Monday, February 17, 2014 View Comments

Programming in a nutshell

Monday, February 10, 2014 View Comments

Twitter Archive Eraser version 4.0 available

Twitter Archive Eraser version 4.0 was released about a month ago (too lazy to update on the blog here) and comes with an exciting set of new features.


The major features introduced with version 4.0:

  • Zip archive loading: you can now load the whole twitter zip archive in one click without the need to add specific *.js files separately.
  • Automatic errors retry: Twitter Archive Eraser will track any tweets which were not deleted due to network or server side errors and offers to retry deleting them on the fly. You can also save a list of these tweets to delete later.
  • Filtering based on regular expressions: Retweets, mentions etc... You can get all these very easily with Regex based filtering.


Real time statistics and reporting:

One of the exciting features of Twitter Archive Eraser ver 4.0 is statistics. I used Windows Azure Websites and Table storage for this. One of the examples of how valuable are stats is checking the number of tweets deleted using the application in real time. Following is an example of the counter showing these numbers available on the main website of the application):

As for 9th of February 2014, Twitter Archive Eraser deleted ~28 million tweets and loaded ~75 millions, in 6 weeks!!

Licence:

Twitter Archive Eraser version 4.0 comes with an updated licence. In a nutshell:
  • You can always use Twitter Archive Eraser for personal use and distribute it as you wish.
  • You cannot use Twitter Archive Eraser for commercial purposes nor derive works based on it.

If you wish to contribute to Twitter Archive Eraser, you are always welcome to do so on this repository on github at https://github.com/martani/Twitter-Archive-Eraser.

Special thanks for Florent (https://twitter.com/florentsays) for his valuable suggestions.

Download:



Tuesday, September 3, 2013 View Comments

Twitter Archive Eraser version 3.0 available

Twitter Archive Eraser 3.0 is now available for download from https://delete.tweets.tools/.

This new version includes a bug fix which caused version 2.1 to crash and two new major features: Parallel deletion, and keyword-based filtering of tweets.

The first feature allows faster deletion of tweets depending on the chosen degree parallelism. It can delete up to 16 tweets concurrently. With version 3.0 it is possible to filter tweets containing keywords; this is very useful to keep/delete any mentions or specific tweets about some subject.


Wednesday, February 13, 2013 View Comments

Delete Your Oldest Tweets Using Twitter Archive Eraser [Updated version 2.1]

Looking for the awesome Twitter Archive Eraser? It has a new home now, download it from: 

https://delete.tweets.tools


                                 


Old post:

Until very recently, there was no obvious way to access your old tweets. In fact, Twitter imposes a limit of 3200 tweets (the more recent ones that is) that an application can access. This means also that you cannot delete your old tweets. Several tools exist to help you delete your old tweets but, according to my experiments, most of them do not work properly due to Twitter API's limitations.

Last week however, Twitter enabled the option for users to download their whole archive of tweets, which contains among other things the IDs of all the tweets of a user, the exact piece of information that can be used to wipe out any tweet.

I have developed a simple application called "Twitter Archive Eraser" that helps you delete the oldest tweets from your timeline, or wipe out the whole archive too if you would like so.
The application is the simplest possible, it works in 3 steps: authenticate Twitter, select which tweets you want to delete, wipe them out.

Step 1

In this step, you give access to Twitter Archive Eraser to your twitter account so that it can delete the tweets you select. This works by providing a Pin number that twitter provides after authentication.

Step 2

After you download your twitter archive (from https://twitter.com/settings/account) and extract it (to C:\Twitter_archive for example), you choose which tweets from your archive to delete. The tweets in the Twitter archive are grouped by month, ie. all the tweets of a month are stored in the same file.

These files are found in [your Twitter archive path]\data\js\tweets.
For instance, to delete the tweets from September 2009 you choose the file 2009_09.js.

Step 3

Once you have selected the correct files, you are now presented with all the tweets contained in these files. By default, all the tweets are marked for deletion, if you want to keep any specific tweets, you uncheck them as shown in the following picture. One you hit "erase selected tweets" button, there is no going back (unless you force the app to exit!).


You can find the code of the application on github: https://github.com/martani/Twitter-Archive-Eraser. All the Twitter logic is done using the excellent LinqToTwitter library.

Requirements:
.NET Framework 4.0.

Download from: https://delete.tweets.tools




Monday, January 7, 2013 View Comments

Padding Oracle Attacks In C#

Back when I took the Cryptography class on coursera, one of the programming projects was to develop a padding Oracle attack, I have forgotten about the code, but now it is on github with more tweaks.

The code is modular and in order to be used with a new padding Oracle, one has only to create an object representing this Oracle and wire it to the PaddingOracleAttacker; it's that simple.

The new code is available here: http://martani.github.com/Padding-Oracle-Attack/.

The Oracle must implement the interface ICBCOracle which has one function: bool RequestOracle (byte[] cipher), returning true when the padding is correct, false otherwise. There exists 2 examples of such oracles in PaddingOracleAttackTest/Oracles.
This is an example of an online Oracle which return HTTP code 403 when the padding is bad, and 404 on a correct padding.

Another offline Oracle that uses AES is also provided, it can be used for testing.
Once you have the Oracle ready, all what is left is to attach it to the PaddingOracleAttacker and you are in business:


Do not use this code if you are trying to solve the coursera assignment.

Monday, November 5, 2012 View Comments

Delve Into Windows Phone 8 (Emulator) Files

As you may know already, the all new Windows Phone 8 emulator runs on Windows Hyper-V, which means that you can start the WP8 OS directly from Hyper-V, and better, you can have total control to explore the files on the system's emulator.

This is pretty useful (I'm sure the folks over xda-developers are already on this) to see around the different parameters in the registry files; to have access to the executable files of the system etc.

For this, all one needs is to attach the virtual hard drive of the emulator. Open the "Administrative Tools" in the (old) control panel then "Computer Management." Choose "Disk Management" and then on the "Action" menu choose "Attach VHD." Now all that is needed is to locate the VHDs of the emulator located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v8.0\Emulation\Images.

Following are the registry files from the mounted VHD.


Happy hacking...

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