Valhalla Legends Archive

Quote from: herzog_zwei on June 11, 2007, 03:41 PM
3. Warden is supposedly made by a third party, not Blizzard.  If the warden mods and detection queries are still outsourced, it'll delay it even further.  rob/warz released their lockdown workaround around June 2nd.  Warden was enabled on June 5th.

Interesting that Blizzard went that route [of having the detection modules developed by a third party].  I noticed they had some job offers up awhile ago for for such a position, that mentioned experience with various (in my opinion) sucky ways to do anti-hack stuff.  For instance, asking for people with experience doing stuff like system service table hooking in kernel mode and the like - blech.  Given the warden of today, it seems they were fortunately smart enough to recognize that an anti-hack driver that compromises the kernel wasn't too wonderful an idea after all.

On the other hand, it would have been a fairly amusing thing to write about if Blizzard had an antihack system that ran afoul of PatchGuard...

WinHttp: WinHttpOpen, WinHttpOpenRequest, WinHttpSendRequest, WinHttpReadData.

Or, alternatively (though WinHttp is considered the preferred choice on modern platforms), there still exists WinInet: InternetOpen, InternetOpenUrl, InternetReadFile (or the Http* APIs instead, or InternetDownloadUrlToFile).

I would recommend consulting Google on the subject; there's a lot of information out there.  Most consumer GPS devices either connect to a serial port, or use a powered USB-to-serial converter and show up as a serial port on the computer they are connected to.

The above mentioned Google query should get you started on how to process the data as represented by most GPS devices.

BNLS is temporarily down due to a server move.  The hostname bnls.valhallalegends.com will be updated with the new addressing information when BNLS is available again.

The old addresses for BNLS, including undocumented addresses, will no longer be functional going forward.  Programs should be using the bnls.valhallalegends.com hostname and not hardcoding the IP address.  This has been the recommended course of action for several years now.

Programs that use the bnls.valhallalegends.com hostname will again be able to communicate with BNLS without modification when the service is back up and the hostname is updated.

Custom modes are typically specified via a monitor INF - does your TV manufacturer provide one?

Are you using DVI or analog TV out?

Regardless, this is not something that (typically) requires code changes.

It is not a fixed calling convention.  The compiler takes a look at the function itself, and all callers of the function, and from there decides the best way to pass parameter values.  It is subject to changing completely at a recompile.

If you're using Win32, you might check out the console manipulation APIs like ReadConsoleOutput and ScrollConsoleScreenBuffer.

Multi-byte nop.

Quote from: RεalityRipplε on May 07, 2007, 12:31 AM
Any project where every developer doesn't know how it work is a poorly made project indeed. Sort of like the Windows Operating Systems... hum...

Actually, the people behind Windows have a fairly good idea of what they're doing.  I've met more than a few of them personally, for various discussions.

Commented code takes less time to understand, and is less-prone to errors in the person trying to understand it.  Both of those are important when it comes to real-world work.

Quote from: RεalityRipplε on May 06, 2007, 09:15 PM
If you can't figure it out, you shouldn't mess with it. The only things that should be documented in coding are how to call subs and functions in DLLs. As the quote goes "Document my code? Why do you think they call it code?"

Not true at all.  Especially in large projects where you have multiple maintainers (e.g. most paid programming positions), where not everyone is familiar with all the code (or at least, not the original author, or perhaps someone has modified it since they wrote it), comments are quite important.

Actually, it might live on in the incarnation of the ill-fated "skybaccabot" project.  Not something that I could disseminate, though.

In general, any "lockdown" version check challenge string which does not fit the size limitation of 16 bytes is unlikely to be valid.

Most nontrivial shellcode today will be prefixed by a small decoder program, so that the bulk of it need not be written with the constraints of the buffer (e.g. no nulls, no uppercase, and soforth).

Only if the user account with which you are doing that operation from has write access to the file/directory.

If you placed your program in a location under, say, %ProgramFiles% (with the default ACL) and attempted the process running it as a limited user, it will fail.

* Note: If you are using filesystem virtualization for Vista, the virtualization minifilter may make a shadow copy under your %userprofile% tree, with redirection in place to make it appear as the operation succeeded, despite the fact that the original in %ProgramFiles% is unchanged.  If you accessed the program from a different user account, it would see the original in %ProgramFiles% and not the "modified" one.

Quote from: RεalityRipplε on April 22, 2007, 03:00 PM
I've never found a program I can't make a copy of and edit.

That doesn't really get you anything.  You'll have no way to place the modified version of the binary where it will be run, assuming file ACLs are set properly and the lack of a security hole allowing an unprivileged user to convince a privileged process to load a binary from an untrusted location.

If you run the modified version of the binary yourself, it will be executing with the privileges of your (unprivileged) account and thus will not be able to perform things outside the sandbox of that user account.