Lowyat.NET: Latest topics by FlierMate1

Free RM20 PayPal balance cannot be used

FlierMate1 — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 15:28:13 +0800

Can someone tell me how?

Last few months, PayPal Malaysia gives away RM20 free e-Wallet balance to users. I try to send money to friend (gmail address) but it asks for payment from debit card. No way to use the RM 20 PayPal balance. Also too little to transfer out to bank.

Is there any T&C with this RM 20 free PayPal balance? (It is surprising no PayPal conversation on this subforum, so I have to start my own thread, sorry about that)

Two ways to set colors in Windows

FlierMate1 — Sat, 06 Aug 2022 18:23:59 +0800

I am too late to understand coloring in Windows.

All the while, I achieve the text coloring in terminal window through Pascal, like:

CODE

TextColor(2);

Or through Visual Basic .NET:

CODE

Console.ForegroundColor = ConsoleColor.Red;
Console.Write("Hello World");

And I didn't know Windows also support Console Virtual Terminal Sequences like in other operating system.

Highlights by Peter Mortensen:

QUOTE

There are ANSI codes for setting the color, moving the cursor, and more. This will work on Unix including OS X, Linux and Windows (provided you use ANSICON, or in Windows 10 provided you enable VT100 emulation).

In Windows, this is how we set the terminal escape sequences:

CODE

ESC [ <n> m

...where <n> denotes a decimal number.

And what's more, I found two ways to print colored text in terminal window under Windows.
See my example output:

Either way:
1. Need to SetConsoleMode to enable ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_PROCESSING flag , or
2. Use SetConsoleTextAttribute and define the character attributes.
...but color support in SetConsoleTextAttribute is rather limited.

Please share your thoughts on these, like how do you define colors in your favourite programming language?

Last but not least, I share the code modified from Microsoft example, which use two methods to print colored text, in C++ (Windows):

https://itextpad.com/HvmTr9Rdgu

(To download this example code, console.cpp, click to download console.zip)

Enjoy this article?

What Is Schizophrenia (Photo)

FlierMate1 — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 15:43:55 +0800

Below snapshots were taken from a brochure in government hospital.

Beijing people’s facial recognition was broken

FlierMate1 — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 19:14:26 +0800

Source: https://taiwan.postsen.com/world/10810/Beij...ology-News.html (and several other multiple sources)

QUOTE

If the face recognition system can be unlocked with photos, it may indicate a huge hidden worry in the current situation where cameras are all over the place.

Face recognition technology is widely used by the Bank of China, and various drawbacks have emerged. The facial recognition of some people in Beijing was breached, and nearly 430,000 RMB (about NT$1.892 million) was withdrawn from the bank account, but the IP of the registrant was displayed in Taiwan.

The latest report from China News Weekly describes what happened to Li Hong (pseudonym). The incident happened on June 19. She fell into the trap of fraudsters, her mobile phone text messages were intercepted, and her mobile phone number was set to call forwarding, so that her verification code fell into the hands of others, and she was unable to answer the bank’s confirmation call.

More seriously, her “face recognition” was broken. The backstage of the China Bank of Communications system shows that when resetting the password and transferring large amounts of money, “Li Hong” performed 6 face recognition comparisons, all of which showed “successful biopsy”.

But in fact, these face recognitions were not operated by Li Hong who was in Beijing. After investigation by the police, the IP address of the registrant was displayed in Taiwan, and the mobile phone model used was Motorola XT1686, which was also different from the Xiaomi Mi 8 used by Li Hong.

» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «

Li Hong doubted the security of the Bank of Communications’ facial recognition system, and took the Bank of Communications to court on the grounds of a “debit card dispute”, demanding compensation. However, on June 30 this year, the Fengtai District People’s Court in Beijing rejected all Li Hong’s claims in the first instance. She is going to continue to appeal.

Banks believe that they have done their due diligence. Bank of Communications Beijing Changxindian Branch stated in court that “transaction passwords, dynamic passwords and customer authentication modes that assist face recognition” meet regulatory requirements, and they are in the process of Li Hong’s transfer. , the bank gave her a risk warning. After the big data analysis of the internal system found an abnormality, it called Li Hong’s mobile phone to verify the identity of the transferor and the transfer situation.

But Li Hong said that the bank claimed to have sent 22 SMS passwords and SMS risk alerts, but she only received 11 of them, and she did not receive the bank’s call. The reason behind this is that her text messages were intercepted by the scammers, and the calls were also transferred to the scammers’ mobile phones.

The report quoted Lao Dongyan, an expert who has long been concerned about personal information protection and a professor at the Law School of Tsinghua University in Beijing, who pointed out, “Facial recognition was introduced by banks as a participant in risk creation, and banks benefit more from this method. , should bear the risk responsibility proportional to the benefit it receives.”

She also pointed out that with the development of artificial intelligence, fraudulent methods are more high-tech, and banks should keep pace with the times so that their security technology exceeds that of criminal methods. If banks are held accountable for vulnerabilities in facial recognition technology, it will help urge banks to plug technical security loopholes and prevent possible fraud.

The report also pointed out that the difficulty of cracking facial recognition technology is sometimes unexpectedly simple. In 2019, several primary school students in Zhejiang used photos to crack the express cabinets in residential areas and easily take other people’s express delivery. In October 2021, a team of students from Tsinghua University successfully unlocked 20 mobile phones using only face photos.

Guo Bing, an associate professor at the School of Law and Politics of Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, believes that “photos of human faces are too easy to obtain.” If the face recognition system can be unlocked with photos, it may indicate a huge hidden worry in the current situation where cameras are all over the place.

UniFi Autopay SMS

FlierMate1 — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 17:23:06 +0800

This month UniFi no longer says "Thank you" for payment. It replaces the greeting with "Hi".

Maybe I am too sensitive, but I prefer they thank subscribers for autopay payment.

"Mark as read" not synced across mobile & desktop

FlierMate1 — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 16:29:45 +0800

In my starred forums, I often use the thumbnail next to the subforum name to tell whether is there any unread posts.

I always mark as read in mobile or desktop view, to find out it is still unread in desktop or mobile view.

For example, I mark as read in Software section in mobile view, but when I open this site using PC, the "mark as read" status is not synced to desktop view. I need to perform twice every time.

Is there any workaround to this problem? But for some sections with icon already (e.g. "Windows 11"), I cannot tell whether is there any unread posts, this "mark as read" only useful to subforums with default thumbnail.

Thanks for any remedy or response.

What text editors allow vertical selection?

FlierMate1 — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 17:07:52 +0800

What text editors allow vertical selection?

I can think of Microsoft Word, allowing you to select vertically by holding Alt key and highlight text using mouse.

Another example of vertical selection in Visual Studio 2022 (a popular IDE for C++, C#, VB and Python):

Some others said Notepad2 also has this feature. Vertical selection can be useful in specific case.

Anyone runs PureDarwin in VM?

FlierMate1 — Mon, 04 Jul 2022 22:01:04 +0800

http://www.puredarwin.org/

Specific download link:
https://github.com/PureDarwin/PD-17.4-Beta

Once download, you get this VMDK file (disk image):

Following are some settings in VirtualBox 6.1:

But I could not boot it successfully. I get a blank screen.

Anyone runs PureDarwin before?

Also, I have no luck to boot PureDarwin Xmas (an old version of Mac OS X):
https://github.com/PureDarwin/LegacyDownloa...nment-XMas-1.7z

(I think I tried "-v colors=32" if I recall correctly)

A strange URL that looks identical but never open

FlierMate1 — Sun, 03 Jul 2022 03:39:55 +0800

Now can you try to copy the URL below and paste it on browser's address bar?

forum.lowyаt.net

Of course, "it is" web forum address. Let the fun begins.

Hint: Punycode

Phishing website address

FlierMate1 — Sat, 02 Jul 2022 20:27:49 +0800

This is hard to avoid, how to recognize the correct "a" address?

www.maybank2u.com.my

www.maybαnk2u.com

Let say with or without the .my, can you tell the difference between maybank2u and maybαnk2u?

So confusing.

Minimal GUI app in Linux

FlierMate1 — Thu, 23 Jun 2022 14:27:18 +0800

A Russian coder managed to create simple GUI app in Linux using pure Assembly (without the need for linking object file) in just 972 bytes! Terrific.

This is the GUI app (empty window):

This app has string table defined as:

CODE

STRING_TABLE: db 0
str@libX11.so.6 db 'libX11.so.6',0
str@XMapRaised db 'XMapRaised',0
str@XCreateSimpleWindow db 'XCreateSimpleWindow',0
str@XNextEvent db 'XNextEvent',0
str@XSelectInput db 'XSelectInput',0
str@XOpenDisplay db 'XOpenDisplay',0

It connects to X Server.

Command-line to compile GUI.asm and the terminal message after running it.

BGGP #3 (2022)

FlierMate1 — Sat, 18 Jun 2022 04:56:48 +0800

Here comes the third year of small file competition organized by a group of security researcher or reverse engineer:

tmpout.sh/bggp/3/

Unlike the prior contests in 2020 and 2021, this year's contest will involve a lot of creative thinking.

QUOTE

The goal of the 3rd Annual Binary Golf Grand Prix (BGGP3) is to find the smallest file which will crash a specific program.

Now I will become more like ethical hacker...

QUOTE

What's the smallest ROM that crashes your favorite emulator?
What's the smallest document that crashes Word?
What's the smallest video that crashes VLC?
What's the smallest plugin that crashes Ableton?
What's the smallest file that crashes your browser?
What's the smallest WAV that crashes Audacity?
What's the smallest ELF that crashes Linux?
What's the smallest EXE that crashes Windows?

I don't dare to try the last two scenario. If I were able to create EXE that crashes Windows, I will be in the tech news headline tomorrow. Smile

This contest runs from June 17th 2022 to August 19th 2022 (New York time)

@angch, I see you followed @binarygolf on Twitter. Nice to see you there! This year contest is more challenging, isn't it?

Free personal website hosting

FlierMate1 — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 19:21:56 +0800

In the 90's, GeoCities was the popular personal web hosting. Now we have Neocities.

neocities.org

It comes with 1GB storage (and 200GB bandwidth?), but not all file types are supported (no .zip, no .mp3 & no .mp4, no .php) unless you subscribe to their paid plan, then the file types whitelist will be removed.

Sign up is easy, example site: txt88.neocities.org (not mine)

You can upload .html , .css files using button, or drag-and-drop. And you can also edit files online using their editor in the browser.

Console app development

FlierMate1 — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 06:46:29 +0800

I am offering console app development for Windows or Linux.

Also known as CLI or command-line programs, it runs in command prompt window or terminal window.

Example apps that you can ask me to develop:

✍ Random quote generator

✍ Binary file viewer

✍ CPU identification utility

✍ File format converter (multiple files at once)

✍ EXE maker for simple commands

While I don't write GUI apps, I can try if you want although my specialization is in console apps (TUI or CUI).

If you are interested to use my service, please PM or reply below.

Old and new style of message box in Windows

FlierMate1 — Thu, 09 Jun 2022 20:20:24 +0800

From my observation....

This is the old style of message box:

This is newer:

And the Windows 11 message box?

American programmers median age 43.5

FlierMate1 — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 17:21:08 +0800

Source: datausa.io/profile/soc/computer-programmers

Source: insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#developer-profile-key-territories

2021 StackOverflow Developer Survey

Age:

It is never too old to become programmers (applicable to USA ).

How many of you use TKinter ?

FlierMate1 — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 12:22:35 +0800

I thought Python is only console screen, today I discovered that Python has GUI library called TKinter.

Example code:

CODE

import tkinter as tk
from tkinter import messagebox

win = tk.Tk()

def hello():
messagebox.showinfo('Info','Hello, world')

win.title('Python GUI example')

win.geometry('400x300')

btn1=tk.Button(win,text='Click me',command=hello).grid(column=0,row=0)

win.mainloop()

How many here know Tkinter, and use it?

Is it a standard and universal lib across various versions of Python?

Example output of code above:

Text-showing operators in PDF (txt2pdf)

FlierMate1 — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 20:16:20 +0800

Long story short, I have written a simple txt2pdf converter in Pascal without using third-party libs, but I have lost the source code.

Now I plan to rewrite this txt2pdf converter using either FASM or C# or Python (depends on my preference later).

However I am too old to understand the PDF specification, at least not this time, trying to decipher text-showing operators.

If you want, you can search for "PDF32000_2008.pdf" (22MB), it is free, PDF 1.7 specification, I think.

I can change the font type, font size, and author info. But there is no simple way to show the next adjacent line using fewest lines possible.

CODE

5 0 obj

<<

>>

stream

BT

/F1 24 Tf

10 750 Td

(lowyat) Tj T*

(howdy) Tj T*

ET

endstream

endobj

The problem is "Tj" and "T*", if I use "Tj" on both lines, "lowyat" and "howdy" would appear at the same line. I want them to be in separate line.

I remember my old txt2pdf converter define a new x&y position for every line, but am not sure how I did it in the past.

Someone might want to help? (If you download test.txt below, rename it to test.pdf will show as PDF file)

https://pictr.com/images/2022/06/01/ByUU5B.png

https://pictr.com/images/2022/06/01/ByUi1c.md.png