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- cross-posted to:
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Very interesting article!
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Nice find. Really whips the Llamas ass.
This takes me back to a simpler time.
A time of playing Total Anihilation and hanging on MSN messenger.
Does anyone remember musicmatch jukebox with the jumping sheep visualisation?
This threw me for a sec because I was like “no way was someone playing Total Annihilation and not listening to that incredible OST”.
This is the Internet I miss!
It is still there, just not picked up by Google or Bing.
What? You don’t like browsing the web, where everyone is shoving politics down your throat, and making violent hostile threats, and everybodys offended over baby names, and the web is like 3 websites big???
You don’t LOVE that?
This is a truly fantastic story. It reminds me of why the Internet is cool, if you dig deep enough, there’s always treasure to be found.
This is pretty cool, although it makes me feel old.
I can’t imagine anyone younger than 30 would even get what this article is about.
Actually, I’d love to hear from anybody younger than 30. Does this article make sense to you at all?
I am not at all representative of my age group (I am on lemmy ffs), but yes, I do know what winamp is/was.
Same
I’m 21, but people talk about winamp online all the time so I’m pretty familiar
Yeah? Dude got some corrupt skins for the Winamp program back in the day that didn’t work and poked into the files to see what was in there.
Makes me wanna check out WACUP, but last time I tried a skin with it that I at least remember working back in the day, it didn’t work.
Idk maybe it’s because I’m not American so we didn’t have the latest tech at all times, but I’m in my mid-20s and my first OS was Windows 2000 (no I don’t mean ME). I remember my dad teaching me how to rip CDs with Alcohol 120% when I was 5 or so lol.
27, I dimly remember what Winamp was (never used it though) and extrapolated what Skins would be. I assume they’re essentially an archive of image files used to give a music player a custom look? Except they’re not technically restricted to image files and can apparently contain other files too, which I assume will make them invalid as skins, i.e. corrupted.
How far off am I?
Mind, I’m far from representative for my age group, given my IT expertise.
Oh wow, I never heard of the skin archive. This is fantastic.
I still use Winamp 2.95, with a Pure Pwnage skin I downloaded back in the mid 2000s. Added it to the archive.
You must be a l33t h4x0r!
Boom! Headshot!
Eventually I figured out that the password needed to be lower case. Inside were a bunch of
.avsfileshttps://fileinfo.com/extension/avs
… is a configuration file used by Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS), an audio visualizer for the Nullsoft Winamp media player.
what a great article
Oh for fucks sake, now the article itself has a misplaced mobile Wikipedia link and there’s nowhere I can quickly see to put my copy paste about it.
copy paste for context:
Please, anyone who reads this, stop posting links to the mobile version of Wikipedia. It doesn’t switch automatically on PC, and I see it happen all the time. Just take the half a second to remove the “.m” from the beginning of the link, save everyone else from the pain of having to be surprised by it and taking the time to do it themselves.
General infosec tip: keep your browser add-ons to the absolute minimum you can live with. Add-ons are attack vectors. The more you have - the more at risk you are. And only install the ones you have a reason to trust.
Nah, browsers are sandboxed to absolute shit it is such a pain in the ass to make an extension just to do a phishing attack or to buy the ownership of one to introduce malicious code.
At most an extension with really broad permissions like read/write contents of any page (a fact that is made obvious upon installation) can replace a link to take you to a phishing page to harvest creds, but thanks to SSL and HTTPS it won’t even work without fifty some odd warnings
You live by that and I’ll live by the advice I’ve seen from infosec professionals that recommend as few add-ons as possible due to security concerns. But yes, browsers are getting more secure over time and that’s good.
I’m an cybersec MSc and an infosec professional.
You obviously shouldn’t install closed source or otherwise shady extensions from dodgy authors you don’t know, but on the whole there is very little they can do that you should worry about.
Most “advice” comes from people who want to sell you something and the infosec industry is mostly a scam to drain B2B procurement budgets plus a few gay furry researchers at defcon who are incomprehensible savants and actual malware authors who do something, unless they just write crappy .NET junk.
Take for example an average “”“zero-day”“” in 2024: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/threat-actors-exploited-windows-0-day-for-more-than-a-year-before-microsoft-fixed-it/
This isn’t even a vulnerability. It’s just phishing that requires a user to have file extensions turned off, then download a dodgy as hell .PDF file that isn’t one due to hidden extension, which then uses a milquetoast .hta trojan downloader that only works if one has IE enabled on Windows AND opens the .pdf in MS Edge to pull in reverse shell code via probably psexec of some sort.
There are so many steps one wonders why not just send a iamnotavirus.exe uac prompt and all to download, compile and run ransomware from vxunderground source code then and there.
Worrying about stuff like this in browser is akin to using a VPN on public WiFi to avoid MITM attacks, there’s nothing wrong with it but there’s basically nothing to actually worry about there.
I mean, couldn’t an addon just read the password you put into a login field, or send in a request, and send it off to their servers?
If an add-on is modifying contents of pages it shouldn’t or of the clipboard when it shouldn’t, you would have to give it explicit permission at install time, i.e. “This extension can: Read and Modify Data on all sites you visit: Read and Modify contents of the clipboard.”
Obviously a simple URL redirector for wikipedia requesting access to this data is absurd and would be an immediate red flag. The reason this very thing doesn’t happen more often, is because frankly you’d have to be so computer illiterate to get to that stage that it is much easier to just phish you with basic Facebook profile info for much greater gains.
This is also the reason most “hacks” nowadays are either supply-side or phishing, shit is just too secure, no fun. We should bring back ActiveX.
Obviously a simple URL redirector for wikipedia requesting access to this data is absurd and would be an immediate red flag.
To you, yes it should be. But it does require knowledge about how websites and browsers work that most people don’t have. I’d be very surprised if 50% of people have any idea what those permissions actually do and what would be reasonable for different extensions to have.
But installing few extensions doesn’t protect against it if the few extensions you install have scope and permissions to do bad things. It’s all worded in plain English, at some point you gotta just not use computers anymore if you can’t read.
Even if it’s good advice for nan checking emails on IE6 on windows vista, it really shouldn’t be necessary for a Lemmy user.
People not having the Wikipedia app baffles me. Sharing from there gives you reasonable links.
Why use an app when there’s a web site? In case of Wikipedia I fail to see any functional benefit for an app.
