Two Slashes

Over the years, I’ve experimented, poked, prodded, tested, and done-just-about-any-other-verb-you-can-stick-here with various components of VB 6 or the Windows APIs. Of course, this also means that I’ve accumulated quite the little collection of test applications.

Now, most of these never make it beyond me using them once, except in a few circumstances where I actually shine them up and attempt to make them public. Well, if you didn’t already guess, these are the ones that I felt were shined up enough to be used in at least a casual environment.

I’m going to make this especially clear, and I’m only going to say it once: THESE APPLICATIONS ARE NO LONGER MAINTAINED. This means that unless I have a reason to bring the project back to active status again, it’s going to stay exactly as-is, bugs included. I simply don’t have the time to mess around with all of these, not to mention that some of these are several years old by this point. You can use them in whatever environment you wish, but note that I’m not responsible for bugs, crashes, loss of data, or anything that might result from their use. It’s all at your own risk, and I make no guarantees that these will even work for you in any given situation. Alright, enough with the casualized legal mumbo-jumbo.

The list:

• Agent Control Panel – Mostly done to experiment with the Microsoft Agent Control, this is nothing more than a way to make annoying animated characters cater to your every whim. For some reason, the speech component doesn’t work with XP.
• BlowfishGen – BlowfishGen is a simple utility for converting to or from Blowfish-encrypted plaintext, given that you know the password. It’s really stripped and really simple…but it works.
• BomberMan – I envisioned this to be a way to test the effect of pingbombing (a form of Denial-of-Service) across a network. Unfortunately, I didn’t take into account the fact that a few pings by themselves don’t generate any traffic, so unless you run plenty of instances of this, it doesn’t have any effect. I did have plans to rewrite this, but as of yet they are unfulfilled.
• DuMore – This is nothing more than a wrapper to the Sysinternals Du utility for Windows (which is in turn a clone of the du utility found in Unix environments).
• GetMac – This utility will retrieve the MAC address of a computer attached to the same network as yourself, given the IP address. This is one way to test for man-in-the-middle attacks between you and another computer…assuming you know what the MAC should be in the first place.
• GrabBanner – This utility connects to a remote port, grabs any data transmitted such as a welcome banner or service version/etc., and disconnects. I must say, it’s useful for quick identification of remote services.
• MD5HashGen – MD5HashGen is another encryption-centric utility, only the purpose of this one is to generate MD5 hashes from input plaintext.
• PingPlus – This is a quick GUI-based pinging utility. Nothing more, just like my description.
• PortFaker – At one point, I had the idea that security through obscuring your open ports was a good idea. In theory, it is, but that assumes you keep your services on random non-default ports. PortFaker simply added a few open ports to your system, which cycled every few seconds and told you if something had tried to connect to them.
• PortXpress – Of course, what security app would be good without a tool to test it with? So PortXpress is a really cheesy portscanner…and when I say cheesy, I mean why I released this still eludes me.
• (Connection) Quality Tester – What this was intended to do is measure the maximum possible reported thoroughput between yourself and a remote host. What it actually does, I have no clue anymore.
• RDportX – This was actually written by request, based upon a friend’s VBscript-based solution. RDportX is a utility for changing the listening port for Microsoft Remote Desktop on later NT-based Windows machines from the default to something else, which makes it great for both a hint of added security and the ability to move it to a port that might not be filtered by someplace you’re trying to connect from.
• ResolveIP – Even more basic than PingPlus…this literally just resolved IPs from canonical hostmasks.
• TenCryptor – At one time, this was my piece de resistance. Now it’s just a way for you to astound your friends with the ability to layer multiple encryption methods on top of one another, and hoping that someone didn’t catch the order you did it in. In a way, I still trust it more than some of the corporate apps, though.
• WinASS – A long time ago, Nullsoft released an application that could pack multiple files into one, and a library for extracting them on-the-fly for use in your C applications. What I had hoped to ultimately do was make a full packing/unpacking studio based on their method. WinASS acted as a frontend to the packing utility, which of course would be a first step…a first step I never continued with. Essentially, you can pack files with this tool. But you can’t really do anything once they’re packed.