CyberShadow’s blog

If you’re one of the few crazies like me who prefer doing web development using command-line tools, you might appreciate this simple command-line calculator which can operate on RGB colors. It supports the 4 basic arithmetic operations and grouping using parens. (continue reading…)

Ever had to deal with annoying conflicts between various command-line utilities sharing the same name? Ever wanted to use different versions of the same command-line software package? Tired of manually editing the environment or using “development environment command line” batch files? Then this plugin is for you! (continue reading…)

I wrote something that cuts up images from WinAMP classic skins to allow using them (with CSS) in web pages.
It allows variable content width/height, using the bitmap font in the “gen” title bar, and uses mouse “hover” effects.

Source: http://github.com/CyberShadow/WSZ2Web
Download: http://github.com/downloads/CyberShadow/WSZ2Web/wsz2web.zip
Examples: http://thecybershadow.net/misc/skins/

I probably should have known better when I started down this path with “cracking” a certain flash game. This has taken way more of my time than I had initially planned. On the other hand, now I know how to use Adobe Flash Builder, Adobe Flex SDK, XML schemas and JAXB and brushed up on my Java as well.

My previous versions of the cheat consisted of a Mozilla Firefox extension which redirected requests for the game SWF (and data.xml, a configuration file) to my server. The server (configured as a HTTP proxy) sent back an older version of the game SWF, which still had some debugging code left in which allowed you to edit the game board using hotkeys. The game developer has once changed the MD5 salt used to calculate validation checksums (after removing the debugging code), but I got away with it once by uncompressing (gzip) the SWF file, hex-editing the salt, and compressing it back. However, the latest build of the game was obfuscated, so no such tricks would pass this time.

In retrospect (as I wrote on the cheat page), I could have used simpler techniques such as memory editing and replay attacks, but all these could eventually be “patched up”. It would probably even have been simpler if I had written a bot (or just updated the old one) – there really isn’t much to do against screen-scraping bots, other than heuristics and changing the UI every once in a while. Still, I have written an ActionScript 3 deobfuscator.
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At least here in Moldova, many computer stores publish their price lists as Microsoft Excel (.xls) files on their web sites, often in a zip archive. To compare the prices for a product in several stores, one usually has to download and unpack the price lists for each store, then search through each one manually.

I made myself something to automate this last year; here it is in case someone finds it useful.
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A TAS extension for Cryptic Sea’s demo/preview of No Quarter, plus a TAS video created using that.

Discussion thread on TASvideos.org forums.