Computer security is shit

general topics
41

Perl CGI? Please say Perl CGI.

42

Perl CGI :smiling_imp:

Hay, I had literally like four minutes to write the entire handler! (I should have fast-cgi’ed it to, I dunno, a Lisp command in emacs. That would have been awesome)

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43

Perl runs on modern machines?

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44 
$param = $q->param('totally_safe');
$param =~ s/[^a-zA-Z0-9]//g;
say '<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN"><head></head><body>';
say "Take me, I'm yours $param";
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45

Every perl script I write starts with:

`killall python 1&2>/dev/null`

Just out of spite.

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46

Anyone going to RSA this year?

47

Perl is still used in a lot of odd places you might not expect. I’ve had it on my todo list to kill the handful of ancient Perl CGIs the thing at work uses since I got there (used for auth, naturally, fairly 90s, and with ‘our’ sprinkled around and no ‘warnings’). The first month I was there I was locking things in those scripts down in terror.

I kind of like Perl for quick one-off scripts, since sh is the spawn of Satan and perl’s always there.

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48

Scripting in perl should be considered spiteful enough. ( i wrote some great one offs in the past using perl, but I prefer languages that don’t make me feel like I’m fuzz testing my own brain when I come back and look at the code a month later.)

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49

‘our’ is an abomination that should be killed with fire. I do like fucking with people and mixing functional, procedural, and oop all in one subroutine.

If you haven’t read this diatribe, its worth a read (mostly java complainin’, but a good read)

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50

It’s nice for some things if you’ve already gone through the pain of learning it and don’t want to drag in sed/awk/pipes:
perl -i.bak -pe “s/old/new/ig;” file

If you have to save the script in a file and then open that file again then it’s dicier, but if it’s trivial it can be fine.

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51

It’s fantastic for one liners. I’ve got a bit of bitterness though having inherited poorly commented applications with multiple modules, all, written, in fucking perl. <shakes fist at sky/>

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52

I’m starting to take your claims of being evil more seriously.

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53

Oh, so you found my code?

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54

There’s a phrase I learned a few decades ago, and its not a compliment: Three Star Programmer. As in:

***string

As in a pointer to a pointer to a pointer. Try debugging that shiat. It denotes a developer who thinks they are clever, but all his colleagues fucking loathe him.

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55

Like doing math in a korn shell script cause some random update broke bc?
[size=10](Not my proudest moment)[/size]

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56

No, the person who wrote it moved on to be a big shot executive at a tier 1 provider. He doesn’t touch code now, and we’re all better off because of it.

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57

I think we should start a different rant thread on Java because otherwise it would take over everything.
At the job I do
35% Java
20% C (split between kernel/userspace)
40% Rails
5% other crap
but it feels like 80% Java because of the slog through AbstractProfileFactoryThreadBuilder.java with added dependency injection head meltingness (and some Hibernate for extra magic). It does make kmalloc() seem more friendly, though.

All of it begs for one lazy/poorly informed/briefly confused person to make an error and open up a security vulnerability too.

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58

Again, back to sec, I have a friend that is a founder of a company that is an RSA finalist.

http://www.rsaconference.com/press/46/rsa-conference-announces-finalists-for-innovation

They are ‘Phantom’. I’ve known him for a decade and I couldn’t be more proud.

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59

Repeat after me: There is no such thing as secure PHP.

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60

Why bother?

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