Hey that’s me! I’m glad it’s working for you. All credit to the folks who figured out this bypass. I just coded it up in Python when I couldn’t get some of the other solutions to work for me.
Ha! Small world on HN. I haven't personally tried the Edgerouter solution. I've been trying to replicate on pfSense/BSD, but it isn't as simple as you might think. :/
There is varying levels of difficulty when you want to BYO router. The situation for AT&T U-Verse isn't too fun. If you want to use your own hardware, you only have a few options:
1. They offer "IP Passthrough" which is fake Bridge Mode. They still do routing and you'll still hit NAT table limits of 4096. Connection falls apart for anything over 3000.
2. You can dump and reverse the router-gateway firmware and 802.1X/EAP authentication. Oh goodie.
3. There's a history of exploits for the NVG510, NVG589 and NVG599. Try your luck. [1] [2]
4. Create some "magic" to split the 802.1X and untag VLAN0. Works in Linux at least. [3]
5. But good luck if you want to do this in pfSense or FreeBSD. There's an open BTC bounty if you've got any netgraph / networking chops. [4]
Photos only. Apple's APIs only capture in Wide Color when shooting in photo mode, and their documentation only recommends using wide color/Display P3 for images.
> What really worked for me is building a small product. The big picture I have for Logojoy will take years. I was able to get really excited about it because I decided on the simplest version of it. Spend time deciding on the most critical features to launch with, and only build those.
Something like this happened in Virginia in early 1992. At a certain point, the jackpot/(cost of buying all numbers) ratio was high enough that an Australian business group swooped in, hiring volunteers to purchase as many tickets as possible. They only managed to cover 5 million out of 7 million possibilities (ran out of time), but they still won the lottery, winning a $27 mil jackpot.
It's a genuine scalability problem when you have to work out how to physically print/place that many tickets, and the mechanism by which you distribute the jobs up to all of your volunteers (are they volunteers if they're being paid?)
Also an extra edge to get you over the line - make sure you have a license to sell the tickets to yourself. Usually the vendors (newsagents, shops) etc that sell the tickets get a commission on each ticket ranging from 2% - 10%
Crowdsource ~$146 million and only buy half the lotto tickets. For each of the ~11 million combinations of regular numbers, buy 13 tickets covering half the possible powerball numbers.
Assume you win the $800 million jackpot and lose 50% to taxes, you have $400 million left over. You spend ~$292 million to double your investors money and have ~$107 million left over.
Assume you don't win the $800 million jackpot, you still have 13 $1 million tickets left over. You can either pay that back to your investors, or keep it for yourself and point to a clause in a contract they signed saying that you'd only pay out if you won the jackpot.
Somehow I doubt it's legal to do something like that, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Assume you win the $800 million jackpot and lose 50% to taxes, you have $400 million left over.
Gambling losses are tax deductible as expenses against gambling winnings.
Going with your scenario, if you spend ~$146 million and win ~$800 million, you'll be taxed on the ~$654 million profit. Off the top of my head you're looking at ~$400 million in after tax winnings.
So the investors get their ~$146 million back and then take a share of the remaining ~$400 million.
Used to be, the lump sum wasn't offered -- you had to sell your legal rights to the annuity to an investor to get it. You could still do this -- perhaps have open bidding on it; might net more than 62%.
IBM has been recently promoting Docker on z. IBM argues the high I/O capabilities of their platform are a good fit for the container model. (I don't disagree with them. The many-application-on-big-hardware model is not a new concept to IBM. Hell, they invented it.)
Anyways... Since Docker is written in Go, the only way Docker has been available for s390x was by building with gccgo. My guess is that native Go support is in the interest of Docker on z and would be a worthwhile investment for IBM.
More likely Docker on Linux on LPAR. At that point you'd struggle to see the value of VM, other than making some of the device management/maintenance easier.
Actually, System z (mainframes) still accounts for a quarter of IBM's revenue and about half of its profits. [1] At least, that was the case in 2012. I suspect that hasn't changed much with IBM's recent announcement of the LinuxONE. In fact, IBM contributed significant effort get Node.js (and thereby V8) ported to s390x. [2]
It's too painful for people to check their facts before declaring mainframes dead or something IBM is leaving. As you said, they're incredibly profitable. Same thing happened with OpenVMS, which turned out much profit for HP despite little investment. Next they'll be telling us Group Bull, Unisys, and Fujitsu are similarly scraping by in the mainframe business. And NonStop and IBM i are on verge of cancellation. And blah blah blah.
I'm sure we'll be hearing the same crap in a decade while said crap is posted via a service that imtegrates with a COBOL app on a mainframe. ;)
For the security researchers out there, mainframes are really under-researched. There just aren't many people that have the expertise in the platform required for security research. And most of the people who do have expertise in the platform are often oblivious to technologies outside of the mainframe. (If you've ever dealt with mainframe people, you might know what I am talking about.) It's unfortunate, but too often true. Our best mainframe guy is brilliant. I've never met anyone more technically skilled in his platform. But ask him a basic Windows or a Linux question? Forget it.
With today's complex stack of multiple platforms in most enterprises, a good security researcher, IMHO, should be fluent with both worlds. Mainframes are where some of our most critical data is stored. When you pull up your account balance through your bank's website, there's a good chance that value was read off a mainframe.
Mainframers are old-school. They don't believe in public disclosure or open security models or public audits. If you go through the DEFCON and BlackHat archives, there's not much mainframe research out there. There's just a small community of mainframers on the Internet, but it's a significant part of the world's infrastructure. The mainframe world is a crazy alternate reality. (I know, because it's my day job.)
Phillip Young, the guy who owns this Tumblr project, has made some waves in this community. His talks are a great place to start. Here's a few resources to get you started:
You can blame IBM for that. The fact that they haven't made it easy for security researchers (or anyone really) to tinker hurts the platform.
Up until a few years ago, there was no legal way to run z/OS on hardware that wasn't a million dollar hunk of iron from IBM. IBM has since made a product called Rational Developer and Test Suite [0] available. With it, you get an emulator and a licensed copy of z/OS that you can run on x86. Except it's $9,500 / year.
The only saving grace is an open source project called Hercules [1] which emulates the z/Architecture. If you don't mind breaking some copyright laws, there is no technical reason why you can't download a copy of z/OS and run it under Hercules. But good luck finding the latest version. Want to test your research against the latest maintenance levels? Good luck.
Funny thing is that mainframes might have earned their reputation for security if architectures such as Burroughs or i432 won out. Instead, IBM dominates the market and we know S/360 architecture was optimized for performance not security. That along with IBM backward compatibility seems to be how it won. The obscurity of almost every aspect of it along with barrier-to-entry is why it got less scrutiny.
So, it all adds up to a platform that should be very easy to smash and have literally decades worth of vulnerabilities built in. Should be some horrid design decisions in there, too, which might not be just a patch job. Mainframe hacking is literally a goldmine people should get into. Plus, those that prefer a boring, 8a-5p job with good pay and excellent job security will benefit from learning mainframe (or COBOL). Do the daily grind, play with shit on the test/dev partitions (LPARS?), and have fun hacking after work.
And you're right that the Redbooks are good. My only disagreement is that, if looking for mainframe, the SEO actually is too good in that all I get are Redbooks and IBM articles. That's when I'm looking for independent assessments of it. It's like Google wanted to drown me in their shit while I was actually looking for an independent assessment of Channel I/O, TCO, etc. Found some of it but it was work.
EDIT: Only thing that confused me was when the presentation said he bought a mainframe. How the hell did he buy a mainframe? I thought you had to be rolling in cash to even get an entry-level model with z/OS and z/VM. Re-edit, I found two answers to that question for people with some cash and who want to hack mainframes. See below:
> For the security researchers out there, mainframes are really under-researched.
I suspect it has to do with the price tag. For Windows/Linux, I can just install the system on a random PC I have lying around, or at least buy a PC for very little money (in the grand scheme of things). With mainframes, few companies have one just standing around for you to tinker with.
If IBM were willing to license z/OS (and their other mainframe OSes) to run on Hercules for such purposes, that might go a long way. But so far they seem to have no interest in that.
Casual exploration of the platform becomes very hard when a small mainframe is... what? $/€ 100,000?
And the complexity of the platform encourages specialization. (Try asking a competent Windows/Linux guy a mainframe question, they will probably give you a blank stare as well. FWIW, I am a Windows/Linux guy, too, I just was lucky enough to have a brief stint in a mainframe team during my training.)
Are there any places online to play with things like this? I used to admin Solaris machines back in the day and always wanted to learn more about mainframes. I'm not sure if there are any spots where you can get a free sandbox account on these types of things or not...
You have to enable `set system offload ipv4 vlan enable` else your routing performance will suffer.