Ετήσια αρχεία: 2021

Cannot remove the ‘sticky’ option from a post

 στο WordPress  επισημασμένο με ετικέτα post / sticky / wordpress / wpml Από

Recently, we were trying to remove the sticky flag from a post on a self-hosted installation. We were removing the sticky option both from the posts menu and the post editor and after a page refresh, it would reappear as active.

After some troubleshooting, it appeared that the problem was with the WPML plugin. After we disabled that one, we could change the option for the sticky status. Unfortunately, when we activated the plugin again, the option returned to its previous state.

The “fix” that worked was the following:

  1. We visited the WPML plugin settings page: https://example.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=sitepress-multilingual-cms%2Fmenu%2Ftranslation-options.php
  2. Then in the category Posts and pages synchronization, we removed the tick from the option Synchronize sticky flag and the clicked the Save button.
  1. Following that, we edited our post again and removed the sticky option.
  2. Afterwards, we checked the homepage that the post had been removed and then we went back to the settings page of WPML https://example.com/wp-admin/admin.php?page=sitepress-multilingual-cms%2Fmenu%2Ftranslation-options.php
  3. From there, we enabled again the Synchronize sticky flag option, pressed the Save button to revert the change to the settings hoping the problem will be fixed eventually.

Technical Info

  • WPML Multilingual CMS version 4.2.6
  • WordPress version 5.8.1

How NOT to solve the IEEE Day Badge Challenge

 στο GNU/Linux / IEEE  επισημασμένο με ετικέτα bash / GNU/Linux / ieeeday / pdfcrack Από

Recently, we were taking the IEEE Day Badge Challenge in https://ieee-collabratec.ieee.org/. We wanted to give another go on solving the clues, so instead of following the clues to open the encrypted and password-protected PDFs, we got the clue that the password is composed only of numeric digits and we used pdfcrack to open the files!

We installed pdfcrack using the following command:

sudo apt-get install pdfcrack;

$ sudo apt-get install pdfcrack
[sudo] password for bob: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  pdfcrack
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 28 not upgraded.
Need to get 31,0 kB of archives.
After this operation, 90,1 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://cy.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/universe amd64 pdfcrack amd64 0.18-2 [31,0 kB]
Fetched 31,0 kB in 1s (40,1 kB/s)
Selecting previously unselected package pdfcrack.
(Reading database ... 452721 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to unpack .../pdfcrack_0.18-2_amd64.deb ...
Unpacking pdfcrack (0.18-2) ...
Setting up pdfcrack (0.18-2) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.1-1) ...

To crack the files, we used the following commands that limited the input to the numeric digits and got the password back in seconds on a normal CPU:

pdfcrack -f IEEE+Day+2021+Clue++3.pdf -c 0123456789;

bob@Linux:~$ pdfcrack -f IEEE+Day+2021+Clue++3.pdf -c 0123456789
PDF version 1.7
Security Handler: Standard
V: 2
R: 3
P: -1060
Length: 128
Encrypted Metadata: True
FileID: 79c15a021438224ba4df58b0e7fa9a20
U: 4990feee0d63f411cf4eba3c1346ff2100000000000000000000000000000000
O: cc5e6a95577573cac6f6683d4c7f02d6605fe42e5622feb6dc36636263ba838e
found user-password: '490000'

bob@Linux:~$ pdfcrack -f IEEE+Day+2021+Clue++5.pdf -c 0123456789
PDF version 1.7
Security Handler: Standard
V: 2
R: 3
P: -1060
Length: 128
Encrypted Metadata: True
FileID: cf72bd9b3fb24145a6d2b578fa52c0e4
U: 8cd5ea45b59168ca10674bdd81f06f5800000000000000000000000000000000
O: 70301a6ff93ac7a91c28895180e8ad57a41388d2b7f3a813b83f4b3fd5274945
Average Speed: 49297.7 w/s. Current Word: '348478'
found user-password: '1470000'

Information on the version we used is below:

$ apt info pdfcrack
Package: pdfcrack
Version: 0.18-2
Priority: optional
Section: universe/utils
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <[email protected]>
Original-Maintainer: Joao Eriberto Mota Filho <[email protected]>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 90,1 kB
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14)
Suggests: pdf-viewer
Homepage: http://pdfcrack.sf.net
Download-Size: 31,0 kB
APT-Manual-Installed: yes
APT-Sources: http://cy.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/universe amd64 Packages
Description: PDF files password cracker
 PDFCrack is a simple tool for recovering passwords from pdf-documents.
 .
 It should be able to handle all pdfs that uses the standard security handler
 but the pdf-parsing routines are a bit of a quick hack so you might stumble
 across some pdfs where the parser needs to be fixed to handle.
 .
 The main PDFCrack features are:
 .
   - Supports the standard security handler (revision 2, 3 and 4) on all known
     PDF-versions.
   - Supports cracking both owner and userpasswords.
   - Both wordlists and bruteforcing the password are supported.
   - Simple permutations (currently only trying first character as Upper Case).
   - Save and load a running job.
   - Simple benchmarking.
   - Optimised search for owner-password when user-password is known.
 .
 This program can be used in forensics investigations or similar activities,
 to legal password crack.

Ubuntu: The file content is encrypted, but currently not supported

 στο GNU/Linux  επισημασμένο με ετικέτα 7zip / encrypted / password / ubuntu Από

While trying to extract a password protected/encrypted 7-Zip archive on a fresh Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, we got the following error:

An error occurred while extracting files. The file content is encrypted, but currently not supported.

To fix the problem, we just installed the p7zip-full package using the apt command.

sudo apt-get install p7zip-full;

After that, we were prompted as expected to input the decryption password and we were able to extract the archive.

Below is the information of the package that was retrieved by apt info.

sudo apt info p7zip-full
[sudo] password for bob: 
Package: p7zip-full
Version: 16.02+dfsg-7build1
Priority: optional
Section: universe/utils
Source: p7zip
Origin: Ubuntu
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <[email protected]>
Original-Maintainer: Robert Luberda <[email protected]>
Bugs: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+filebug
Installed-Size: 4887 kB
Depends: p7zip (= 16.02+dfsg-7build1), libc6 (>= 2.14), libgcc-s1 (>= 3.0), libstdc++6 (>= 5)
Suggests: p7zip-rar
Breaks: p7zip (<< 15.09+dfsg-3~)
Replaces: p7zip (<< 15.09+dfsg-3~)
Homepage: http://p7zip.sourceforge.net/
Task: kubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-full, xubuntu-desktop, lubuntu-desktop, ubuntustudio-desktop, ubuntukylin-desktop, ubuntu-mate-core, ubuntu-mate-desktop
Download-Size: 1187 kB
APT-Manual-Installed: yes
APT-Sources: http://cy.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal/universe amd64 Packages
Description: 7z and 7za file archivers with high compression ratio
 p7zip is the Unix command-line port of 7-Zip, a file archiver that
 handles the 7z format which features very high compression ratios.
 .
 p7zip-full provides utilities to pack and unpack 7z archives within
 a shell or using a GUI (such as Ark, File Roller or Nautilus).
 .
 Installing p7zip-full allows File Roller to use the very efficient 7z
 compression format for packing and unpacking files and directories.
 Additionally, it provides the 7z and 7za commands.
 .
 List of supported formats:
   - Packing / unpacking: 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2, XZ and TAR
   - Unpacking only: APM, ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, CramFS, DEB, DMG, FAT,
     HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, LZMA2, MBR, MSI, MSLZ, NSIS, NTFS, RAR (only
     if non-free p7zip-rar package is installed), RPM, SquashFS, UDF,
     VHD, WIM, XAR and Z.
 .
 The dependent package, p7zip, provides 7zr, a light version of 7za,
 and p7zip, a gzip-like wrapper around 7zr.

Audacity – Automatically split an audio file into multiple files using at the quiet/silenced parts

 στο Applications  επισημασμένο με ετικέτα Audacity / audio / split Από

This video demonstrates how we were able to automatically split a large audio file into multiple smaller files at the quiet parts of the audio using Audacity.

The steps to follow after you open your audio file are:

  1. Select the part of the audio that you want to automatically split to multiple parts or press ctrl + A to select all the track.
  2. Go to menu Analyze and select the option Label Sounds....
  3. Set the settings that best suit you. For example the noise level or the minimum duration of silence that should indicate a new part, etc.
  4. Press OK and give it some time to process the file and add labels around the new parts.
  5. You will see a new row appearing that will demonstrate in ranges the new parts that were created. If the file was not split as you expected, press ctrl + Z to undo the operation, then go to step 2 again and try with different settings.
  6. Once you are happy with the results, go to the menu File then select the category Export and finally the option Export Multiple....
  7. Unless you need specific settings, select the folder where you want the new file parts to be created and hit the Export button.
  8. In the following pop-up windows, which will be one per audio track segment, if you do not need to make changes just hit the OK button enough times to get the export process going.

A note on using Audacity on large audio files (which we assume applies to many other serious audio processing applications): When you open the audio file, Audacity will pre-process it, and it will take several GBs of disk space to use for its metadata. It will delete them as soon as you close the project, but it is good to keep it in mind before trying to work and then failing to perform an export.