The mind of a hacker

So today I figured I would talk about well programming and hacking.  Something I have dabbled in and would like to share to get people started on the right path.

So, first of all there are many many different types of hacking. I am only going to talk about 1 specific type and that is hacking desktop applications written with a .NET language i.e. C# , VB.

So to do this, you first need to be able to recognize if something was written in a .NET language. For some this is not easy, but it can be found out quickly.  First you need a decompiler. Also if you see .jar files then its written in Java, and while a similar process exists, I will not be covering it here.

Go grab one here.  https://www.jetbrains.com/decompiler/

Second you open the .dll's and .exe's from the program's directory in it.

• If it is a C++ or C dll it will not open here. So if it opens then it is .NET
• In some cases they will use both .NET and C++. In this scenario its most likely that they have .NET wrappers for external components, much like what OpenTK is for OpenGL.
• In this case save those dlls that you can't open as they are probably referenced by some of the .NET ones. 

Export the .dlls and .exe's to projects.  Do not create a solution for each one. You do not need pdb files for this process either.

Download Visual Studio if you don't already have it.

Create a solution, and add all of the projects you exported into the solution.
From there you now have the source code to the program, and you can make changes, though it will take real investigative work to find out what everything does as they may have used an obfuscator.

Now once you know what you are going to change simply recompile that specific project in Visual Studio.  And you replace the dll the program uses with your modified one.  This can allow you to change the way the program functions, such as removing copy protection.


Now all of that being said, there is a reason I code with F#.  I wrote this code in F#. Something I know damn well would be incredibly annoying if not impossible to convert to C# by hand

open System
[<EntryPoint>]
let main argv = 


    let func1 input1 =  input1.ToString() :>  Object

    let func2 input1 = input1.GetType().ToString() :>  Object

    let func3 input3 =input3.GetType().ToString() + input3.ToString() :>  Object

    let list _ = [func1;func2;func3] :>  Object

    let list2 = [func1;func2;func3;list] :> Object

    list2.ToString() |> Console.WriteLine
    Console.WindowWidth <- 94

    printfn "%A" argv
    () |> Console.ReadLine |> ignore
    0 // return an integer exit code

So when I tried decompiling it. It generated bogus code in C# that does not compile :) This is how I will safeguard my future programs by writing them in a language that doesn't decompile well.

Listless

I have reached an unusual crossroads in my life. I feel I really want to do something or make something. And yet I feel so lazy in doing so. I have the desire but not the willpower. I suspect its just a stage, part of a clearing process. I will see it through to the end.

Sleep

Yeah for me, its this elusive animal, like bigfoot or his frosty cousin the yeti.  I can try so hard to pursue it, chase it, and buy anything and everything under the sun for it, and yet it still does not yield its hidden mysteries to me.  Often only when I least expect it, it happens.

I just learned that expressing myself strangely helps me to sleep better. It really relates back to a previous article, but essentially my life is a bit out of balance, and as a result expressing myself more seems to tip the scale towards balance, allowing me to sleep.  I am not sure that I fully understand this mechanism itself, or why it would be the case that failure to express oneself or emit their own vibration would make it hard to sleep, and yet even as I type that, my intuition is starting to make it clearer through imagery. The point my intuition is trying to make is a rhetorical question. "How can something sleep without any substance of its own?" Anyway, I suppose my time here on earth will teach me extensively about addictions and health challenges. Hopefully all these trying incarnations will allow me to blossom into something wonderful and powerful, and probably really good at healing.  Anyway that is what relevant spiritual literature says the purpose of this suffering could become. And I am pretty sure I believe it too.

A new anime

There is a new anime out that I have come to enjoy even if it injures me a bit emotionally. Its called Anohana.
**Spoiler**
 From the first few minutes of the first episode before the intro I could already tell the little girl was a ghost. But what I could not tell you was how much drama there is in this show.  Spoiler alert, there is death, despair, unrequited love ( a word I only know because of English translations), people living in the past, a highschool dropout, cold woman, a hardass dad, crazy mom, dead mom, running away from home,  and a guy who dresses as a the girl he fell in love with after she died.
**End spoiler**
Yet despite all the insanity, the viewer is left with a beautiful hope that things can change, and that people can go back to being the happy people they were in their youth. It tells the tail of a reinforcing of friendship bonds.

I will say I find Menma a bit annoying at times. Of course she seems extra childish, though I am sure that is done for effect.Seriously though(if/when I have kids, I will promise to give them her good heart, but also a brain and a sense of personal awareness).This girl possesses a strange cuteness that is as blatant as it is pure. A lot of cr fans were crying from this stuff. I have to say I was moved once or twice myself. Be careful, it has a bit of the feels. As for genre, its like a shoujo drama that has a guy as a main character, which in and of itself is an interesting combination.

Truthfully, without ever watching a full episode or even having translations you could still accurately guess what the show was about just from its intro. It captures and articulates the idea so perfectly, that you almost feel it ruins the show a bit for you. Though the guy singing the intro sounds like he is either totally apathetic or has had the energy drained from him.  OR perhaps he's just trying to be chill, its hard to tell with that kind of voice, though the music itself is perfectly grafted to the theme and pace of the animation.

Why I need to blog

Its time for me to start emitting my own vibration. It may seem like a foreign concept to some, but to break it down its really simple. Essentially, I have done way too much absorption. I have been asking too much from others opinions, not placing enough value on my own. I have been seeking validation outside of myself.  And I have been soaking it in. Enough! Now, I will balance my masculine and feminine energies. Usually its the yin that is missing in most men's lives, but for me it was the yang. I was not taking control. I was not acting directly, and instead waiting to be directed. Now its time to show the world what I can do. What my plans and ideas are.

First of all.  I like chocolate. I don't give a damn that it can make me unpredictable and harder to control myself. Given that I have been so passive, a little more unpredictableness is totally called for.

Second,  I like playing games. Its time to put my ideas into action. I am pretty good at that so far. All my character designs are my own. But I can do more. So much more. Its time to stop asking for help and sit down and figure it out like a man. Sure its a bit exaggerated, but its necessary to correct the imbalance in my life.

I like the concept of the F# programming language. It allows for great data processing and sorting. Also good for math.  Even more than that, its a challenge. I like to get myself to try things that I do not fully understand in order to gain intelligence through the process of coming to understand something.   Its a mental exercise that I enjoy. That being said, I its time to do more of those coding challenges in F# instead of C#.

I realize this is more or less a semi-coherent rant. But its necessary for my health. So there. If you don't want to read it, then don't. I will tag this as a rant so anyone hoping to find a programming blog won't be sorrowly disappointed.

Asian Dating : Scammers

   So not long ago I signed up for a website called Blossoms.com. I found myself being pulled into a lot of different directions. I ended up being bombarded by women of ages 18-43 looking for love.  Now most of them are nice people. A few of them are scammers. Some of them are nice people who I feel are trying to marry their way out of a bad living situation.

   I want to talk a little bit about scammers. First,  it can be really easy to tell if they are. The writing is on the wall so to speak. When you look at their profile. You will see 2-8 pictures of what looks like a model  posing for professional-grade photograph. There may be 1 picture of a normal person as well.  Another tell-tale sign of them being a scammer is obvious to most people, but essentially not all of their photographs look alike. Its kind of silly when you see it because you honestly think "What the hell is going on here?".

    Now some scammers play the long game. They will talk to you in chat for hours, always flirting using lots of "hehehe"'s and emoticons. Essentially laughing and pretending everything about you is either handsome, interesting, or cool.  But eventually, it works like this, they will say for one reason or another that they don't like the website that they are on. They will ask you to go to another website where you have to pay to signup. You can tell its a fake website when you that all of their members look like models.

    One way to tell earlier on is if they are a scammer is to ask them about what they do for a living. They tend to give vague and brief responses. One time I asked they said  "trading". Trading what exactly? Another time I asked they just said "assistant manager". Of course I followed up with, "Well then, what does your manager do?". They just said "marketing". So its actually pretty common when you ask real people that they will even tell you what company that they work. They may tell you what its like, what they hate about work, what they love about work. All the various responsibilities, etc.

   Sometimes a scammer may say that they need to go to another website because it has webcams. Usually if you are on a website that you have to pay for, it will already have one. Anyway, If they do, you can ask them to use skype or yahoo messenger instead. If they refuse or say it doesn't work with their webcam, I would say call bullshit on them, mainly because skype and yahoo are mature professional products that are designed to function on the largest variety of webcams available. Moreover, I am willing to bet there are common OS level interfaces that the driver talks to. So if you have the driver installed correctly it should pretty much work regardless of the what the webcam is because when software from a website or skype ask the OS to do something, the OS will call the driver's implementation of that task on the webcam hardware.

    They may say that their English isn't very good and thus its necessary to go to this website that does translation services. If you were naive enough to sign up, you would find that they probably use a checkout system that you have never heard of. You buy credits for translations. In some cases its as bad as 1 dollar per chat message, but they try to disguise it in a credit/point based system, offering discounts on larger volumes of points at 'discounts'.

    Anyway as it turns out Blossoms.com already has built-in translation services for paying members. If you already signed up, all you have to do is type in your native language and it will translate for you. The website already has several anti scammer features. It will say which country their IP address is coming from. It will has a link to an image database search where you can put other peoples pictures into and this would allow you to search the internet for their pictures. I would still recommend google images instead. Their database said it only searched like 5.4 billion pictures. I think that is a little low. Its not strange for photographers to take over 70 photos a day for example. So a real internet image database should be many many times the human population of the earth.

Anyway that is all for now. Perhaps in the future I can get to talk about what the non-scammers are like.

Black Addiction Chocolate Pie Recipe

Okay, this was something I wanted to put up earlier, but I ended up getting delayed again and again.

Black Addiction Chocolate Pie

By Alex Baggett

Ingredients

·         2 cups heavy whipping cream

·         1 Hershey’s special dark pudding mix

·         1 Oreo Pie Crust

·         1 Ghirardelli Cabernet Matinee Chocolate bar.

Directions

Break the chocolate into squares and put it into a large saucepan. Pour the whole milk into the saucepan as well. Heat on low while stirring slowly for 8-10 minutes.  When it just barely starts to steam, turn the heat off. And stir vigorously until the chocolate is mixed in. There will be small pieces floating around at this point and that is okay.  Empty the pudding mix into the mixture. Stir first with your mixing device from earlier, then when there are no longer large clumps, use an immersion blender or an eggbeater or other electric mixer to blend it in more finely. After that pour the result into the Oreo pie crust. Cover using the cover that came with the Oreo pie crust and put into the refrigerator for 20-30 minutes. Then you can take it out and serve.