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Category Archives: Other technical

Porting a custom Gina to a Credential provider

Making a replacement Gina behave like a Credential Provider (not the other way around) looks like the ticket to have a single source solution to a Gina and Credential Provider.

Segmentation example in a CAPTCHA

From time to time, I come across an application whose designers need – or think they need – a CAPTCHA. I stay convinced that CAPTCHA are to be avoided. This post just goes to show the effect of segmentation on optical character recognition (OCR). If you read about artificial intelligence and character recognition, you [...]

Ne jouez pas avec un CAPTCHA sans la surveillance d’un expert

Je suis tombé sur cette implémentation d’un CAPTCHA.

Je déteste les CAPTCHA. C’est comme de la mauvaise crypto.
Fondamentalement, le CAPTCHA ne fonctionne pas. La tâche d’analyse (le test de Turing) est complexe juste parce que personne ne s’est encore donné la peine d’écrire le code pour réussir. C’est aussi vrai pour la crypto classique, mais ces [...]

Stop internal drive from showing up in "Safely remove hardware"

Like many of you, I had a drive that showed up in the “Safely remove hardware” tray icon, and was unable to remove it.
The trick is to subtract 4 from the Capabilities in the registry. Not easy, but it can be done. The only thing is that it keeps coming back after every boot ! [...]

Easy test coverage with constant Hamming distance of 1

I left a terrible bug in version 1.3 of my replacement Gina. I didn’t want to miss any test case this time, so I wrote a batch file that tests every one of them. That batch file adds a user to a group and a group to the registry. There are two possible groups in [...]

A convenient way to run Apache Forrest on Windows

I use Apache Forrest to generate what will someday be the homepage of paralint.com. I use “forrest run” most of the time, and “forrest site”, “forrest clean” every now and then.
I wrote a little batch file that will launch forrest in a new window when the “run” option is used, and in the same window [...]

Making Jetty listen to the local interface only

I use Apache’s Forrest tool, which uses internally the Jetty engine. I wanted to make Jetty listen to 127.0.0.1 instead of 0.0.0.0, so my computer wouldn’t show up in a enterprise port scan.
I had trouble finding the information. I went looking for the link again without any success. So I am posting it here, where [...]