Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2023 September 13

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September 13

ODIN Intelligence hack

According to our article on ODIN Intelligence and here, its SONAR and SweepWizard systems were hacked, does anyone know the actual vulnerability exposed? Therapyisgood (talk) 20:53, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Is there something I'm missing? Our article already says [1] "WIRED verified the unauthenticated API endpoint that returned breached data". This is supported by the Wired source [2], which also offers further explanation although the text I quoted seems fairly self explanatory for anyone interested in vulnerabilities. Nil Einne (talk) 01:08, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Your linked popsci article states: "…ODIN Intelligence, accidentally left sensitive information regarding hundreds of police operations publicly accessible…" and Wired says: "SweepWizard’s application programming interface, or API, that allowed anyone with a specific URL to retrieve confidential law enforcement data from the app." and "…WIRED downloaded the Android version of the app from Google Play and verified that its API endpoints were in fact returning data regardless of authentication.". At minimum, this means ODIN failed to implement proper Computer access control, and failed to properly authenticate users of its service such that: any call to the API with any semi-valid credential, could access any information within the database linked to this service, whether they were specifically authorized/intended to or not.

It's analogous to handing someone the key to a front door so they can walkthrough a building as part of a real estate transaction, and that key also opens every filing cabinet, safe, and bank vault accessible on the property. -- dsprc ^[talk] 09:13, 17 September 2023 (UTC)

Hebrew Unicode forms

כ ך

פ ף

צ ץ

נ ן

מ ם

״ ׳׳

Several Hebrew letters have final forms; when the letter appears at the end of a word, it has a different shape from its appearance at the start or the middle of the word. All of them appear above this paragraph. Also, gershayim are punctuation marks with singular forms and double forms, analogous to the ellipsis character … that's different from three full stops ...

When you're running searches, and conducting other activities that aren't 100% rigidly character-for-character (not, say, Ctrl+F in Notepad), are final forms and the gereshayim character handled differently from non-final forms and two geresh characters? I can't quite decide, from my lack of experience. My browser, Chrome, treats the letter forms as identical to each other, but it also treats the gereshayim character as identical to straight quotation marks " and the geresh as identical to a straight apostrophe ' even though they're obviously different Unicode characters.

123.51.107.94 (talk) 23:49, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

How this is treated depends on the precise software instructions of any given application and may differ from application to application,  --Lambiam 08:23, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

I don't know Hebrew, but a final form is also used in Greek sigma (Σ, σ, ς). In Firefox, when I do a case sensitive search, σ and ς are different characters. When doing a case insensitive search, they are the same. So this is treated just the same way as capital letters, as could be expected. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:00, 14 September 2023 (UTC)

yeah, it depends between applications. I never know what to expect. Kotz (talk) 16:30, 15 September 2023 (UTC)

Alphabetical order § Language-specific conventions would be the place to put such information, if you find an RS - it is lacking any Hebrew data. -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 17:20, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Not only do many letters of the Arabic alphabet also have special final forms, just like Hebrew, but they also have initial and medial forms, next to the "isolated forms". This is not mentioned in the Alphabetical order article, but in dictionaries in print all forms of a given letter are treated as occupying the same position in the alphabetical order. This does not imply that any software does the same. On the Hebrew Wikpedia, searching for ממ‎ does not lead me to their page מם‎.  --Lambiam 22:44, 16 September 2023 (UTC)