Ingy 2.ö

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

The Hackers Will Always Overcome


So I bought a ticket to go to Taiwan in December, but later decided to postpone the trip.

The departure date was next week so I knew I'd better call today and cancel it. I called the airline at 5:15pm and they told me to use their website to cancel it. So I hung up and surfed on over.

After finally navigating this very crufty site to the cancellation page, I filled out the form and clicked the CONFIRM button. The page simply zipped to the top and did nothing. Strange. I tried again. Same thing. I looked around to find a better button to click. Nada.

So being a hacker I viewed the source code for the button and saw that it called the "validate_data" javascript function. I tried entering in some bad data, and it gave me alerts saying that my data was bad. Then I fixed all the bad data again and nothing. again.

At this point I said fµck it and called them back... I'm sorry, the office is now closed... office hours are from 9am to 5:30pm...

FµCK! This time I really said ƒµçk it!! I'm a hacker! I'm going to hack this site and make it work!!!

I fired up Firebug and did a document.getElementsByTagName('form'). Cool! Just one form. I clicked on the result and firebug showed me the guts of the form. It all looked good. Then I saw onsubmit="return validate_data()". That stupid stupid JS function. document.getElementsByTagName('form')[0].removeAttribute('onsubmit').

Buh-bye.

Now I went back and clicked CONFIRM again. Nothing... Hmm. Is this button even part of the form? Oh ƒµçk it. Who needs a button to submit a form? document.getElementsByTagName('form')[0].submit().

Voilà!

Don't let crappy e-commerce sites get you down. Just hack the ƒµçk out of them!

2 Comments:

  • I love it.
    There have been oh so many times when I wish I had you around to fix some fucked up site for me. Currently, my graduate school's entire web portal is a mind-numbingly frustrating joke. this portal, of course, is where all student-administrative tasks must take place (registering, financial aid, checking transcripts, posting grades for classes i teach, etc). What a disaster.
    How old is the internet again? seriously, aren't we (and by me, I mean IT programmers) more competent with this by now? is this all ITT Tech's fault?
    Good ness.

    So are you going to Taiwan?

    By Blogger jen, At December 4, 2007 9:00 PM  

  • Aye, fer føøk's seke! Brilliant! It's like uncivil obedience or something. I think the next thing you have to do is hotwire a broke-down taxi so the driver can give you a ride.

    By Blogger Daniel P. Johnston, At December 19, 2007 8:18 PM  

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