A brief anecdote – last week I had to fix a website. Doesn’t matter which one, but there was a link that needed removing. Easy, you might think; not so, unfortunately. The link was embedded in a piece of malicious code in a website theme, which uses a bit of web technology called PHP. Now, I know very little about PHP, but I managed to find the right bit of code on the server and opened the file, to be greeted with absolute gibberish – a totally unintelligible string of numbers and letters. A bit of googling revealed that the code had been intentionally obfuscated by encoding it in base-64 – sneaky. A bit more googling eventually turned up a base-64 encoder/decoder which made sense of it, I stripped out the offending link, and uploaded a new version of the file back to the web server (using this awesome online ftp client), which (miraculously) worked! Job done.

The point of this anecdote is that you can achieve a lot with computers with a tiny bit of knowledge and a lot of experimentation – or just hacking around. Read the rest of this entry →