Finally got myself a Lytro Illum!
I,v been wanting to buy one since it came out but the company who made it closed down in 2015..
Thoose fuckers just thrown everything in the trash and set it on fire, software, firmware, mobile app etc.. no open source, no archives, your expensive camera is now a paper weight! You’r welcome!
So i got myself a new hobby, started reverse-engineering the fuck out of it, luckily it’s based on android (api17), i have adb and it’s running a hidden DHCP server too so it’s coming along nicely :D
I’m planning to make a camera control mobile app for it and maybe some faster image processing, wifi sharing etc..
I love beeing in home office :D

So, a rather unfortunate bug on the Minecraft website.

Minecraft allows you to change your name every 30 days. I was reverse engineering their API so I could use it personally.

On the username change form there are two fields: your desired username, and your password.

To protect myself from actually changing my name, I purposefully put in password123 so that it would fail. Then, I clicked "Change name" to monitor the network traffic.

Well that's when two unfortunate things combined.

#1: I used my last name to test. It's a unique word that is relatively short and very easy for me to type out of habit.

#2: That password field doesn't actually get validated.

So imagine my shock when I clicked "change username" and it WORKED.

And now my username is doxxing me for at least 30 days + the permanent name history

FUCK me

I often times write code and think to myself "I don't have to comment this, it's obvious what is going on", only to find myself back at the same code, figuring out wtf it does...

I was watching an Ancient Aliens episode called "Beyond Roswell". The show described the idea of some of our tech being seeded slowly by introducing alien technology to specific companies. They suggested that computing technology has advanced very fast and introducing this tech could be part of that.

At first I was kinda pissed about this. I have read about the creation of the first transistor back in the 40s or 50s. WWII really advanced our need for computing devices such as what Turing built. Then I realized a lot of the explosion of computer tech did occur after key ET events. This kind of made me wonder how much is "us" and how much is ET tech. I also realized it can take a lot of effort to understand something really advanced. So reverse engineering can take a LOT of effort to figure these things out. Being seeded by external tech does not take away from humans at all.

A parallel to this is a programmer that learns how to use a C++ compiler. They could go their whole career without ever understanding how the compiler itself is doing its job. I find myself wanting to learn how compilers work and started down this path. I look at the simple grammar I have learned to parse. Then I look at the C++ grammar and think "How can I ever learn to do that?" So I see us viewing potentially advanced things and wondering how the heck can we ever learn to do that. The common reaction when faced with such tech would be disbelief and in some cases ridiculing the messenger. When I was a kid the idea of sending a picture over a phone was laughable. Now this is common and expected. It was literally a scifi concept when I was a kid.

So, back to the alien tech. I am now thinking it would be cool to be working with alien technology through computing. This is like scifi stuff now! So what if what we have was not all invented here (Earth). If anything this will prepare us programmers to get jobs working for alien corporations writing ship level programs and brain interfaces. Think of it as intergalactic resume building. 😉