Windows – Dan Vasile

Intercepting custom communication protocols in Windows 7

Actually, the title should have been: “Don’t feel lucky and go beyond the first result in a Google search”.

I’ve been using EchoMirage for some time but apparently I’ve been using the wrong one. Because when you search for it in Google you normally click the first link. Right? Wrong!

Password policies in Windows

To access the password policy in Windows just go to Start and type in the search box secpol.msc. Click on secpol and you’ll be presented with the security policy.

Go to Account Policies, then click on Password Policy.

The options, explained:

History – how many passwords will Windows store (you won’t be able to reuse these passwords)
Complexity requirements – if enabled, the Windows complexity requirement states that passwords should be at least 6 characters long, must not contain the username, have at least 3 different character types ([a-z][A-Z][0-9][special characters])
Minimum length – this overrides the previous length setting
Store passwords using reversible encryption – self explanatory; note that if the key used for encryption is lost, the password can be retreived
Maximum age – how long (in days) until the user is forced to change the password
Minimum age – very interesting option! If left to 0 you can change the password as many times as you like in one day. The problem is in conjunction with History. If, for example, History is set to 5, a user can change 6 passwords in one day and reuse the original password.

More information on: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-au/windows-vista/change-password-policy-settings

Install a clean Debian on Virtualbox

I don’t test my ‘ideas’ on live servers, nor do I keep unnecessary hardware around the house to play with them. So I use the other option in hand, a virtual machine. Despite the fact that this will be a VM installation of Debian, the idea for a very clean and basic installation is the same for a real hardware installation.

For my testing purposes I prefer Oracle VM VirtualBox instead of VMWare. First of all because it’s free for home use and secondly it’s smaller and faster for the applications I run. If you don’t already have it installed you can download it from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads.

You might have noticed that I’m a Debian fan, these is the system I have worked for a long time so it’s more of a habit now. For our clean installation we’ll use the so called NetInstall version. It’s a small ISO image (under 200MB), containing only the basics for the installation, the rest of the applications will be downloaded during the install phase. So you must have internet access during installation (if you read this article you surely do, but pay attention when installing on real hardware). So, download the latest version of Debian NetInstall from http://www.debian.org/CD/netinst/.

Start VirtualBox and let’s create a new Virtual Machine, by selecting New:

[Tool] Check if an email address is valid – the php way

In an older post we talked about checking the validity of an email address.

Now let’s make a php function to automate this task. We can use this type of validation to check for example if a user is using a correct address when registering for a service.

Check if an email address is valid – the telnet way

You can use telnet to check if an email is valid. You can actually send emails via telnet, but we’ll stick to checking for now. Remember that this is not a string validation but a complete check with the mail server if the user is valid.

For this example we will use [email protected].