The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category

Scoop buckets by Github score | scoop-directory

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/27

Interesting gamification of the Scoop installer buckets: [Wayback/Archive] Scoop buckets by Github score | scoop-directory

It is an overview of various buckets you could add to [Wayback/Archive] ScoopInstaller/Scoop: A command-line installer for Windows. sorted by GitHub stars.

–jeroen

Posted in Power User, Scoop, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Leave a Comment »

URL File Extension – What is a .url file and how do I open it?

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/20

I thought I had long gone blogged about the .URL file extension as it has been in Windows for some 25 years now to point to URLs, but I didn’t.

So here are two links on them:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Power User, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Leave a Comment »

zxcvbn: Low-Budget Password Strength Estimation | USENIX

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/19

Many web-sites and password managers have a strength indicator built-in.

This is a really good example (with open source JavaScript code!) of one: [Wayback/Archive] zxcvbn: Low-Budget Password Strength Estimation | USENIX

Be aware though that it stores a plain text file named passwords.txt on your system (this seems to confuse some users, especially when their password is in it).

Homans password behaviour does not change much over time, so this half hour 2016 presentation on it is still current: [Wayback/Archive] USENIX Security ’16 – zxcvbn: Low-Budget Password Strength Estimation – YouTube for which you can download:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Chrome, Development, Edge, Firefox, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Power User, Safari, Scripting, Software Development, Web Browsers, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | 2 Comments »

On my list of tools to check out RustDesk (as replacement for TeamViewer, Remote Desktop and similar)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/06/05

For non-Windows systems, I have used TeamViewer in the past and when they started being obnoxious reverted mostly to VNC derived alternatives. For Windows, I’d usually combined VPN with Remote Desktop.

Recently, I found out that during my first rectum cancer year (and for others, the first COVID-19 year), the development of RustDesk – which can be self-hosted – started as an open source project on [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – rustdesk/rustdesk: An open-source remote desktop application designed for self-hosting, as an alternative to TeamViewer. with their first commit being [Wayback/Archive] Initial commit · wabarc/wayback@650ea87 · GitHub.

I got pointed to this in [Wayback/Archive] Your Remote Desktop SUCKS!! Try this instead (FREE + Open Source) – YouTube.

One of the main things to figure out is how reliably RustDesk does firewall hole punching*.

Another personal interest is to learn more about Rust and Dart, the main programming languages in which RustDesk is written.

Here are some links:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Development, Power User, Remote Desktop Protocol/MSTSC/Terminal Services, Rust, Screen sharing, Software Development, TeamViewer, VNC/Virtual_Network_Computing, Windows | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Bypassing ACLs with SeRestore privilege. And very simple User to LocalSystem elevation. – YouTube

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/28

This is cool and scary at the same time, especially since I knew about other privileges (SeDebugPrivilege comes to mind).

Granted you need to be local administrator for this, but still: for some tasks you do not need to elevate in the traditional way, but just give your current token more privileges.

[Wayback/Archive] Bypassing ACLs with SeRestore privilege. And very simple User to LocalSystem elevation. – YouTube

Via [WaybackSave/Archive] Grzegorz Tworek on X: “Friendly Reminder: If you have admin privileges but lack the necessary file permissions, you can leverage the SeBackup/SeRestore privileges directly from cmd.exe! There’s no need to elevate to LocalSystem, duplicate TrustedInstaller, or use similar methods. Simply enable the …”

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Posted in C, Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows Development | Leave a Comment »

Interesting take by Florian Roth on Twitter: “First security application I install on … “” covering various platforms (both server and workstation) with tools that are easy and quick to install

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/26

[Wayback/Archive] Florian Roth on Twitter: “First security application I install on … macOS: LittleSnitch Linux Server: Fail2ban Linux Workstation: etckeeper Windows Workstation: GlassWire Windows Server: Sysmon — What are yours?”

Full thread at [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @cyb3rops on Thread Reader App

Some interesting responses to the original tweet, hence me saving it.

–jeroen

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, Apple, BSD, FreeBSD, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Exporting Chrome History (with the “new” configuration and state file structure), and Epoch dates on various systems

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/05/02

Quite a while ago, Chrome moved from a structure based on “Current Session“, “Current Tabs“, “Last Session” and “Last Tabs” into “Session_#################” and “Tabs_#################” stored in a “Sessions” folder (and similar migrations for other state and configuration files).

The numbers in the “Session_*” and “Tabs_*” files are time stamps of those sessions, for instance one needs to figure out what the “13310808970819630” in “Session_13310808970819630” and “Session_13310808970819630” means.

Lot’s of web-pages with tips and tricks around the old structures are still around, often surfacing high in Google Search results.

I was interested in a particular trick to export Google Chrome browsing history and had a hard time figuring out the easiest solution.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Apple, Batch-Files, Chrome, Chrome, Database Development, Development, Google, JavaScript/ECMAScript, Mac OS X / OS X / MacOS, NirSoft, Polyglot, Power User, Scripting, SQLite, Web Browsers, Windows, Windows 10, Windows 11 | Tagged: | Leave a Comment »

Some SQLite things I recently learned a while ago

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/30

More on the reason why I learned a few SQLite things soon, but for my link and documentation archive, below is what I learned.

Most commands use the database file C:\temp\History which has no extension as that is how I got the file in the first place (spoiler: it’s a Chrome browser History from one of my user profiles).

Let’s get started:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in *nix, *nix-tools, bash, CommandLine, Conference Topics, Conferences, Console (command prompt window), Database Development, Development, Event, Power User, PowerShell, PowerShell, Software Development, SQL, SQLite | Leave a Comment »

Windows Installer is transactional, but combined with NTFS and installer processes is not fully: do more C:\Config.msi vulnerabilities exist? (plus a truckload of information on Windows SIDs)

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/10

Over the last years a few C:\Windows.msi vulnerabilities have been discovered (and fixed), of which some are linked below.

The core is that the Windows Installer tries to be transactional, and NTFS is, but the combination with installer processes isn’t.

That leads into vulnerabilities where you can insert malicious Roll Back Scripts (.rbs files) and Roll Back Files (.rbf files), and I wonder if by now more have been discovered.

So this post is a kind of reminder to myself (:

Oh, and I learned much more about whoami on Windows, as there  whoami /groups shows very detailed SID information. From that, I learned more on the internals of SIDs too!

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Blue team, C++, Development, Power User, Red team, Security, Software Development, Visual Studio C++, Windows, Windows Development | Tagged: , , , | Leave a Comment »

Run Windows 3.1 in True-Colour Full HD: GitHub – PluMGMK/vbesvga.drv: Modern Generic SVGA driver for Windows 3.1

Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/09

This is soooo cool: [Wayback/Archive] GitHub – PluMGMK/vbesvga.drv: Modern Generic SVGA driver for Windows 3.1

Modern Generic SVGA driver for Windows 3.1
This is a rewrite of the Windows 3.1 SVGA driver, designed to support ALL available 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit or 32-bit graphic modes on any system providing the VESA BIOS Extensions (hence the VBE in the name). It is based on the Video 7 SVGA driver included in the Win16 Driver Development Kit, with most of the hardware-specific code gutted out, and with support added for multi-byte pixels.

Related:

It reminds me of other endevours to keep retro-software easy to use: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Assembly Language, Delphi, Delphi 1, Development, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 3.11, x86 | Leave a Comment »