The kind who spends more time compiling than using my system.

Wait, where’s Gentoo?

♫ All along the eastern front ♫

♫ People line up to receive ♫

♫ She got the power in her hands ♫

♫ To shock you like you won’t believe ♫

I had a friend who wasn’t very technical who had some issue where he couldn’t boot into his OS (Windows) and bought a new computer, but wanted the files off the old computer. So he asked me for help. I remember bringing a Knoppix live CD (remember Knoppix?) And when I was there, I realized I had a severe lack of general networking equipment. (I didn’t have a switch, so I couldn’t plug both computers into the network so they could communicate with each other and the internet.)

So I started up the old computer in Knoppix, plugged it into the network, and installed a bunch of networking packages like a DHCP server and such. And then I used the Ethernet cable to plug the two computers into each other, letting the Knoppix box give the new Windows machine its IP. And then I installed Putty on the Windows machine and used it to SCP the files from the old machine to the new one.

The whole thing went way smoother than I’d have expected, never having attempted that before. But I felt like such a hacker that day. Lol.

“If it works, it ain’t stupid.” ;)

Huh. Only 11 days on the Raspberry Pi I’m using as a “desktop system” right now. (Arch Linux Arm, btw… though Arch Linux Arm sucks now-a-days.)

Let’s check my RPi-based NAS:

[tootsweet@mynasserver ~]$ uptime
 19:56:07 up 212 days, 18:43,  4 users,  load average: 0.16, 0.04, 0.01

Also not as long as I’d have guessed.

I pronounce it “AUR” of course.

Java, Postgres mostly but also LDAP and random in-house-written RESTful services, almost 20 years.

• The objects we store in the Postgres database are very “hierarchical” in nature, with one top-level object and lots of child/grandchild/great-grandchild objects. (We asked for a Mongo database but the infra team at the time said "make do with Postgres.)
• As I mentioned, some of that hierarchy is in LDAP or RESTful services, not in Postgres, so we needed something capable of dealing with multiple storage backends that would stitch the objects together as necessary. So the “ORM” needed to have backends for multiple backend systems.
• We knew clients would need a vast number of different queries. So we made a RESTful endpoint that gave the full power of the ORM to (authorized) clients. If they needed different data, we’d be like “change your query like this” and they didn’t have to wait on us.
• Early in the project, we consciously designed an extensible JSON representation of our hierarchical objects. That is what’s returned from the aforementioned RESTful endpoint.
• However, we also created a “shortcuts” system to allow us to “balance” how much of the logic lived on the server vs in the client. (It can mix and match. Like “apply this shortcut, but also filter this way and paginate” or whatever.)
• We made the API of the ORM such that it could both be used to query from the database/LDAP/RESTful systems, or be used as a client SDK for the aforementioned RESTful query endpoint that the application exposed.
• It’s both “more than an ORM” (querying from non-database sort of backends) and not fully an ORM (read only, doesn’t handle schema evolution.) But it’s fair to say it’s more “an ORM” than “not an ORM”.
• The implementation of the Postgres backend part of it is heavily inspired by Django’s ORM.

We couldn’t have pressed Hibernate into this use case. It doesn’t really deal with hierarchical data and sure as hell doesn’t know how to query from LDAP. I don’t know that anything existed at the time (nor am I sure anything exists now) that would fulfill our use case.

And the alternative to what we built was a massive, unmaintainable DAO with ridiculous numbers of individual queries in it that would have to be modified or added to endlessly every time someone needed to filter a bit differently or whatever.

This was a developed-in-house e-commerce web application at a major e-retailer. So fortunately that monstrosity of a cookie-handling mess was only ever used by one company.

You know what, though? Talking about this reminds me of another story about the same e-commerce application.

After a customer placed an order on this e-commerce site, the company’s fraud department had to evaluate the order to make sure it wasn’t fraudulently placed. (As in, with a credit card not owned or authorized for use by the purchaser.) Once that was done, the order had to be communicated to a worker at the warehouse so they could pack the right items into a box, put on a shipping label, and set the box aside to be picked up by the UPS truck which would come once a day near the end of the day.

The application used by the fraud department and the application that displayed new orders to warehouse workers was one and the same application. Whether a user had fraud-evaluating powers or pack-items-in-boxes powers just depended on what permissions their particular user had. (That may have been decided by LDAP groups. I don’t remember for sure.)

Meanwhile, the e-commerce site offered gift cards for sale online. The gift card would be shipped to the customer. And there was a box where you could write a message associated with the gift card. So, for instance, someone could buy a gift card to be sent to their nephew’s address or whatever and include a little note like “Happy Birthday. Don’t spend it all at once.” or whatever. And the fraud/pick-and-pack application would display all details of the order including any messages associated with the gift cards.

Well, I found a stored cross-site scripting vulnerability where if you put <script>...</script> tags with some JavaScript in the gift card message box and completed the order, the JavaScript would execute any time someone viewed the details page for the order in the fraud/pick-and-pack application. And of course, the JavaScript could do within that application just about anything the user could do with their given permissions.

The main danger was that a malicious actor with sufficient knowledge of how our fraud application worked could place an order fraudulently with someone else’s credit card and include in the order a gift card with a malicious JavaScript payload in the message box, and then that malicious JavaScript could automatically mark the order “a-ok, no fraud here” when a fraud department worker loaded the order details page, letting the order be fulfilled without any actual fraud review.

The fix was pretty simple. Just stick a <c:out>...</c:out> in the appropriate place in the fraud/pick-and-pack application code. But it was an interesting example of a vulnerability in a not-customer-facing application that could none-the-less be exploited by any public customer/user without any particular special access.

If you’re interested in one more interesting story about the same e-commerce application, see this comment I made a while ago.

Never roll your own ORM

I’ve done this. Probably 10 years ago. Even today, I maintain the same application that has the ORM in it that I designed. If I could go back in time and do something else, I’d do the same thing again. Honest to god. For my use case, I feel it was warranted. It was risky, but it worked out surprisingly well.

Java webapp. Customer facing. E-commerce application, so in PCI scope and dealt with credit card info and such.

There was one specific cookie that stored some site-wide preference for the customer. (Why not just put that preference in the database associated with the user? Because that would make too much sense is why.)

But the way they encoded the data to go into the cookie? Take the data, use the Java serialization framework (which is like Python’s “Pickle” or Go’s “Gob”) to turn that into a string. But that string has binary data in it and raw binary data is kindof weird to put in a cookie, so you base64 encode the result. (The base64 encoding was the only sane step in the whole process.) Then you do the reverse when you receive the cookie back from the browser. (And no, there was no signature check or anything.)

The thing about the Java serialization framework, though is that decoding back into Java objects runs arbitrary object constructors and such. As in, arbitrary code execution. And there’s no checking in the deserialization part of the Java serialization framework until your code tries to cast the object to whatever type you’re expecting. And by that point, the arbitrary code execution has already happened. In short, this left a gaping vulnerability that could easily have been used to extremely ill effect, like a payment information breach or some such.

So all a malicious user had to do to run arbitrary code on our application server was serialize something, base64 encode it, and then send it to our servers as a cookie value. (Insert nail biting here.)

When we found out that there was a severe vulnerability, I got the task of closing the hole. But the existing cookies had to continue to be honored. The boss wasn’t ok with just not honoring the old cookies and developing a new cookie format that didn’t involve the Java serialization framework.

So I went and learned enough about the internal workings of how the Java serialization framework turned a Java value into a binary blob to write custom code that worked for only the subset of the Java serialization format that we absolutely needed for this use case and no more. And my custom code did not allow for arbitrary code execution. It was weird and gross and I made sure to leave a great big comment talking about why we’d do such a thing. But it closed the vulnerability while still honoring all the existing cookies, making it so that customers didn’t lose the preference they’d set. I was proud of it, even though it was weird and gross.

The value that was serialized to put into the cookie? A single Java int. Not a big POJO of any sort. Just a single solitary integer. They could just as well have “serialized” it using base-10 rather than using the Java serialization framework plus base64.

“My graphics programs.” Printmaster in particular. That was a long time ago and now she’s more open to Linux. We’ll see what happens next time Windows does some bullshit.

Based.

I was thinking more Senator Kelly from the X-Men movie.

Not a vending machine. It’s clearly the third member of Daft Punk with a snaggletooth.

The next row would be “boss fires you thinking Claude can maintain the codebase.”

I can definitely see a lot of good applications for this way of doing things.

It does seem like I often run across “error handling” code that literally just catches a bunch of different exception types and throws a new exception with the same content from the caught error just reworded, adding literally zero helpful information in the process.

It’s definitely the case that sometimes the exact sort of crash you’d get if you didn’t handle errors is exactly the best sort of exception output the program could do given its particular use case and target audience. Or at least it might be best to let the error be handled much further away in the call stack.

So build your own. ;)

Don’t forget Bro-senpai.

Windows 1.0: Just four sticks tied together with rough twine, not attached to any building or anything. Just held in the frame of the photograph in mid air by a pair of really hairy hands.

Windows 12: Same as Windows 11, except missing a window on the door all together.

Windows ME: The driver’s side window of a clown car.

Windows 95: Identical to Windows 98.

(There are a lot more like CE, NT, 2000, Server, FLP, RT, Mobile, etc, but I’ll end my list there.)

Also, the photo gives way too much credit to Vista. Also, everything from XP and after should at least have bars on the windows. Having to phone home to activate was always unreasonable. The fact that things are way worse now doesn’t mean earlier versions were unrestrictive by a long shot. (And believe me. People in XP’s era were also horrified at how restrictive and enshittified XP was compared to previous versions.)