Oleg's Big Party

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March 30, 2005

Making use of the Web

Recently my philosophy teacher made history. Well, thats a bit of an over statement. He has done something no high school teacher I had ever has done before: make an actually useful website with our marks, assignments and even a forum (wow). What’s more… is that the domain registry (the “whois” command) shows that he has done it in a matter of days (domain was acquired on March 21, 2005). Impressive, I gotta say.

Now, that I have praised him long enough, I start poking holes in plan. The site is a little simple, but quite pleasant actually - much better than I’ve expect. But it is still that Adobe GoLive auto-generated crap which does not validate as HTML 4.01 Transitional. And the board… is phpBB which is pretty good, but Invision is simply better. Oh well, we can live with that, I guess.

The marks are stored in static html files. To access them, we need to enter our username and the password, and the JavaScript takes care of the rest. Of course, most people just don’t realize that JavaScript isn’t a layer of security, because it runs on the local host and can trivially be circumvented. Well, in this case, it doesn’t really help, because the username and the password are useless - they generate a case-sensitive 12 character alphanumeric “Master Key” which is used to form the URL. Thats too much possibilities, and lies outside beyond my hacking capability.

Posted by Oleg Ivrii at March 30, 2005 08:27 PM

Since when do u have hacking abilities?

Posted by: Anonymous at March 30, 2005 08:47 PM

What is the site? I'll attempt to haxor it for you :D

Posted by: Nicholas Engelking at March 31, 2005 12:57 AM

On another note, the W3 validator returns 53 errors on this page alone. You may want to change your doctype. Also, you have javascript errors because the removal of curly bracets in if statements isn't allowed in the context you use it in.

Posted by: Nicholas Engelking at March 31, 2005 01:06 AM

You're right, the W3C validator doesn't really like my page. Most of the errors are inessential and either come from typos or not following strict W3C conventions... nothing much to worry about.

Posted by: Oleg Ivrii at March 31, 2005 05:15 PM