Forbid decompressing for UPX Win32/PE compressed files - upx

Actually dont want people to decompress my Win32/PE executables.
I found a solution from one russian guy. His tool is named "UPX shell" and was at http://bash.x2i.net/, but website is down for now(it is not the same as upxshell.sourceforge.net)
His tool has option "Protect file from decompression" and it works just great(even with latest UPX)!
upx shell from russian guy doesn't have command line interface at all, which is needed for automatically compressing files with Visual Studio Post-Build.
Okay, it is not really cool for me, and I want to know how it works to write own command line solution, and is there any modern solutions for protecting .exe files from decompressing?

Depends a lot on your goals. Why don't you want people decompressing your PE?
If you are looking to stop people from "cracking" your software then even the "Russian guy"'s UPX Shell won't help. Code will get decompressed in memory when the EXE is running, so someone could simply read that memory.
My guess is UPX Shell just wraps the UPX compressed PE in another layer. Like making an executable zip file of an EXE. If this is the case just use another PE compressor on top of UPX, like PECOmpact http://pecompact.com/pecompact.php

Protection schemes are not unbreakable, on the contrary, a good amount of them are easely breakeable. There's a ton of tutorials for breaking a bunch of protetion schemes. So, I really don't recommend relying on this kind of protection.

Related

DAW Audio Plugin Development for Non-Destructive Operations (e.g. Cut, Fade)

I want to create a plugin for DAWs such as Adobe Audition or Pro Tools, etc. that would do something like this:
Download a text file (just into the memory would be enough)
Apply the commands in this file (mostly cut and potentially cross-fade operations) to a project file in a non-destructive manner as if the user just would have done it manually
Allow the user of the DAW the possibility to keep or remove the individual cuts
Now, I know there are VST, VST3, Audio Unit, etc. But additionally some tools might have their own plugin or add-on functionality. But since this is more a "tool" than an instrument (VSTi) or effect (VSTfx), I'm not sure if these systems are the right way to go.
What would be the recommended way of going about developing such a plugin?
Reaper DAW allows such funtionality with ReaScript
There are numerous Reascript examples out there which you can checkout already - ReaTeam Scripts
Ok, I got an answer in the Juce forum. I go ahead and quote the summary of the finding:
So if I understand correctly the way through the plugin architecture doesn’t work for this scenario.
That means such a plugin needs to be developed for each individual DAW, given a supported SDK to build it?
So for example for Adobe Audition we’d need to use the Adobe Audition SDK. For Pro Tools this one or Reaper with ReaScript.

TrueType Fonts in various Environments

Trying to utilize TTFs for image rendering. I didn't have any on the Linux box the application sits; I was at a loss and took a shot in the dark by SCPing the TTFs from my local machine to the server and pointing the application to them. I figured this wouldn't work since my machine is Windows, and box is Linux....but it was a shot in the dark. Alas, it didn't work. My question is: Are TTFs OS and OS Architecture specific?
No. They are plain data files, and data files are not OS specific (although their use may be).
The one single exception I can think of is that in the Bad Old Days, Apple's native file storage format on the Macintosh used two different disk objects: one for 'code' and one for 'data'. Without special software, only the 'code' parts could seen on other computers, leading to a swift exorcism of this storage format when Apple realized the rest of the world had problems reading their files. Still, it's far from unusual to read messages of confused people, finding that extracting an old Mac zip file can result in lots of zero-byte files.
As for your problem: since the problem does not lay in the font file format (there is no reason TTF "cannot work" on your system), it should be either the software you are using (does it actually support TTF fonts?) or - and I consider this more likely - you made an error transferring the files and you ended up with damaged fonts.

AIFF files: strip initial "whitespace"

I have a folder full of AIFF files that have a little gap at the beginning where no sound is heard. How would I go about writing a script/tool that'd remove this gap?
Basically the files look like this in Audacity (I want to get only the selected part):
I can't really use Audacity because I have hundreds of the files so doing it by hand is not an option.
I don't care too much about the OS / language, as long as it works.
since you are asking on a programmer's website and have programming experience (peeked at your profile) -- if you look in the sources, you will see Audacity has some scripting support.
there are also commercial tools (e.g. batch processors) for this.
i wouldn't recommend getting your hands too dirty with this file format (i.e. writing a C program could easily take more time than doing it manually in the editor).
In the end it was just easier to hack up a quick C++ solution using libsndfile.
Feel free to steal it from https://github.com/houbysoft/short/blob/master/removeInitialSilence.cpp.

walking through a building created in google sketchup

I am looking for a way to take a model of a building and allow people to walk through it like a video engine.
We are also looking to run this on a viz wall, which requires OpenGL on Linux and be open source. But Something running on windows or closed source on Linux would be better than nothing.
I have found Panda3D, but I am not sure that will perform well enough for such a large model, the .egg file was over 200MB and took over 8GB of RAM to convert to their binary format.
None of our prefessors know about this, and we are having trouble finding the tools we need.
Try Flux Player, i used this on a school project a while ago.
If i recall correctly i had to export the sketchup file with the extention that the program needs, but i don't remember at the moment which one was that.
http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/854384/media_machines_releases_flux_studiotm_20_and_flux_playertm_20/
software belongs to "media machines"
this is basically a plugin that allows you to navigate the models on a web browser using your cursor or mouse.
I believe that there are other solutions out there that allow you to do exactly what you want.

SVG to PDF on a shared linux server

I have a website which uses SVG for an interactive client side thingamabob. I would like to provide the option to download a PDF of the finished output. I can pass the final SVG output back to the server, where I want to convert to PDF, then return it to the client for download.
This would need to work on a headless shared linux server, where installation or compilation is either an enormous pain, or impossible. The website is PHP, so the ideal solution would be PHP, or use software that's easily installed on a shared webserver. Python, perl and ruby are available, along with the usual things you might expect on a linux box. Solutions that involve cairo, scripting inkscape, or installation more complex than 'FTP it up' are probably out. Spending large amounts of money are also out, naturally. As this is a shared server, memory and/or CPU hungry solutions are also out, as they will tend to get killed; this more or less rules out Batik.
The nearest that I've got so far is this XSL transform which I can drive from PHP and then squirt the resulting postscript through ps2pdf (which is already installed). The only problem with this is that it doesn't support SVG paths - if it did, it would be perfect.
There are a bunch or related questions on StackOverflow, all of which I've read through, but they all assume that you can either install stuff, spend money, or both.
Does anyone have an off-the-shelf solution to this, or should I just spend some downtime trying to add paths support to that XSL transform?
Thanks,
Dunc
I stumbled across TCPDF today which would have been perfect for this, had I known about it at the time. It's just a collection of pure PHP classes, no external dependencies for most things.
It can build PDF's from scratch and you can include pretty much anything you want in there, including SVG (amongst many, many other things), as shown in these examples:
http://www.tcpdf.org/examples.php
Main project page is here:
http://www.tcpdf.org/
Sourceforge page is here:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tcpdf/
You can use Apache FOP's free Batik SVG toolkit which has a transcoder api to transform SVG to PDF.
download link
You will need to write a tiny bit of java. There are code examples here – note you will need to set the transcoder to org.apache.fop.svg.PDFTranscoder instead of Java.
You should be able to do this without installing anything on your machine – just drag the jars on there and run a script. I quote:
All other libraries needed by Batik are included in the distribution. As a consequence the Batik archive is quite big, but after you have downloaded it, you will not need anything else.
have you looked at imagemagick? I suspect you also need ghostscript to complete the loop, which might make installation difficulty and performance a problem.
I'd suggest giving princexml a try, they provide various addons (including one for PHP) and can output PDF from SVG/HTML/XML.
i have used TCPDF (http://www.tcpdf.org/) in many projects and it work in almost every use case.
Here is the example of SVG: https://tcpdf.org/examples/example_058/
and following is the code which can help you:
$pdf->ImageSVG($file='images/testsvg.svg', $x=15, $y=30, $w='', $h='', $link='http://www.tcpdf.org', $align='', $palign='', $border=1, $fitonpage=false);
$pdf->ImageSVG($file='images/tux.svg', $x=30, $y=100, $w='', $h=100, $link='', $align='', $palign='', $border=0, $fitonpage=false);

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