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View Full Version : Rather random array of curiosities...


Markpyro
08-22-2006, 6:44 PM
Here I plan to post my slew of technological questions, in hope that by resolving them they won't form misconceptions about certain aspects of the internet, computers, and other mechanical beings.

Answered Proxies. I frequently use the email service at my school, and lets say, I found out the password of a higher employee. Now, I only accessed it twice, and via a proxy. The second time I did so, I sent an email to the employee from his own email notifying the person that they should change their password. (Yes, that's my story. I'm not a mischevious person :rolleyes:. They just happened to be stupid enough to make their password their last name :P). Now, I like to think that I was being a good person by notifying them of their fault, but because of the way the school runs, I seem to think that I would get in trouble for even thinking of trying the employee's password. Now, If that particular employee were to let on that someone other than theirself had accessed their account, I'm sure the tech crew would look into it. I've been told by a friend of my parents who worked at the district tech headquarters that they could trace me even if I used a proxy. Is this true? How could that work? What forms of higher hacking could allow an outsider to gain access to the proxy's logs to see what IP address used it at what particular time?

2- Are there ways to gain access informaiton off sites, even if the sites dont provide the information via RSS feed or other means? Say I want to find out the last post made (or the contents of a thread, etc) on Warboards or any other forum, but (of course) I dont have access to the server or files that provide that information? There are a few PHP functions I've looked into that seem to gather information from sites, but I've never used them nor do I know how they work.

Answered Are there any (for podcast) RSS (desktop) programs, that when a new podcast of that type comes out, will simply download the new file to a folder? Or any other kind of podcasting/sorting tool of similar nature (sorting, such as, it'll download the podcasts, then sort them into a file where It'll mark whether I've listened to them or not)?

That's all for now. I'll surely think of more later >.>

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http://pyrom.net/sigs/manual/sigimage.png
*http://pyrom.net/test/blamecountimage.php*http://pyrom.net/test/lastblameimage.php*
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bluemicrobyte
08-23-2006, 12:42 AM
1) Short answer: you're probably safe. The government would be able to find you, but I doubt a school would go through so much effort just to figure out what computer might have accesssed someone elses account. Even if they do find your home computer IP (or whichever computer you used) that IP wont mean anything to them because (to my knowledge) you can't link an IP address to a street address, only a general location (such as city). If it was a school computer, even if they figure out which computer it was how will they know who was using it at the time?

3) I thought iTunes had some sort of podcast feature like that.....

ZeroDarkStar
08-23-2006, 1:30 AM
3- Are there any (for podcast) RSS (desktop) programs, that when a new podcast of that type comes out, will simply download the new file to a folder? Or any other kind of podcasting/sorting tool of similar nature (sorting, such as, it'll download the podcasts, then sort them into a file where It'll mark whether I've listened to them or not)?

i believe iTunes does this.

Markpyro
08-23-2006, 10:53 AM
I'm rather against iTunes, and it's very slow and annoying. I was looking for something a bit lighter :/

ZeroDarkStar
08-23-2006, 1:03 PM
I'm rather against iTunes, and it's very slow and annoying. I was looking for something a bit lighter :/



What are you talking about? iTunes is extremely fast. The search function is the best. Also the GUI is the best in the business IMO. None of this stupid WinAmp shit with so many buttons your head will explode. iTunes' buttons are very large and easy.

Markpyro
08-23-2006, 1:14 PM
Are you on a mac? It's been slow on every PC I've used it on O_o (and I have a fast computer now :D). Winamp can get a bit bulky, but it's still faster than iTunes.
The first time I used iTunes, I was annoyed. I couldnt get it to add a few files to my brother's iPod, but it wouldnt tell me why it couldnt or what I should do about it. Very annoying.

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http://pyrom.net/sigs/manual/sigimage.png
*http://pyrom.net/test/blamecountimage.php*http://pyrom.net/test/lastblameimage.php*
http://pyrom.net/test/blameclick.png (http://pyrom.net/test/blame.php)

Neo
08-23-2006, 2:56 PM
I would suggest searching sf.net for an open source podcaster thingy, I'm sure there is one, and something less bloated then iTunes.

No they can't track you through a proxy, whoever told you that is being retarded (sorry but seriously) Thats the whole point of a proxy. If you use one from korea, then it will look like your accessing the site from korea.

Yes its possible to pull info from forums and such with rss feeds, its just much more complicated. Although WB does have RSS (in fact, I think the front page is fed via RSS or some such) so >_<!

Uhh Thats all I guess.

-Neo

TimP
08-23-2006, 3:09 PM
If you're interested in learning VB.NET, writing a program like this would be pretty simple.

Nuts
08-23-2006, 3:27 PM
No they can't track you through a proxy, whoever told you that is being retarded (sorry but seriously) Thats the whole point of a proxy. If you use one from korea, then it will look like your accessing the site from korea.

It depends on the nature of the proxy. Some proxies, especially those that are intended to be used as such, will forward the actual address as part of the protocol. Many proxies found on proxy lists are not anonymous and as such will possibly relay your real ip.

There are anonymous proxies available that will block your real ip and do exactly as you described. But even then, if someone in a position of authority were to contact the ISP, they could be convinced to pull their records and divulge this information. This is exactly how hackers are caught and prosecuted. Proxies only offer as much protection as the person that owns the remote computer is willing to offer.

So I guess I'm retarded. ;)

Markpyro
08-23-2006, 10:31 PM
Yes its possible to pull info from forums and such with rss feeds
(I'll assume you meant without :P) I gathered from the start that it would be complicated, but I'm still at a loss even how to get started except for one ideas that I know little about :/

TimP
08-23-2006, 11:25 PM
The technique is called screen scraping. Generally, you find a unique or semi-unique aspect of the data you want to pull, then write a script to do the dirty work. For example, let's say you wanted to scrape the messages off Warboards. If you check out the source code, you'll see that every message is actually between two HTML comments that are "message" and "/ message". In this case, I would fetch the HTML into a string, then process it line by line, storing the message details in some data structure. Regular expressions are often used for this sort of thing, but the regular expression language is somewhat complicated. You can also apply PHP string processing functions repeatedly until you get the desired output. An inherent downside with screen scraping is if the layout of the website ever changes, more than likely your script will break.

xodkrm
08-24-2006, 3:00 AM
I don't understand why people say that Itunes is slow.
I use both Itunes and Winamp, and they are equally fast.
(I actually use winamp for audio, wmp classic for videos)

Neo
08-26-2006, 4:38 PM
It depends on the nature of the proxy. Some proxies, especially those that are intended to be used as such, will forward the actual address as part of the protocol. Many proxies found on proxy lists are not anonymous and as such will possibly relay your real ip.

There are anonymous proxies available that will block your real ip and do exactly as you described. But even then, if someone in a position of authority were to contact the ISP, they could be convinced to pull their records and divulge this information. This is exactly how hackers are caught and prosecuted. Proxies only offer as much protection as the person that owns the remote computer is willing to offer.

So I guess I'm retarded. ;)
Yeah, your right. I'm retarded, I was assuming he meant "anonymous proxies" -- Just shush.

You know that thing about never assuming? heh.

-Neo