blog.haraldkraft.de

Updated and unified version of standalone SMS extractor for iPhone

Harald Kraft — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 22:21:14 +0000

Last year I released a script written in PHP which was able to extract text messages from the iPhone (more specifically: from the SQLite storage container) into a simple TXT file, which was documented in this blog post. The software required a PHP interpreter, which had to be cared for by the user (check the blog post for details), but was published under CC BY 3.0 so the user could make any alteration he desired or deemed necessary.
Some time later I wrote an online version of the extractor (release blog post), which offered extended functionality and above all no longer needed the user to run the interpreter him- or herself.
However, due to the lack of time I couldn’t keep the standalone version up to date with the online version and so they diverged.

As of now I am publishing the updated code of the standalone version, which has partially been re-written in two ways: for one it now comprises of the same functionality as the online version, and for another the coding structure has been reorganized so I can keep the two versions in unison easier. This means that any update or change made to the software will be applied to both versions: the online version will make use of the update whereas the standalone version will be published open source under the same license with the updated code.

You can download the updated code here.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Let me quickly list the options which the new standalone version offers (i.e. the differences to the original publication), which are about user customizations:

$OUTFILE_TYPE = “TXT”
defines whether the type of the output should be in text (TXT) or comma-separated values (CSV). Please note that the file extension you define for $OUTFILE as part of the filename is not taken into consideration; so e.g. if you want to output a CSV file, setting the outfile name to “outfile.csv” is not enough, you need to specifically set $OUTFILE_TYPE to CSV.
$NEWLINE = “\n”
defines the format of the system dependent newline. Use \r\n on Windows and \n on Unix/Linux and Mac.
default file opening mode is now “overwrite” ( $f_handle = fopen( $OUTFILE, “w” ); ). If you would like to append extracted text message to the output file rather than overwrite the file use “a” instead of “w“. Note that the line now moved towards the end of the file.
Change format of output of single text messages
In case of TXT you need to change $OUTSTRING .= “$time$senderror$NEWLINE$address$NEWLINE$text$NEWLINE$NEWLINE$NEWLINE”; to your liking and in case of CSV change $OUTSTRING .= “$address,$time,\”" . str_replace( “\”", “\”\”", $text) . “\”$NEWLINE”;.
Make sure you only change the format string and leave the .= intact .

If you are a new user to this and don’t know what to do about the user specific CONFIGURATION section or how to run the script, please refer to the original blog post, which explains in detail how the standalone version works.

As always you can contact me with any remarks you would like to bring to my attention.

Firebug’s “Aborted” message upon AJAX request

Harald Kraft — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 14:08:57 +0000

A while ago I encountered this error in Firebug during my work with AJAX techniques but never really documented it – so here we go.

The scenario is simple: a number of asynchronous requests are done via JavaScript and many of them Firebug will list as Aborted. I attached screenshots below.

What seemed mysterious was that these requests were done at completely different locations in the code, which didn’t have any relation to one another. Furthermore I didn’t render the fact problematic that some of the requests were shuffled amongst each other – that’s what AJAX was for …

However – of course the answer was PEBKAC – I was using the same XMLHttpRequest object from the different locations over and over not caring whether the previous request had returned or not. The browser is left with no other option than to stop the already open request of the object and start a new one. Firebug shows this behavior by the label “Aborted” in the HTTP Status column, I don’t think this is a term used in the standards. For example Opera’s Dragonfly calls it “n/a”, which is probably even more correct in ways of “the HTTP status code is not available”, but does not give the developer any clue about what happened.

Bottom line: I encountered many “Aborted” messages in Firebug with AJAX because I was using the same XHR object for simultaneous connections. Maybe some other folks with the same problem will stumble across this blog and find peace .

Here is an simple example of how to reproduce the issue:

A minimal HTML page including the separate Javascript file and calling an entry function wrapper( ) on load:


    
  
    
        Testpage for firebug abort problem
        
    

    
        
            testpage for firebug abort problem

A separate JavaScript file with the entry function that will call the interfering procedures. The procedures have to be called asynchronously (third parameter of open( ) is set to true) otherwise the browser would wait for the return (or a browser specific timeout):

function createRequestObject() {
    if( navigator.appName == "Microsoft Internet Explorer" ) {
        return new ActiveXObject( "Microsoft.XMLHTTP" );
    }
    
    return new XMLHttpRequest();
}

var xhttp = createRequestObject();
        
function wrapper() {
    ajax_sleep( 5 );
    ajax_sleep( 1 );
    ajax_sleep( 1 );
}

function ajax_sleep( seconds ) {
    xhttp.open( "GET", "./sleep.php?seconds="+seconds, true );
    xhttp.onreadystatechange = handleResponse;
    xhttp.send(null);
}

function handleResponse() {
    if( xhttp.readyState == 4 ) {
        var response = xhttp.responseText;
        alert( response );
    }
}

An external PHP script that will do nothing but sleep for the expected amount of seconds:

And here are the screenshots with the mentioned error messages:

Firebug console:

Firebug net view:

Opera’s Dragonfly network view:

The story of an occasional Virgin Mobile cell phone

Harald Kraft — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 19:14:25 +0000

For the past few years I’ve been using a Virgin Mobile cell phone every time I spent time in the United States. Because this was happening only once a year (meaning the rest of the year I’d be outside of the US and any US signal) I would use a plan that was good for a month and then just stop topping up until I would get back into the country. Of course this meant that I would lose the phone number and get a new one every time I got back; but since this was a holiday phone (in different places of the country with different contacts) that was totally fine. Besides, I know people who change their phone numbers (and email addresses) almost every month – and yes, I am being a bit dramatic here btw.

This year’s trip to Miami shouldn’t be any different: (re-)activate phone (=get a new number), top-up, fire away (=get to know ppl and write lots of texts).
However, this time it turned out to be sort of a chore, which I’ll be trying to document here.

Like I said, the first step would be to activate my phone and get a number. The last time I did this I was using the dial programming code ##847446# (which works on every VM phone), following the steps and getting a text with the new number. However this time the process couldn’t be completed and I got a note to call customer service (1-888-322-1122). Trying to do so failed with an announcement “Sorry, your phone has not been activated, yet. Please call customer service“. Great, so I can’t call customer service to activate this phone using the phone; furthermore the hotel would charge $1/min for toll-free numbers (very logical I have to admit). Luckily I also brought my home iPhone and the hotel offered free WiFi, plus I have an American VoIP account.
Using my iPhone and VoIP I finally called customer service and went through the steps of activating the phone: get a new VM account (unlike the last time, when I could just re-use the old one) with a new number, program the phone with the new MSN and MSID and getting an activation notice. However, in order to top up I again had to link my PayPal account to VM (would have been too easy if I could have just reused the old VM account where that step had already been done last year -_-).

Getting off the phone with support I went onto the website, logged into my new account and started out to connect my PayPal account. Having done that I wanted top-up – right away just like last time. However, for two reasons I was unable to complete the process: it took me a long while to figure out what the exact amount for topping-up was (would be so easy if you American guys could include VAT before labeling the total – just like the rest of the world -_-) and second the form field didn’t let me put in cent values.

Means, I would call the service line again. This time with the newly activated phone .

I described my problem and the woman said it would be no problem to issue the PayPal payment over the phone. Her telling me the final total and me giving her confirmation to hit “go”, it didn’t go through. Also following tries returned an error and she put me on hold in order to find out what the problem was. After a few minutes she got back to me and told me that this was a very rare issue and I should wait 4 hours and try it again. Apparently sometimes there is a grace period that needs to pass until the PayPal connection can be used.

It being in the middle of the night already I decided to get some rest and give this a rest until morning.

Before I’d call their number again I wanted to give it a last shot. But on their website I couldn’t use the PayPal option anymore. Great. Instead I then tried to use my credit card – however they require a US address and entering my hotel address didn’t work (even though it was just an electronic billing address).

So there I was dialing customer support again. Explaining the situation didn’t really help, but this time it even got worse. The woman blamed PayPal and something being wrong with that account – yeah right, as I had also just used it for something else and it aas working just fine. Nevertheless she didn’t give into giving the PayPal option another try, but instead she insisted on giving me the support number offered by PayPal. So much for that.

Honestly I didn’t even bother calling PayPal because I knew there was nothing wrong with the account. I basically gave up on “just pay as much as needed for exactly one month use” and went to a local store buying a top-up card, which – of course – wasn’t available with the amount I needed.
Therefore I ended up paying more than I actually needed plus wanted, but maybe that money is staying in my account without expiring and I can use it next time I get back.

Upside is, I’ve used the phone a lot during my stay and it’s just absolutely necessary to stay in contact with local people (or folks that are currently around the same area).

Correct CSV export for free iPhone SMS extractor

Harald Kraft — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 22:39:13 +0000

About half a year ago I published a PHP script that could extract text messages from an iPhone SQLite container. It was followed by an online version (blog post) a few weeks later, which was a website offering to use the original PHP script for text message extraction without having to install and/or run a webserver.

The online version continued development including security checks and the likes. Until I have more than 24h a day at my disposal, I will continue development on the online version only. The source code for the online version is not yet publicly available (it will be once I merge the two branches), but please do contact me if you’re interested.

The current blog post is about a small update that basically fixed the CSV format. Even though there is no “CSV standard” and a few different formats in common usage, I am refering to RFC 4180: enclosing text with double quotes and escaping double quotes with themselves.

Bottom line, feel free to use the updated online version of the free SMS extractor:

Click: SMS / text message extraction from iPhone

“sudo” in OpenSolaris

Harald Kraft — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 16:22:53 +0000

One of the objectives of this blog – when I started it – was to archive solutions to problems which took me a while to find. If at the time a Google search with the most common question to the problem didn’t show a page with a solution within the first results, I created a blog post in order for it to be easier accessible for myself – along with sharing that solution with the open web. Furthermore, it’s a technique to remember things easier: write them down once and you won’t forget.

In the beginning I was fooling around with a quad-boot system including OpenSolaris.
Unfortunately I haven’t been using OpenSolaris that much, so I kept forgetting what the equivalent to the Unix command sudo was. However I still remember that whenever I did use OpenSolaris, somehow it took me a while to find the answer – this might seem strange because when googling for “sudo in opensolaris” at this point in time, you will get the correct answer right away.

Nevertheless I thought this might be worth a tiny blog post and personal reminder that the OpenSolaris equivalent to Unix’s sudo is pfexec: pfexec

or if I may quote Sun/Oracle: "In effect, pfexec functions as a passwordless su or sudo in Linux."

btrfs

Markus Mauder — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:15:08 +0000

Is it possible to get excited about a technology we never notice when using a computer? File systems do their job and we never give them a second thought. On a fresh setup of Ubuntu 11.10 I have 10 different mkfs.* binaries, allowing the creation of as many file systems. Why is there more than one? Let’s take a look at one I find truly exciting: btrfs, the newest entry in the Linux file system zoo.

What is it?

Btrfs is a file system designed to handle large amounts of data. It is capable of organizing volumes of up to 16 EiB and supports a maximum file size of 16 EiB. To ensure a consistent file system state, it uses copy-on-write, meaning it writes data to new locations and then updates the entry in the file system trees, so the changes only become visible once they have been completed. As a comparison: ext4 (which is the newest update of the ext-family of file systems traditionally used on Linux) supports 1 EiB volumes (1/16) and 16 TiB file sizes (1/2^20). And ext4 is a journaling file system. It records changes to be made before making them so the system state can be restored in the event of a crash.

btrfs also has a few interesting new features, which we will take a look at in a minute after having a look at how the development of btrfs started.

In 2004, Sun made waves with their ZFS file system for Solaris. It provided many new capabilities, which were not available in production-grade file systems at the time. Examples include 16EB maximum file size, copy-on-write and data dedublication. It was opensourced as part of OpenSolaris and eventually ported to linux, although never included due to license incompatibilities. Probably in response, Oracle’s Chris Mason announced btrfs, its own new copy-on-write file system capable of storing 16 EiB files and supporting similar features like snapshots in 2007. Ironically, Oracle acquired Sun in 2010.
By now this new file system is bundled in all major Linux distributions (since Debian 6.0, Ubuntu 10.10 and Fedora 13 (this was the earliest mention I found, maybe even earlier). Fedora plans to eventually use btrfs as their default file system.

New features

The original announcement listed 12 features as implemented or to do. Let me highlight some of the more exciting ones:

snapshots

Since btrfs is a copy-on-write file system, it can keep trees representing the state at an earlier time around without any additional copying. This feature can be used to implement proper “safe points” to restore a system in case something goes wrong. No more booting of life systems and manual restoring of backups!

storage mode for SSDs

New computers often come with solid state disks, which are faster to read and write, allow random access, but have a smaller number of write cycles. These properties can be used and taken into account by choosing a different strategy for identifying disk space to allocate on write. Phoronix has compared the write speed of SSD drives using btrfs in both the normal and SSD mode.

file system based RAID

Or rather RAID-like features. Specifically, btrfs currently supports distributing file systems over more than one physical disk (like RAID0) and duplication (like RAID1).

subvolumes

Similar to snapshots, subvolumes allow the same data store to be used for several file systems. In essence, the same file system can have more than one root directory in the same disk space.

I for one am very excited about snapshots, but can imagine all of those features to come in handy in the future. Check out the btrfs wikipedia article, which lists those features with links to helpful articles inside its enormous repository of knowledge.

Status

btrfs is still not considered stable and there are some very exciting features forthcoming. One notable omission is that of a file system check utility. btrfs-fsck can currently detect errors in the file system, but not fix them yet. After some delays, this functionality is supposed to be released real soon now. Oracle plans to use btrfs as their default file system in Oracle Linux, which makes this tool a necessity.

I have used btrfs on the storage partition of my laptop since the release of Ubuntu 11.10 and have not had any issues. (However, making the boot partition btrfs failed with boot issues. Not unresolvable, but not a priority of mine at the time.) Additionally, I have upgraded the default ext4 root partition on a fresh Fedora 16 beta release to btrfs using the btrfs-convert tool from btrfs-progs. (Doing it this way is quite risk-free. The tool will keep your ext-data around so you can restore your previous state. As usual, backups are a good idea when playing with new stuff. Don’t forget to update the affected partitions’ UUIDs (use blkid to determine the current value), which will be changed by the conversion. /etc/fstab and the boot loader come to mind.)

Summary

btrfs is a new Linux file system. It has many exciting new features and is already stable enough to be used on non-critical systems. When the integration with tools on Linux-based systems improves we will see some exciting new capabilities coming to these systems. Currently, Fedora integrates snapshots into GRUB to realize proper system rollbacks. Expect this and more features to get picked up by the other distributions.

We are not going to notice much of it in normal operation, but we can rest easy in the knowledge that btrfs manages our exbibytes for us.

Guest post by Markus Mauder.

Computer gibberish in movie – part 4

Harald Kraft — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 17:48:46 +0000

Considering that most things about the movie The Bourne Ultimatum and that it was well done concerning IT were already mentioned in the previous gibberish post this will rather become a short blog post and I will get straight to it.

Yet again this isn’t really gibberish but also a continuity goof.

Check out the following two pictures and pay close attention to the blood type. While on David Webb’s dog tag blood type 0 negative is engraved, the later induction report will state blood group A positive.

I can’t think of a reason why this might as a matter of fact be intentional – why would they want to hide a person’s (even a CIA cover agent’s) blood type. Let alone I don’t know why they wouldn’t just match the reports to the military ID tags…

Computer gibberish in movie – part 3

Harald Kraft — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:56:57 +0000

Well, to put this down as “gibberish” would be unfair, because it’s quite reasonable information right there. It’s rather what would be called “continuity goofs” over at the IMDb. Furthermore my remarks in the introduction of the first part of the blog series still apply, that with current HD quality movies, it’s easy to pull up a still and check the information sold to us by the movie makers.

I have to admit, the people responsible for The Bourne Ultimatum have done a pretty good job, both with the movie in general and as far as IT authenticity is concerned. (As a small side-note: sorry, idealists, but I have not read the book)
However, there are a few things (to be followed), where they did sloppy work – remember when Nicky says “it’s being blocked by the firewall”?

To get to the point, throughout the movie we are presented with glimpses of CIA files on the big screen in the operations room. One of them is Nicky Parson’s file, some time later both hers and Jason’s are shown side by side.

Check out the category where it says “Short Summary” (e.g. including the weapons training) and compare the two images:

Note that they just copied Nicky’s information over to Jason and filled Nicky’s file with new stuff? I can’t really find a reasonable explanation why they didn’t just fill the category in Jason’s file with new values …

Oh well, they are forgiven, but stay tuned for another continuity goof in the movie (UPDATE (15/09/2011): this one)

Access denied for existing MySQL user

Harald Kraft — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 20:19:31 +0000

After I was fed up with using the administrative MySQL account on my local machine even though I had a personal account, I finally got to the bottom of why I was denied access to that user no matter how often I deleted, re-created the account and flushed privileges.

The problem occurs when you try to login and looks as if you entered the wrong password:

ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'username'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

If you’re using phpMyAdmin, it looks like this:

#1045 Cannot log in to the MySQL server

However, I knew that I had granted privileges to that user with the wildcard host % so I could connect locally and also from anywhere else. Showing grants as root user:

mysql> show grants for 'username'@'%'; +---------------------------------------------+ | Grants for username@% | +---------------------------------------------+ | GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'username'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD '*2470C0C06DEE42FD1618BB99005ADCA2EC9D1E19' WITH GRANT OPTION | +---------------------------------------------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The root of this problem lies only in part with the custom user username. The actual problem is, that commonly upon setup of the MySQL server a few users are generated automatically, including the anonymous-user account (with privileges for wildcard host % as well as localhost). When you try to connect locally (which happens if you use command line or phpMyAdmin) with your custom user username, there are no privileges for such user connecting from localhost and therefore the connection is treated as an anonymous user (because such privileges do exist).
So in order to be able to use your custom user also when connecting from localhost, you need to create the same user (can be a different password, though) with the host localhost and grant the desired privileges:

CREATE USER 'username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'your_password'; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'username'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;

Please see the MySQL Reference Manual section 5.5.2 Adding User Accounts about these reasons.
The issue was solved with the help of LinuxQuestions.org in this thread.

Sending/getting an invite to GooglePlus during early stage

Harald Kraft — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:59:06 +0000

A few days ago, Google launched their version of social networking in the shape of Google+.
Like most Google projects, this seems to be in a semi-closed beta phase allowing members to invite new people. My guess is they randomly selected Google accounts that were automatically joined into the program for trying it out. Ever since then a huge wave of asking for and giving out invites has occurred.

While you’re still trying to figure out whether you should join or stay away, let me just quickly give short instructions on how to give away or receive invites for GooglePlus:

Create something on your stream. That’s on the main window in the middle – it doesn’t matter whether you’re posting a note or link or video and the likes
Share your post with the person you’d like to invite by clicking +Add circles or people to share with… and enter their email address. (At this point in time I do not know whether that email needs to be already associated with a Google account)
The person will receive an email with a button Learn more about Google+, which practically is their invite link

In order to get an invite, you will need a person already on Google+ (e.g. me ) to do the above.

Now, go have fun on Google+ and remember two things:

Don’t do evil!
Thoughts are free, but just so much …

Please also keep in mind, that the instructions (as well as the labels) might just apply to this early stage and may change in the future. I will not update this blog post but keep it a reminder of how things were in the beginning .

UPDATE (01/07/2011): Looks like Google closed that way of inviting new people, sorry folks.