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/======================================\
| CONTENTS: |
|======================================|
|Introduction -------------------ynori7|
|News -------------------------Futility|
|Data Types ---------------------ynori7|
|ASCII Art -----------------------fuser|
|Futility Rant ----------------Futility|
\======================================/
==============================================================
====================Introduction by ynori7====================
==============================================================
Greetings HBH! Unfortunately this issue of the newsletter is a bit shorter
than I had hoped, but we've still got some great content. I'd like to take
this opportunity to thank fuser and Futility for their great contributions
and to thank COM for his excellent proofreading abilities. Also, thanks to
system_meltdown for helping out with administrative tasks.
If you like what you see here and would like to contribute, feel free to
contact me via pm or email(which can be found on my profile). We're always
looking for more quality content.
And without further ado, I present to you Newsletter #3!
~ynori7
==============================================================
======================News by Futility========================
==============================================================
How has HBH changed in the past two months? It hasn't. There is not one
thing that I can possibly say has happened and I'm not even going to try.
In fact, I'm going to fill in the rest of this piece with meaningless
babble, so you might as well just move on.
Thank God that's over. Now that I've weeded out all of those that are
unwilling to care about the condition of our beloved site, I'm left with
you: the most dedicated and most worthy members there are. You're the
people who made all the changes I'm about to mention possible, and for
that I thank you. Anyway- on with the show!
Update: NEW CHALLENGES
HellboundHackers is appealing to new members because of the growing
number of challenges that we provide. It is only after they're hooked
on the game that they start to expand and notice the wealth of
information present in the forum or start studying the code bank for
new and fancy code.
But I digress. HBH has recently added a whopping five new challenges
for our enoyment. They contain a range of different subjects,
starting with steganography and stretching all the way to programming-
based timed challenges. Each and every one of them is unique and
quite fun to mess around with, so be sure to check them out.
Update: PHP OPTIMIZATION CONTEST
The results are in! jjbutler88 and -cL took to organizing a
competition based upon the idea of taking a poorly written bit of PHP
and trying to make it run as fast as it could. The competition has
recently come to a close and the winners have been clearly posted on
HBH's index. If you're curious as to who is a PHP optimization guru,
then all you have to do is stop by and take a look. I'm sure that
they'd be more than willing to lend a hand if you have a project that
you're stuck on.
HBH is also planning on hosting many more competitions much like this
one in the future. If you want to test youself against numerous other
people, then all you have to do is sign in.
Update: MY THREADS
The idea has been brought up many times of the past few months: a
place to save certain threads that you want to monitor. Maybe you
created a thread asking for help and want to be notified every time
someone else posts in it. Maybe you particularly like a thread
created by someone and feel it contains very useful information.
Whatever the case, all you have to do is press the little green "+"
located at the top and bottom of the page. You then go to the My
Threads link located in the upper right-hand corner of the page. Then
you're done. Something so useful is really that simple.
There are many other changes that fall outside of any major category.
There is currently a competition going on which allows you to put your
graphics ability to the test. I'm not allowed to say much more, other
than the fact that if you're good enough, people might actually be allowed
to purchase what you create! Unfortunately this contest is only available
to exclusive members because real prizes are on stake, rather than just
the normal points and recognition.
I've also heard rumors of a big update coming out soon thanks to -cL and
ynori7. I haven't been given any details other than it's almost done, and
that's enough to excite me.
I hate talking about myself because there's just so much I can say. I
could tell you about how I'm never wrong, or how everything I touch gets
a little closer to perfect because it has come into contact with me...
See what I mean? The reason I bring me up is because I have created a new,
darker theme for HBH that is readily available for you to use through the
Edit Profile link on the right. Don't bother complimenting it- I already
realize that it's completely flawless.
In the next issue of this newsletter, I'm planning on publishing something
by you. That's right, I'm talking to you. I know how much people love
seeing their name on something next to mine, so I want to bring back the
Q&A mentioned in the first issue. Except this time there has to be one
minor change: you have to actually send in questions to be answered!
It's hard enough making up answers off the top of my head, I can't deal
with making up the questions, too. These questions must be technical or
in some way related to HBH. Oh, and one more rule- no challenge help. I
know how well you guys listen in the shoutbox, but here your content is
monitored. So if you have something to ask, send it to any of the
newsletter staff with the subject of "Q&A" and a good well-thought out
question. You just might make an appearance in the next newsletter!
-Futility
-----------------------------------
As some of you may have noticed, this news is a bit outdated. Futility
wasn't here for this last week, so he didn't see the recent sabotage
committed by our rivals at Enigma Group. I've decided to leave Futility's
article unchanged for the purpose of showing the extent of the damage
done.
On June 19th, I visited HBH as usual and was greeted with the following
message: "enigmagroup.org is better. Don't waste your education here." All
other pages in HBH's domain seemed to have disappeared. Psychomarine had
somehow obtained the Plesk password for HBH and decided to cause a bit of
chaos. -cL has been banned for giving the password to Psychomarine. There
is still some belief that -cL is innocent, however I will try to stick to
the facts.
Fortunately the admins of HBH were able to quickly restore a slightly
dated version of HBH. As a result, most of the news stories above are no
longer true. How has HBH changed in the past two months? It hasn't.
Futility didn't know how true his words would be.
The new challenges:
Stegano's 21 and 22 have been restored, but encryption 13 and timed 9
are still lost.
The "My Threads" update:
The link is no longer on the main page. You can still get to it by going
to http://www.hellboundhackers.org/my_threads.php. The function to save
threads isn't in place yet.
Futility's Theme:
Unfortunately no longer exists. Sucks because I was using that...
Shoutbox Trigger Functions:
No longer exist.
I expect that these things will be repaired in time. The lost news stories
and articles seem to back again, and the forums and user data was saved.
In the meantime, do not bother the admins with questions about lost data
because they've got quite a lot of work at present I imagine. Be patient.
-ynori7
==============================================================
====================Data Types by ynori7======================
==============================================================
Types are a vital component in any programming language, however,
most people just take them for granted and don�t really understand
what they are or how they work. A type can be defined as a set of
permitted values and a set of operations permitted on these values.
Programming languages tend to have many different types, and they vary
in their methods for handling them.
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
A type system for a programming language is a built in method by
which the language determines the type of data associated with a
value. There are two major type systems: static and dynamic.
Statically typed languages such as C++ and Java do not require a value
to be set to variables before their use. For example:
//C++ code
int x; //note that x has not been initialized to a value yet
x=5;
However, a dynamically typed language requires that every variable
declaration is also an initialization or instantiation. For example:
#Python code
a=0 #requires that you initialize the variable to a value
The compiler also handles the two type systems differently. In
statically typed programs type checking is done at compile time,
whereas in dynamically typed programs it is done at runtime.
Another important concept in relation to type systems is that of
strong and weak typing. This is a concept commonly confused with
static and dynamic typing. In strongly typed languages, all variables
must be bound to a particular data type. For strongly typed languages
at compile time, the compiler first performs a syntax analysis, and
then it performs a few kinds of semantics analyses such as
type-checking before finally generating the machine code. The compiler
for strongly typed languages assigns a type to all expressions in a
program at compile time. For example:
//Java code
public class Example
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
int x=3;
double y=1.01;
y=x+y;
/* In the above expression, x would be temporarily given the type
�double�. This is because of a kind of casting called �type promotion�
that occurs when a variable of one type is converted to a larger type,
in this case from an integer to a double precision float.*/
if(x<y) { //The expression x<y is assigned a �Boolean� type
System.out.println("x="+x);
}
}
}
An important term when considering strong versus weak typing is
�typesafe�. A program is considered typesafe if it will always execute
without type errors. A type system is considered strong if it will
only accept typesafe programs. Otherwise it is considered weak.
Essentially, a weak type system is one that allows the programmer to
assign incorrect data to variables. Here is an example:
/* C++ is an example of a strongly typed language */
#include<iostream>
#include<string>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
string x="example";
x=x+2;
return 0;
}
Upon compilation, you receive an error similar to this:
test.cpp: In function 'int main()':
test.cpp:9: error: no match for 'operator+' in 'x + 2'
/*PHP on the other hand is a weakly typed language*/
<?php
$x=�example�;
$x=$x+2; //this does not produce an error
?>
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
As well as having a type system, a compiler also supports many
different types and usually provides a method for converting one type
to another. There is also a multitude of different programming styles
when it comes to dealing with types.
Primitive data types are types that generally have hardware support
and/or are built directly into the language. Some examples of common
primitive types are: integers, floating point numbers, characters and
Boolean values. Other additional data types such as strings and arrays
are considered complex data types.
Ordinal Types are those that have a fixed sequence. �Integer� is an
example of an ordinal type because any subset of the set of all
integers is finite, can be counted, and has a specific order. This
cannot be said for floats (e.g. the subset from 10.000000 to 10.000001
has an infinite number of floating point values in between the two end
points).
Coercion is the process of converting one type to another. Coercion
can be done implicitly or explicitly.
For example:
float x=5; //note that 5 is an integer and x is a float. This is an
example of implicit coercion.
int x = (int)5.34; //This is called typecasting which is explicit
coercion.
Monomorphism is the concept that a name (i.e. variable, function,
struct, etc.) has exactly one type. Polymorphism, however, is the
concept that a name can have multiple types. It allows us to
explicitly provide many values or implementations of the same concept.
There are two common forms of polymorphism seen in programming: Ad Hoc
Polymorphism and Parametric Polymorphism (note that there are more
than just those two, but these are the most common).
Ad Hoc Polymorphism:
Ad Hoc Polymorphism allows us to assign a new operation on a specific
type to an existing operator or method. This is done by operator or
method overloading. In C++, methods defined with the �virtual� keyword
are methods that can be overloaded.
Here is an example of operator overloading in C++:
#include<iostream>
#include<sstream>
#include<string>
using namespace std;
struct Pair
{
Pair(int l, int r) : left(l), right(r) {}
Pair operator+(Pair &p);
string show()
{
ostringstream os;
os<<"left: "<<left<<endl;
os<<"right: "<<right<<endl;
return os.str();
}
private:
int left;
int right;
};
//The following is an example of the plus operator overloaded.
//now you can add two Pair objects with +
Pair Pair::operator+ (Pair &p)
{
return Pair(left+p.left, right+p.right);
}
Programs with parent classes and children that inherit their traits
utilize method overloading. This occurs when a program has one main
class with virtual methods, and one or more subclasses that extend the
definition of those virtual methods.
Parametric Polymorphism:
Essentially, this allows for us to have the type of a variable passed
into a method as a parameter. This is often known as Generic
Programming which is a style of programming in which the types
associated with data are specified by the program when necessary. This
can be done using templates in C++.
Here is an example of a template in C++:
Following is a sample of functions that all have exactly the same
body. The only difference is the type of data in the vector.
void display_message (const string &, const vector<int>& ) ;
void display_message (const string &, const vector<double>& ) ;
void display_message (const string &, const vector<string>& ) ;
This is tedious, so instead we can create a template:
template <typename elemType>
void display_message (const string &msg, const vector<elemType> &vec)
{
cout << msg ;
for ( int i = 0; i < vec.size(); ++i )
{ cout << vec[i] << � � ; }
}
Note: you want to put the template declaration in the .h file. In the
above code, elemType is the name of the variable representing a type.
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
This subject of types, type systems, and programming styles can go on
and on. This article only touches the tip of the iceberg, but it
provides an explanation for the basic details. Understanding types and
how the compiler handles them can help very much to improve your
programming skills and efficiency. Once you�ve reached a basic
understanding of types you can easily expand upon it. Simply search
for any of the material mentioned above and you�ll find hundreds of
insightful sources.
==============================================================
======================ASCII Art by fuser======================
==============================================================
I'm pretty sure at some point during your internet activities you've
stumbled upon some ASCII art. Whether when you were SSH'ing into some
remote shell and saw the art in the welcome banner, or when you were
reading some textfile and the writer had placed some huge ASCII logo at
the end of file, which can be really tasteful if done correctly.
When did this madness start? Some would point at the hieroglyphs made
by the ancient Egyptians and typewriter art made in the 20th century, and
while relevant, aren't really ASCII, but rather text art. The more
relevant answer for this article is that ASCII art most likely began in
1966 by Kenneth Knowlton, a Bell Labs researcher and artist. Around this
time, he and Leon Harmon, another researcher, were experimenting on
photomosaic, and the results were then published in "Studies in Perception
I" which showcases the first examples of ASCII art.
It was during the personal computer boom, however, that ASCII art began
to take hold. Those with money to buy a modem and maintain a BBS soon
discovered that the usual text-based bulletin boards are horrendously
dull, and they realised that graphics would be cool. There were some
obstacles, however, first being that computers back then couldn't process
graphics the way a normal pc does today. The second being slow speeds in
which a user is apt to quit calling a BBS if the graphics used on the
system took too long, and the third reason was due to platform
incompatibility; graphics that looked great on the C64 might have looked
ugly when viewed on an Atari 800 or even a PC.
This is where ASCII art came in. Using nothing more than /, \, |, -, _
and whatever available keyboard characters to create images and large
texts, ASCII provided some basic artwork for the BBS user of the time. The
advantages were obvious; a computer can process text in the blink of an
eye, and being platform-agnostic, any computer will view the same image
with very little differences. They can be used for even more than just
spicing up your BBS banner; you can use it for Text Adventure BBSs, in
your textfiles, sigs (although I might remind you that even back then
those with large sigs were considered lame) and anything you can think of,
I'm not suprised people still use it to this day on almost anything.
Despite the advantages ASCII provided, it was only in the mid-80's and
early 90's that there was any real ASCII movement. You can blame computer
manufacturers for this; instead of complying to the ASCII standards, two
computer companies went out and produced their own computers that used
their own ascii standards. Who are the culprits, you wonder? Commodore and
Atari.
For their 8 bit series, Atari decided to ignore the standards and
instead used their own ATASCII standard, which adds its own graphics block
symbols, which in turn corresponds to the control character locations of
the standard ASCII table. Commodore did the same thing with their 8-bit
computers; starting with the Commodore PET up to the C128, which differs
from user to user. Yet geeks used this to their advantage: Jeff Minter,
for example, used PETSCII to create a game based on Battlestar Galactica
when he was still a student, slaving on a Commodore PET at college to
create it.
It was no secret that ASCII art is associated with piracy. In fact,
many pirate groups would include an ASCII artist or a few more to design
the group's logos, BBS and even the docs and info files that came with
their releases, in exchange for unlimited access to the group's BBS and
unlimited downloads. It is one of the most enduring traditions in piracy,
in fact. Download any pirated content from any sources, and they will
include the nfo file, which is made out of ASCII art which includes the
information of the content you downloaded, the group in question and
additional info about them and their artist.
It was only in 1992 that the first dedicated ASCII group was founded.
The group was called CLASS, and they concentrated their efforts on the
Amiga scene to go against the PC scene, which at that time specialised in
ANSI art, a type of computer art which utilises the ANSI.SYS driver
available only in Windows. Compared to ASCII, ANSI utilises colours to
help display graphics, which makes it even more appealing to PC users to
pursue it instead of ASCII art.
It didn't take long for the PC to have their own dedicated ASCII art
group though. Some PC users who had seen ASCII art thought that while it
didn't have colors and couldn't be animated (another advantage of ANSI),
felt that it allows the artist to use all the characters on a keyboard,
meaning that the only limitation for creating good artwork is their own
imagination. So in 1994, Tinyz, an artist from the Amiga scene, jumped
ship to the PC scene, and founded Katharisis!ASCII in March 1994.
(Karharisis was the name of a pirate group which he was involved in prior
to jumping ships)
It's no suprise that if a group is influential, there are bound to be
others wanting to be like them. While there were a few PC based artists
that soon reached the same level as Tinyz, it was two Californian artists
that offered some real competition. These two upstarts are known as
Necromancer and Necronite respectively. They originally wanted to join
Katharisis, but since they felt their art wasn't good enough, decided to
form their own group, which they tastefully named Remorse, which began
operating in October of 1994.
Originally Remorse was meant to be a homage to Katharisis and Tinyz,
but things didn't turn out the way they wanted it to be. Soon other
artists were joining them, and in the process, began producing quality
artwork. It didn't take the ruler long enough to realise that there were
competitors demanding the throne. KTS's response was typical for teenagers
with computers and internet access; they produced a release named
"THE-NME.TXT," which was one giant "I'm better than you" directed towards
Remorse.
It was at this point ASCII art began to divide into two: the newschool
and oldschool branches. The oldschool branch, also known as "Amiga Style"
(since the art began on the Amiga platform), concentrates on using ASCII
characters to design large blocks. Meanwhile newschool uses the same
characters, and introduced shading and filling to their artwork, which
gave their artwork a more solid and refined look.
Confused? Maybe an example will clear things up. I'll be using FIGlet
in this case to show you.
The first one is a typical "oldschool" artwork:
__
/ _|
| |_ _ _ ___ ___ _ __
| _|| | | |/ __| / _ \| '__|
| | | |_| |\__ \| __/| |
|_| \__,_||___/ \___||_|
And the second is the "newschool" type of artwork:
������
��۰����
���� ��� ����� ���� ����� ������ ��������
������� ����� ���� ��۰� ��۰���۰���۰����
�����۰ ���� ���� ������� �������� ���� ���
���� ���� ���� ������۰��۰�� ����
����� ���������� ������ �������� �����
����� �������� ������ ������ �����
See the difference now? I hope that helps in clearing things up a bit.
There is an infinite number of ways to do ASCII art, this is just an
example of it. If this isn't enough, soon there was a new form of ASCII
art, called "Block/High ASCII". This is where things got a little weird.
In Block ASCII, ANSI characters are used to create art. So how come it
isn't called ANSI art instead? The reasoning is simple, in a peculiar way.
If you use colour to create your ANSI art, it'll become an ANSI art. And
if you used only Black and White in your ANSI art, it becomes a Block
ASCII artwork. Weird, I know. But since they're the ones running the show,
there's little use in arguing with the leaders about common sense.
There used to be a lot of competition among groups up until the
mid-90's in producing quality artwork, where all groups would compete with
one another to be the first to release their artwork on their group's BBS,
which would then be distributed to various BBSs around the world. The
activity pretty much came to a halt after the end of the BBS era due to
the introduction of Windows 95 and the Internet, which completely killed
off any sense of competition among artists since all of the BBSs they
visited had simply died off. Despite the death of the BBS ASCII art scene,
there are still ASCII groups producing artwork in line with the
long-standing tradition of ASCII arts.
And here's to hoping that ASCII will still be around for the future.
==============================================================
==================Futility Rant by Futility===================
==============================================================
Here we go again. The deadline is a mere week away and I haven't even
given this a single thought. But that's good, right? Rants aren't
supposed to be planned out and highly sophisticated, are they? Well I
hope not, because I'm just going to kind of sit here and wait for
something to piss me off ... ... ... Well that didn't take long, did it?
I can't stand people that are unwilling to admit that they're wrong, even
when they obviously are. You all know the type: gets into arguments all
the time and, subsequently, wins them because the other party gets bored
of trying to tell him that the Earth is, in fact, roundish. These are the
people that deny facts purely because they don't match their side of the
argument. If their (incorrect) opinions are so strongly set inside them,
then why do they bother arguing in the first place? Because they crave
attention; they need it. They're the guys that will blurt out random
"facts" at random times because they feel the need for everyone else to
notice them and being obnoxious is the only thing they know.
It's disgusting, really, because these "intellectuals", as they often
refer to themselves as, can usually be discredited with a potent
combination of wit, logic and fourth grade math. You can come up with
the most powerful rebuttal the world has ever seen, and they won't care.
They'll just ignore it and move onto their next point. This is possibly
the most annoying thing that I've ever encountered, and I'm sure it's the
same for all of you. So I'm here to do you all a big favor.
I've come up with my own patented method of dealing with someone that
tries to wear me down by constantly throwing (fictional) data at me, and
I'm going to share it with you: a swift karate chop to the throat is all
that is required. I suggest you all try it sometime. A single blow and
they'll be gurgling with joy in no time and you'll be back on your merry
way laughing about how right your are.
But as annoying as these people are, I can't help but mention my severe
distaste for the special subclass of the genus "Idiot" that I like to call
"Sredneterp". That's right, it's merely pretenders backwards because
writing something backwards makes a very unoriginal word slightly more
interesting and hard to type.
Anyway- Sredneterps are those people that have no idea what's going on,
yet they'll continue to pretend that they do. For example, think of one
of your closest friends. I'm sure you guys have at least a couple of
jokes that only the two of you would understand, right? Wrong. It turns
out that each and every Sredneterp out there understands, as well, because
they can always be found lurking just outside your field of vision,
waiting for you to inoocently mention something that they can pretend is
funny. They hide until either you or your friend starts laughing. They
see this as an entry point, turn on their fake obnoxious laughter, and
waddle right into the conversation. Sredneterps feel that enough laughter
will create some sort of safety shield that will transform the fact that
they should have no idea what you're laughing about into a form of
acceptance and maybe even friendship.
Sredneterps also have the unique ability to always know what you're
talking about. Always. You could ask them if they knew that the best
FloogBurgers are sold at the GnipShak down on Hmur street, and they'll
readily agree and invite to take you there next time they go. They feel
that they can only gain acceptance by agreeing with what you say, even if
it happens to be completely wrong or made up. In fact, Sredneterps tend
to compliment the afore-mentioned group of stubborn assholes and are often
found paired together, creating a violently nauseating 69 of idiocy as
they boost and please eachother for your inconvenience.
Now imagine this situation: You're currently entangled in a heated debate
where the opposing party does naught but cite 'facts' from obscure
websites or blatantly makes them up. Standing next to him is the
Sredneterp, who remains silent unless he's throwing in the occasional
"That's right" or "Good point, buddy!" They are certain that their two
negatives will create a positive and horrified you realize that the fourth
grade math explaining that two times a negative equals dumber doesn't work
on them. You feel overwhelmed, as anyone rightly should. Your brain is
starting to malfunction from the sheer amount of wrong being fired at you
from all directions and you're pretty sure you've lost hearing in your
left ear.
You have two options:
A) Come up with a long string of "Your Momma" insults, because it's a
common-known fact that they are simply the most hurtful things that can
be said while quite possibly being the funniest things ever invented.
B) Modify my original strategy to accomodate two moronic foes, rather than
just one. How would you do this, you ask? Well it's a good thing
you've got me here to spread a little bit of my awesomeness all over.
Firstly, you must distract the Sredneterp. If he sees you going after
his master, he'll probably run. You don't want that, because then
you'd have to run after him and running is never worth it. A well
placed "What do you think about this?" should throw him off guard and
fry his brain for a good thirty seconds. Plenty of time to administer
my patented karate chop to the throat solution on his master. As soon
as the Sredneterp comes to, he'll realize what has happened, but it
will be far too late. Send a nice Screaming Head-Butt his way and
achieve ultimate victory.
C) Give up and lose. Although giving up is always a viable option, losing
is not and therefore this strategy is not even worth considering.
Maybe after reading this, some of you have learned your lesson. When
you're wrong, you're wrong. Deal with it. Because now there's an army of
highly trained professionals out there willing to take you out. And for
all of you Sredneterps reading this: maybe later we can all get together
and play a nice game of jiggly ball. You -do- know what jiggly ball is,
don't you?
==============================================================
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