Blitter Nasty: January 2012

Monday, January 23, 2012

Hiya,

Ok sure yes you 'escape' all your strings for SQL (i.e. replace `'` with \' and so on for other nonprintable).

Sometimes this is unsuitable.

Did you know you can avoid all that palarva and just pass your strings as hex?

Check it out!

For a varchar (or blob, or whatev) column, just try instead of

insert col='blah' into mytable

insert col=0x626c6168 into mytable

How awesome is that? Who knew?

Also, btw, you can get mysqldump to also output blobs as hex, which makes for easier parsing - see the help output

Yes, yes wikipedia, we know you're all radical and cool.

Anyway, just append

?banner=none

to the end of your URL, for example;

kthxbye

Wow this is a fucking bug and a half;

(On iPhone, but applies to everything)

Verizon currently appears to proxy any HTTP request over any port regardless of whether you asked for it. It adds

"X-Via: Harmony proxy"

to show how much it 'helped'. Thanks, if I wanted a proxy I'd ask for one.

It does it even on non-port 80!! FFS!

It appears that anything that says HTTP/1.1 after opening a socket on any port is fair game for fuckwittery.

And, wonderfully, Harmony Proxy has a packet reassembly bug!

The client app was (inadvertently) writing the HTTP request split into two TCP packets;

The first packet was only 22 bytes long, containing the URL

The second packet was 500 or so bytes and was the rest of the header continuing from " HTTP/1.1\r\n...etc"

Hence the very first line of the HTTP req was split into two TCP packets. This is obviously rather unusual.

The proxy freaks out at this, throws away all the HTTP headers, and just generally screws the request up (although it does send it)..

So, when using socket .send() , make sure you've buffered at least the first few lines of your headers in one go.

if your stuff works over wifi, other cell networks, but not VZW, and you're using HTTP...

watch out for this. It's a bug in their proxy.