Literatecode

It took just couple months since Spynote was publicly announced and here we go – there are few fresh Web 2.0 startups modeled after it. Same idea, same accents, etc. Once again I’ve proved to myself that I’m damn good at creating things. After all nobody would steal be inspired of something lame and non-appealing. Although I could always use a little funding. So if you happen to be or know an investor then I’d love to hear from you :) There are more things we may bring together.

The last time we described semi- and undocumented functions in Windows, these were compression functions. Today’s subject is cryptographic functions. There are such functions in Windows core that allows you to use few cryptographic primitives easier, without whole CAPI overhead and hassle. Here is an example of how to generate secure random numbers and calculate SHA-1 hash.
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This is not something new exactly. I first came up with this idea few years ago and it was published and discussed many times since then. The idea is quite simply so a lot of people came up with it themselves as well. I claim neither rights nor priority for this idea.

There are three major approaches to prevent spam today: content filtering, sender verification and “proof of effort”. The last approach is based on making mail send procedure slower thus ineffective for a mass bulk spamming. It is about forcing sender to spend some of his time and computation resources to send a message and prove such effort to receiver. Besides advantages, all three approaches have their own drawbacks. For example: content filtering is a subject to false positive and false negative alarms; sender verification (e.g. SenderID) requires modification of existent network infrastructure and workflow and so on; The approach with a proof of effort (e.g. CPU-/memory-bound functions) seems to be more robust yet may simply be implemented on top of the current infrastructure or even be implemented entirely as client-to-client. But its effectiveness has a tendency to degrade in a long term because of hardware getting better.
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It recently came to my attention that support at Nattyware flooded again with users report about some Trojans inside Pixie. Well, it is the same story as it were once because of PestPatrol made by morons. So here is what I, as the author of Pixie, would like to say:
- Pixie’s code was not changed in a single bit, or re-packed/re-published since 2004. Whatsoever recently aroused Trojan alerts on Pixie are false positives of badly written antivirus software. If your scanner reports any Trojans or spyware inside Pixie, which was taken from http://www.nattyware.com, then please contact your antivirus vendor to fix the bug. Better yet consider to change the vendor because probably the last thing you may need is to be protected by faulty protection software.