Write-ups

I don't know what to call these.

A collection of stories that people share about their investigations.

Links

• Who made these circles in the Sahara? | Vox
  • Seismic survey? Ancient wells? Ancient tombs? Qanat?
• Wifi without internet on a Southwest flight (HN)
  • Wi-Fi without internet but contains flight data
  • HN thread: Ways of people using Wi-Fi without authentication
  • HN thread: Ways of people using visualizing flight data with similar API
  • Check PySkyWiFi as well in side projects
• What's the touchscreen in my room?
  • Poorly designed IoT systems that user gain root access with something called tcf-agent
  • The Internet of Unprofitable Things
    • Another interesting story of the same company "NetThings" misusing the NTP protocol
• Thanks FedEx, This is Why we Keep Getting Phished
  • Is this a phishing message or is this legit from FedEx?
  • Scammers pretend to be legit while FedEx is like they are imitating scammers
• What happens to the coins tossed into Rome's Trevi Fountain? | Reuters The Wider Image
  • 1.4 million Euros a year. It goes to charity
• Car allergic to vanilla ice cream
• The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining
• The Time I Build an ROV to Solve Missing Person Cases (HN)
  • Long, 13 parts blog but very interesting read
  • From the learnings at each stage, to planning and investigating, and the story telling is good
• Reverse Engineering TicketMaster's Rotating Barcodes (SafeTix) (HN)
  • Decoding the barcode to token + 2 TOTPs + timestamp
  • Finding the TOTP shared key in the TicketMaster app
  • Generating barcode offline as long as the token didn't change
• Reliable Sources: How Wikipedia Admin David Gerard Launders His Grudges into the Public Record
  • Using bureaucracy and policies like citing reliable sources to alter public record
  • Stories over the year when Gerard leave traces over the Internet
  • Wikipedia and maybe the Internet as a whole is insufficient to deal with a motivated bad-faith actor
• Jailbreaking RabbitOS: Uncovering Secret Logs and GPL violations (HN)
  • Jailbreaking by exploiting the insecure boot chain, subsituting data between verification and use
• Troubleshooting: Terminal Lag (HN)
  • Finding out why xterm in WSL is slower than in Fedora
  • Slow window effects, potential slow profile features, tuning with hyperfine