An interview with CrackZ and (incomplete) source code to Contract Killer "trainer"

I just found a nice interview with CrackZ here. He nails the point that curiosity and intellectual challenge trumps above everything else but also demonstrates the process from not caring about the impact of his acts to something more “ethical”. His site is still one of the best resources for Windows reversing, especially regarding dongles. I have also decided to publish an incomplete version of my trainer for Contract Killer. I see that cheating is widespread so I think there’s not much impact from doing this....

April 24, 2011 · 2 min · 221 words · fG!

Newsflash: How to fuck up 40 million USD – The New York Times paywall and its iPad app

This will be a story in development, which is kinda of funny taking in account the target in question. I might be wrong on all this but my instinct is hinting me that I’m not. After the Contract Killer post I got very much interested in verifying these kind of implementations in other apps. This morning I had a flash into my mind about checking what happened with the NY Times app....

April 1, 2011 · 3 min · 625 words · fG!

Hacking a freemium iOS app: Contract Killer … or unlimited play without spending a dime (or any other currency)

Let me start this post with a little rant. The iPad is a great product but it’s full of “spyware” and that sucks big time. One might argue that it’s not spyware, it’s just sending bits of information. Well, for me it’s damn spyware because I’m not authorizing the apps to send any information, much less unique pieces of information that can identify you forever. I can’t even conceive why the enterprise world will adopt the iPad with these kind of problems....

March 29, 2011 · 5 min · 993 words · fG!

Small update to gdbinit and to the website

I decided to mess around with this blog template style sheets and use a better font and change some minor things. I added three new pages at the navigation bar – one with all available gdbinit files in this site, another for my GDB patches and a tag cloud (still have to tag old posts). I will also add a page with all source code published here. This small gdbinit update implements some fixes and a new command rint3 (check the file header for the changelog)....

March 7, 2011 · 2 min · 249 words · fG!

Update to GDB patches – fix for a "new" bug

I was messing around with SoftwarePassport and Amit Singh’s tiny executable to find out why GDB doesn’t breakpoint in those two executables. I thought it was due to incomplete headers, but GDB can’t also breakpoint into nicertiny, which has the segment/section added (otool/otx problems can be fixed by manually adding the missing section – there is enough padding space in the header to do that so SoftwarePassport developers might want to fix that)....

February 21, 2011 · 2 min · 228 words · fG!