The Download Munkey : A Link A Day ;)

After last week’s F-Secure Reversing Challenge 2007, I suddenly felt like writing about one of my favourite reverse engineering sites

Fravia’s original site @ www.fravia.org was one of my most frequently visited sites when I first discovered the Internet some ten years back. It was a treasure trove of hard-to-find reverse-engineering information at a time when reverse-engineering was generally misunderstood as a black art mainly associated with software cracking.

Although the site design might not have kept up with the times i.e no dynamically generated pages, AJAX scripting etc, the design was unusually clean and easy to navigate compared to other sites during the Geocities era where blinking text and banners were commonplace.

Anyway, the real value of Fravia’s site laid in the fact that it was one of the first communities for knowlege sharing between reverse engineers throughout the world. Rare information (originally focussing on cracking protection schemes) contributed by enthusiasts created a database of useful knowledge for newbies and skilled reverse engineers alike. The focus later shifted to pure reverse-engineering to improve on software without needing the original source and finally in 2000, Fravia abandoned the entire reverse engineering content - but not his well-known anti-commercial attitude - to concentrate on the art of web searching @ www.fravia.com (originally www.searchlores.org (currently down) ).

Some recommended pages at the new fravia.com are webbits, tools and books & books & dark riders - learn to fully utilize your search engine to find the stuff that you seek.

The writings and techniques presented at original fravia.org influenced me a lot - I developed a love for 32 bit Windows assembly programming from reversing and injecting code in other applications to add extra functionality as well as the love for searching and learning stuff online (so much that I haven’t been studying for any certifications other than my diploma - something that I’m sure will screw me up in the future in paper-obsessed SG)

The original reverse-engineering pages are still available at Fravia’s archive pages of reverse engineering over at RCE Messagboard for those interested in this particular field of computing. More white hat reverse-engineering stuff are also available at www.openrce.org.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
F-Secure Reverse Engineering Challenge 2007
Reverse Engineering Mentoring Wiki

Fancy utilizing your analytical and deductive skills to solve a trio of challenges and learn some extra knowlegde in the process? Actually, there were iPods up for grabs for the three fastest entries but they have already been won. You can still win a visit to F-Secure’s anti-virus lab in Helsinki (excluding travel expenses)

Try F-Secure Reverse Engineering Challenge 2007 (started yesterday at 3:00 PM (SG time) and ends on Sunday 4:59 PM) which I read about over @ Didier Steven’s blog. For more rules and details of the competition, head over to this page @ the ASSEMBLY Summer ‘07 site.

Some of my favourite freeware tools of the trade that you may find useful:

• IDA Pro Freeware 4.3 (or Google Search for freeida43.exe) - A freeware version of a most powerful disassembler
• OllyDbg - Disassembler and assembler-level debugger
• HxD - My favourite hex editor

© F-Secure Corp.

The first challenge should be simple enough for even basic reverse engineers - as long as you’re comfortable with basic programming and debugging, it shouldn’t even take you more than 20 minutes. Download it from the offfical site at www.khallenge.com.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY:
Reverse Engineering Mentoring Wiki

I use the freeware version of TreeSize to keep track of where my precious harddisk space are allocated. Since I download a lot of stuff everyday and tend to keep them all over the place, I run TreeSize once in a while to find out which directories take up the most diskspace and delete those unneeded directories hiding on the harddisk.

Found 100 MB worth of useless files yesterday which were not removed when I uninstalled Lego Digital Designer a few months ago. (Screenshot taken with a older version (1.78) of TreeSize Free)

© JAM Software

It can also be launched via the context menu in Windows Explorer to view the harddisk space occupied by a particular directory and its subdirectories. Another nice time-saving feature is the ability to open any folder in Windows Explorer or do file operations like deleting the directory directly from TreeSize.

Details of the professional version of this software can be found at the official TreeSize page at JAM Software.

Download Treesize as a zip file (723 KB - No installer, no shell integration and no readme.txt) or with an installer (1.1 MB - optional shell integration and readme.txt)

Just played with this Programmer Personality Test which I found out from my friend and ex-colleague’s blog

The Personality Test is a short questionaire comprising twelve questions with two options each. Take the test at Doolwind’s Game Coding Site.

Results of the test:

My programmer personality: DLSB

You’re a Doer.
You are very quick at getting tasks done. You believe the outcome is the most important part of a task and the faster you can reach that outcome the better. After all, time is money.

You like coding at a Low level.
You’re from the old school of programming and believe that you should have an intimate relationship with the computer. You don’t mind juggling registers around and spending hours getting a 5% performance increase in an algorithm.

You work best in a Solo situation.
The best way to program is by yourself. There’s no communication problems, you know every part of the code allowing you to write the best programs possible.

You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We’re not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

Sounds like me Now’s what’s yours?

The previous post was for downloading trailers from Yahoo! Movies. This one is for Apple’s Movie Trailers

I’m using the Transformers trailers @ Apple’s Movie Trailers as an example here. Below is a brief step-by-step guide on saving the trailer to your harddisk for offline viewing

1. Go to the trailer page for your favourite movie

2. View the source in your browser of choice and search for .mov. Sometimes there may be more than one match - ignore the ones with words like btn which are the animated movie clips and not the metadata for the actual trailers (usually with words and numbers like e.g 480p, 640, tlr, etc)

   If you see something like QT_WriteOBJECT_XHTML when searching for .mov, you should be able to download the trailer

3. Copy the URL which should look like http://images.apple.com/movies/dreamworks/transformers/transformers-tsr1_h.640.mov and paste into your download manager or browser.
4. Save the above file and open in a text editor like Notepad.
5. Search for .mov again. You should see something like transformers-tsr1_h640w.mov which is the actual video filename. (See image below)
6. Join the URL (sans filename) in 3. and 5. to get http://images.apple.com/movies/dreamworks/transformers/transformers-tsr1_h640w.mov which is the actual trailer URL for download.

NOTE: Not all HD trailers cannot be downloaded by the above method I will write more on that soon after I figure out how to download the HD version of that bloody exclusive featurette for Pirates of the Caribbean 3

UPDATE:For exceptions like for the Pirates of the Caribbean 3 featurette, you need to look into the associated Javascript files in the source first (in this case it’s js/hd.js, infer the link to the Quicktime metadata file (hint: ….piratesofthecaribbean3-fte_720p.mov) and follow the steps above starting from step 3 to get your 120+ MB featurette.

MORE @ THE DOWNLOAD MUNKEY
How to download Transformers Exclusive Trailer from Yahoo! Movies