hacker.org

really have no idea where to start.hope someone can give me the faintest idea on hot to start solving this challenge.

Thanks

kunik wrote:really have no idea where to start.hope someone can give me the faintest idea on hot to start solving this challenge.

Thanks

The idea of the challenge as i understand it, is that the answer is provided at the link only at a particular time during the day. Example: only if its 12:34pm will it tell you the answer.

It seems you need to automatize just like cavern master.
What programs do you use to automatize this?
Or with what language do you code this program?

Thanks

sjoemelfreek wrote:It seems you need to automatize just like cavern master.
What programs do you use to automatize this?
Or with what language do you code this program?

Thanks

I did mine in bash and scheduled it with cron.

Kind of overwhelmed by all the scripting I gotta do and can't do...
I'm a musician/composer so we program notes
Got the ideas but not the technique
I just started python yesterday...

Anyhow, Thanks, I'll check it out.

You can do this kind of thing easily in Python - "import urllib" and play with it. It's documented in the usual place. Or use urllib2, which is more capable, but poorly documented - search for "urllib2 the missing manual".

An advantage of shell is that the various utilities save files to disk automatically, so you don't have to bother with that. But an advantage of Python is that it's easy to compare the results you get and only save the one that doesn't match the failure pattern.

Getting better at scripting these kinds of things is surely the whole point of being here in the first place. Actually, being prompted to figure out how to fetch pages and preserve cookies really came in handy at work, where I needed to automate the process of submitting 10,000 entries into the development PS3 scoreboards, to test a bug in our game. That involved logging into one server, keeping all the cookies, making a selection on a second server, and navigating through the right pages on a third server in order to keep the session cookies valid. Ick.

I wonder how much load these challenges put on the server, with everybody making scripts to repeatedly send requests at it.

gfoot wrote: An advantage of shell is that the various utilities save files to disk automatically, so you don't have to bother with that. But an advantage of Python is that it's easy to compare the results you get and only save the one that doesn't match the failure pattern.

You can compare the results you get in a shell just as easily as python.

See my solution.

gfoot wrote:Getting better at scripting these kinds of things is surely the whole point of being here in the first place. Actually, being prompted to figure out how to fetch pages and preserve cookies really came in handy at work, where I needed to automate the process of submitting 10,000 entries into the development PS3 scoreboards, to test a bug in our game. That involved logging into one server, keeping all the cookies, making a selection on a second server, and navigating through the right pages on a third server in order to keep the session cookies valid. Ick.

Heh, I had to deal with stuff like that. I think there's a perl module to do that.

gfoot wrote:I wonder how much load these challenges put on the server, with everybody making scripts to repeatedly send requests at it.

For this challenge, at least, once a minute shouldn't be too bad.

gfoot wrote:Actually, being prompted to figure out how to fetch pages and preserve cookies really came in handy at work, ...

AFAKS no cookie handling needed when asking minuteman.
(So I do mine with a simple scheduled netcat, no messing around with yet-another-www-library)

Yes, the cookie-handling was needed for something else though, I forget what.

i wonder if it's client or server time that is tested?

If it were client time then you could spoof the packets ...

Duh me! Can't you just brute the answer box? You have to get the cookies working first of course!

pbhj wrote:If it were client time then you could spoof the packets ...

Normally, HTTP doesn't expect that the client sends a "Date" header with the request. So, I don't think the server cares about one, if given.

Anyway, I solved it and asked myself afterwards if I missed any hint on what time the oracle is answering.