4f 70 61 63 6b 69

Oebhtug gb lbh ol gur ahzore ryrira (11) naq gur yrggre "B"!

[getchester-blog]

Shuttle Discovery Landing at Dulles Airport (17 April 2012)

As I left for the airport yesterday morning, I was excited to find out that I might be privileged enough to see the Shuttle Discovery land in our area.  As I made my way to the airport I was surprised to see the number of people who had parked along the road reaching all the way from the exit to 28 North in Centreville from I66 and along the ten mile march into the airport.  

I continued into the airport and much to my surprise I was able to make out a speck along the skyline swiftly approaching the airport.  This was it and I was excited!  My footage is not the best but I managed to wrestle my cellphone from my bag just in time to document a truly historic event that I wished to share with you.

It was at this moment that the painful realization occurred to me that a truly significant era of mankind had come to an end.  As we have no plans in place for manned spaceflight in any near future, it can only be inferred that the our curiosity for the unexplored has faltered.  I ask myself, will we ever get back to the track laid out for us by President Kennedy, a track that ignited our fifty plus years of spaceflight which ushered in an era of industry and technology.  But more, it saddens me at this moment to remember his statement from so long ago.

"The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space. Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolution, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it--we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding."

...to boldly go where no man has gone before...

[getchester-blog]

I found this video the other day and all attempts to trace the source has been unsuccessful.  I like the concepts presented in the video such as real-time, in-game, code adjustments.  If you've got more information, please let me know.

[getchester-blog]

Javascript Obfuscation...Oh No!

So I've discovered that Tumblr, the service I use as the backend for this site, has severe issues with Javascript obfuscation.  I discovered this while putting in the credit line on the site with my email address.  Obviously I did not want my email address scraped by some  automated spam address collector so I took the transformative approach…I garbled the HTML code.  

At first I just considered utilizing the good ole greater than and less than approach with the word "AT" within.  It looked good and you know exactly what I mean.

joseph<AT>opacki.me

This would have been but I wanted to include the HREF "mailto" functionality of the language.  I set out on the "Googles" to determine the best approach.  I came across a page at Albion Research Limited which included the functionality to obfuscate your email address with character substitutions or as embedded Javascript.  I figured that the site utilized Javascript pretty intensely anyways so I'd take that approach.  Here is an exact copy of the code I used:

document.write('<'+'a'+' '+'h'+'r'+'e'+'f'+'='+"'"+'m'+'a'+'&'+'#'+'1'+'0'+'5'+';'+'&'+'#'+'1'+'0'+'8'+';'+'t'+'o'+ '&'+'#'+'5'+'8'+';'+'j'+'&'+'#'+'1'+'1'+'1'+';'+'s'+'&'+'#'+'1'+'0'+'1'+';'+'p'+'&'+'#'+'1'+'0'+'4'+ ';'+'&'+'#'+'6'+'4'+';'+'&'+'#'+'1'+'1'+'1'+';'+'&'+'#'+'1'+'1'+'2'+';'+'&'+'#'+'9'+'7'+';'+'c'+'%'+ '6'+'B'+'&'+'#'+'1'+'0'+'5'+';'+'&'+'#'+'4'+'6'+';'+'m'+'&'+'#'+'3'+'7'+';'+'&'+'#'+'5'+'4'+';'+'5'+ "'"+'>'+'&'+'#'+'1'+'0'+'6'+';'+'o'+'&'+'#'+'1'+'1'+'5'+';'+'e'+'p'+'&'+'#'+'1'+'0'+'4'+';'+'&'+'#'+ '6'+'4'+';'+'o'+'p'+'&'+'#'+'9'+'7'+';'+'c'+'&'+'#'+'1'+'0'+'7'+';'+'i'+'&'+'#'+'4'+'6'+';'+'m'+'e'+ '<'+'/'+'a'+'>');

As soon as I hit save the whole site went down and I was urged to immediately change my password.  Not only that...all of my custom code was defaulted back to Tumblr's original theme.  Long story short, I had to fall back on an older copy of code I kept on my laptop.  Some custom changes and I think we're back on the road again.  Here's the code that I wound up utilizing as my email address obfuscator:  

<a href='mailto:joseph@opac%6Bi.m%65'>[email protected]</a>

Going along with the theme of this site, the email address obfuscators are just utilizing parseable URL-encoded special characters to represent the ASCII characters in the address.  Since it's HTML special characters, browsers have no issues parsing them and substituting and displaying the address in the proper form.  I'm sure we'll have a blog posting about character substitution such as this in the near future.  Hint, hint.

All in all, my lesson has been learned...always have a site backup.

[getchester-blog]

CZE-y zc Czeletzy Pyncjaetzy

Hp’gp lwcploj otdnzgpcpo esle CZE13 td esp xzcp hpww vyzhy gpcdtzy zq czeletzy pyncjaetzy. Czeletzy ntaspcd slgp l wzyr stdezcj, l qlxzfd pilxawp mptyr esp Nlpdlc Ntaspc (lwdz Nlpdlc’d nzop zc Nlpdlc’d dstqe), l dfmdetefetzy ntaspc fdpo ez pynzop xpddlrpd mj dfmdetefetyr wpeepcd mj zespc wpeepcd l qtipo yfxmpc zq azdtetzyd lhlj ty lwaslmpetn wznletzy. Ozfmwp-pynzotyr CZE13 cpdfwed ty l dstqe zq 26, hstns td pilnewj esp esp zctrtylw xpddlrp lyo td esp dlxp ld yz pynzotyr. Estd td zqepy sfxzczfdwj epcxpo 2CZE13 zc CZE26. Opncjaetyr l czeletzylwwj pyncjaepo xpddlrp cpbftcpd yz vpj. Te zywj cpbftcpd esp vyzhwporp esle czeletzylw dfmdetefetzy td mptyr fdpo.

[getchester-blog]

JRYPBZR! Solution

Congratulations to those of you who were capable of deciphering the challenge from JRYPBZR! If you didn't immediate notice the fact that the first post was a rotational shift of the characters, specifically thirteen spaces, then you most likely started off the challenge by utilizing a combination of frequency analysis and an amalgamation of double-letter recognition and short word identification, specifically those words that contained apostrophes signifying possession or contraction.   

So obviously for you diehards who have no issues with codes and ciphers, you immediately recognize this as ROT13.  I stole the definition below for you from rot13.com just in case you didn't know or recognize it.  

ROT13 /rot ther'teen/ [Usenet: from "rotate alphabet 13 places"], v. The simple Caesar-cypher encryption that replaces each English letter with the one 13 places forward or back along the alphabet, so that "The butler did it!" becomes "Gur ohgyre qvq vg!" Most Usenet news reading and posting programs include a rot13 feature. It is used to enclose the text in a sealed wrapper that the reader must choose to open - e.g. for posting things that might offend some readers, or spoilers. A major advantage of rot13 over rot(N) for other N is that it is self-inverse, so the same code can be used for encoding and decoding. 

I realize that the puzzle presented by JRYPBZR! was not so significant that it presented any real challenge.  I also realize that the solution could have easily been deciphered with nothing but pen and paper.  However, I know that most of you just went right ahead utilized some kind of programmatic solution like the one given at rot13.com.  Now, that's fine and dandy as the "Googling" method, as I call it, will achieve some sort of expected result for you.  However, let's try to understand the programmatic solution for that day when your Internet connection is down and you can't just let me "Google" that for you!

Here's an example for you written in Python.

import string rot13 = string.maketrans( \ "ABCDEFGHIJKLMabcdefghijklmNOPQRSTUVWXYZnopqrstuvwxyz", \ "NOPQRSTUVWXYZnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMabcdefghijklm") string.translate("Welcome!", rot13)

I'm utilizing Alex Gorbatchev's SyntaxHighlighter for all my code implementation.  This means that if you're interested in copying and pasting the code that I include in these postings, then all you have to do is double-click anywhere in the code sections to highlight all code for copying.  

If we dissect the source code, we can see that all that's really being done is establishing what the exact rotational shift key is for every index in the alphabet and utilizing the translation to make a literal interpretation of the passed string parameter. While this may be a good programmatic example to solve this specific solution, there is no chance to reutilize this code for any other type of numeric character shifts.  What about ROT3, ROT7, and ROT11?  I guess that'll be something for us to examine later as it's nearing the witching hour and the sweet softness of my bedtime pillow is beckoning me!  

[getchester-blog]

Jrypbzr!

Vg'f nyjnlf uneq gb znxr gur svefg cbfg gb nal oybt.  Sebz jung V'ir frra, nhgubef srry pbzcryyrq gb znxr n svefg cbfg uvtuyvtug gb gur ernqre n zvffvba sbe gur oybt, uvtuyvtugvat fbzr bowrpgvir, be ernfba sbe cbfgvat.  Zvar vf ab qvssrerag.  V'yy or cbfgvat ba inevbhf fhowrpgf va gur enatr bs pbzchgre fpvrapr, ubzr oerjvat, naq zl qvfpbire bs zl bja trarnybtl sbe gur anzr "Bcnpxv".  V sbetbg gb zragvba...ohg lbh'ir cebonoyl nyernql svtherq vg bhg, zl vasbezngvba vf rapelcgrq...whfg sbe sha!