Category: Life

I’ve just spent the last 5 hours coding in Notepad (woo) the site for the film! You can access it from:

www.docksmovie.com

It was the first time where I made concerted efforts to use straight CSS to take care of everything, instead of a mash-up of tables and other HTML relics that were standard back when I first learned the language in the mid-nineties. The end result is code that’s much simpler and easier to edit.

I still have a few issues… most notably, the inconsistent heights of the main border-thing on the page. Eh well, I’m no expert yet.

For the last few months, I’ve been hard at work with Docks. I’m trying, trying to get August as being the month where everything gets shot. Most likely, that’ll get extended into September. There’s a few hurdles that are left now, the main one being getting my hands on a decent boom mic. If I can get that settled, then I’m set.

I’ve also just ordered a bunch of shirts to be worn during by the staff of the fictional boat company in the film. With the launch of the film will also come the launch of some Docks paraphernalia, including the “official” company T-Shirts.

  

As some of you may know, I’m an avid fan of South Korean cinema. It churns out some of the best films this planet has to offer. You have action-packed films on par with Hollywood blockbusters (Tae Guk Gi), teen comedies (Attack the Gas Station), and the deeper kind of film that Hollywood could only wish to produce and others the budget to dream up.

However, I’m beginning to notice through these films the shallow perceptions that the Koreans place on the Americans. American films aren’t any better, of course. Even the more cultured American films have shallow divisions of culture – I’m thinking Clint’s latest Letters from Iwo Jima, in which the American soldiers do no wrong in the face of the rabid Japs. And let’s not even touch the whole generic “middle-eastern terrorist character.”

The Koreans aren’t much better. Welcome to Dongmakgol is one of the most popular films in recent Korean times. It’s a good movie, which centers on this small utopian village that is stumbled upon by a few North, South, and UN Korean forces. In it, you have a scene whereby a (weak) Korean tries to tell his (powerful) American commanders not to bomb innocent villages. The Americans are played out as ruthless characters that have no care for civilian life, while the Koreans are played out as the voice of the innocents.

It’s very black and white, with little historical context in between. Then comes the other film I’m watching this morning: The Host. This is again a great movie. But how does it start off? A (powerful) American and his (weak) Korean assistant. He orders the Korean assistant to dump raw toxic chemicals into the Han River. The Korean assistant, the voice of reason, objects. But much like Dongmakgol, the American overrides his objections.

You can tell the sentiment of a nation by it’s movies. It’s not hard to see how the South Koreans perceive the American continued presence over there.

Following my post last week, I decided to create a batch script that would let you see if your anti-virus product is also vulnerable to the “Vista Rootkit.”

You can download the script from here (Right-click, Choose “Save As.”)

Essentially, the script creates two identical files on your C:\ drive, in the C:\vistarootkit_test\ folder. These files contain contain a benign (read: non-viral) string of text that’s picked up by anti-virus products from all the leading companies. You can obtain more information on the test files here.

If the script works right, and your anti-virus product akin to mine, then it will pick up the “infected_file_detectable” (left image), but not the “infected_file_undetectable” (right image.)

What’s happening: Windows has a funky way of handling administrator accounts. Users, for instance, can chmod files to deny any other user read/write access to a set of files. What sets Windows apart from other operating systems in this regard is it’s adherence to these permissions for it’s root account equivalents – the Administrator/SYSTEM/etc. It is this fact which is being taken advantage of here.

By creating a dummy account, malware is able to run an instance of itself under that account, and deny read/write permissions to its files to all other accounts. This means that when home users run their anti-virus products, their AV will be denied read access to the malicious files. Meanwhile, the malware is able to continue to operate freely.

This demo script creates 2 identical files that should be picked up by any popular anti-virus product, and creates a new user account “viral_account.” It then sets the permissions for one of these files such that the viral_account has full access to it, but all other system accounts are denied access. When the anti-virus program is run, it should skip over the file whose permissions were edited, as it will be denied read access to the said file.

A simple way to rectify the issue would be for anti-virus products to modify the permissions of the files to grant itself access (Administrator accounts can do this – though they can’t read the file itself), screen it for known viral signatures, and then restore the file to the original permissions.