Nektra Advanced Computing

Nektra Blog has Moved

2008-02-13T19:09:00.002-02:00

The Nektra Advanced Computing Blog has moved to http://blog.nektra.com

Please update your bookmarks!

Cookiepie 1.0.0: Open many Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail accounts on Firefox

2007-12-05T17:32:00.000-03:00

Cookiepie is one of the favorite Firefox extensions for web developers and users of webmail services like Google Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail.

Web developers use cookiepie to test their sites.
In the past, if a site (e.g. home banking, community site) required extensive testing simulating many different users, the developer needed to open different browsers. Currently all browsers, including Firefox, have just one place to store cookies.

Some users of webmail services have more than one web account to log into. People are using each web account for different purposes but they can't login to the same site at the same time in the same browser.

The Cookiepie Firefox Extension is a solution to this problem, as it allows users to log into different webmail accounts on separate tabs. Try it with two or more of your Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail accounts.

This new release fixes problems experienced in Gmail 2.0, and supports many complex sites like the new Yahoo mail. Even webmail embedded chat is working now!

We have made a short video so you can see it in action:

Cookiepie is Free Open Source Software under the GPLv2 license. You can install it now from Nektra Cookiepie site.
Please, if you have comments leave them in our group here. We would particularly like to hear about your experience with other sites, such as Facebook. We are making a list of supported websites.

Spy Studio 0.9.3b released

2007-09-24T11:18:00.001-03:00

Spy Studio moves forward to 0.9.3b.
New features include:

Wide hooks -> This will let you intercept calls from every available process in the system.
Process Monitoring -> Automatic process list refresh.
Modify GUID function parameter to reference other identifier (e.g.: object CLSID)
Performance improvement.
Several Fixes. You should find it more robust.

Also, this version had a lot of core changes, to prepare it for the new features. We'll be thankful to hear any recommendation or bug report.

Get Spy Studio.

Enjoy It! And stay tuned for more.

Deviare hook component released

2007-07-31T14:40:00.000-03:00

We have released the first version of Deviare. A free trial is available for download.
Deviare is a component for 'easy hooking' of Windows DLLs. Now you don't need to be an expert to incercept operating system functions because you use a COM object abstracting many of the complexities.

To show the power look at the following code snippet in CSharp (.NET):


DeviareTools.IProcesses procs = _mgr.get_Processes(0);
DeviareTools.IProcess proc = procs.get_Item("msnmsgr.exe");
DeviareTools.IPEModuleInfo mod =
proc.Modules.get_ModuleByName("ws2_32.dll");
DeviareTools.IExportedFunction fnc =
mod.Functions.get_ItemByName("send");

hook = mgr.CreateHook(fnc);
hook.Attach(proc);
hook.OnFunctionCalled +=
new Deviare.DHookEvents_OnFunctionCalledEventHandler
(hook_OnFunctionCalled);
hook.Properties = (int)DeviareCommonLib.HookFlags._call_before;
hook.Hook();


void hook_OnFunctionCalled(DeviareTools.Process proc,
DeviareParams.ICallInfo callInfo, Deviare.IRemoteCall rCall)
{
 DeviareParams.IParams pms = callInfo.Params;
 DeviareParams.IEnumParams enm = pms.Enumerator;
 DeviareParams.IParam pm = enm.First;
 pm = enm.Next;
 object[] args = new object[1];
 string msg = "Transmition -> ";
 msg += pm.Value;
 msg += "\r\n";
 args[0] = msg;
 txtOutput.Invoke(new AppendHandler(Append), args);
}

With this simple code you hook the send function in the WinSock dll for the Messenger process and our own function hook_OnFunctionCalled is called before the 'real send'
The code can be written in any COM friendly programming language like: C++, C#, VB, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby and many others. API Hook examples in C++, C#, VB.

Many applications can now be built on Deviare Technology like Spy Studio a tool to monitor Windows API and available for free.

Next moves: Spy Studio, Deviare, OEAPI for Vista, NKT WAB LGPL

2007-05-16T16:42:00.000-03:00

As you may already know, Nektra core skills & knowledge can be briefly summarized in system internals & problem solving, innovation and creativity. We were working hard to introduce new products in the market and it's very stimulating when you receive "Wows!" from people who can appreciate the complex stuff we have made.

Our next play is Spy Studio, Deviare, OEAPI for Vista & NKTWAB license change to LGPL:

Spy Studio is a new tool for hooking microsoft windows applications, it has an intuitive interface and you don't need to be an expert in assembler or reverse engineering to insert hooks into different API's or DLL's. It has many interesting applications like seeing what your software is doing internally, and from the business perspective it's very useful for monitoring, isolating processes access to some API or DLL, debugging, litigation & software forensics, support, software engineering blackbox testing, etc. You can download it now from here. We would be very glad to receive you comments in our forums

Deviare is the component to do your own applications and the framework used to develop Spy Studio. You can do your own hooking application with it, and extends Spy Studio's possibilities to your own requirements, for example your own api monitors, administration tools, themes/skins/gui (i.e: scrollbar issues), posture agents, intrusion detection at the application level, etc.

OEAPI has been growing and now supports Vista's Windows Mail in addition to Outlook Express. We are currently at the version 3.1.2 and 3.2.0 will be released very soon. OEAPI has really improved in demos, documentation, performance and capabilities. There is an updated list at What's new section.

NKT WAB is now LGPL and it shows how to implement features not available or documented in the microsoft windows api. This component is useful for accessing the WAB (Windows Address Book), creating groups & folders and now supports Vista's contacts too.

There is new stuff coming, but the most important thing is that our customers continue expressing their Wows!

CookiePie an innovative Firefox extension released

2006-02-22T14:34:00.000-03:00

Sebastian Wain from Nektra has submitted CookiePie extension to Firefox Extend Contest with great expectations to be one of the finalists, since it is an innovative piece of software and push beyond the standard capabilities of Firefox. Although it doesn't came finalist he waited for the announcements to release it publicly without publishing it on Internet until now.
Mauro Asprea from Nektra has been contributing on improving user experience.

What is CookiePie?

CookiePie is a firefox extension enabling you to maintain different cookies storage in different tabs and windows.

How I can obtain and use it?

Download it from: CookiePie Extension

Use the tab context menu to enable CookiePie

For example: Toogle CookiePie in three tabs, and login to different GMail account in both.

Where the idea came from?

We need to use it internally at Nektra, and finally decide to publish it for the community.

What does CookiePie means for the end user?

It means that you can for example open multiple GMail/Yahoo Mail/Hotmail accounts in different tabs and windows simulteanously.

What does CookiePie means for web developers?

Developers working on Web Software supporting multiple users or profiles can use CookiePie to simultaneusly test their software with each user without needing to open a different browser.

How CookiePie was made?

A first look at the FireFox extensions capabilities let us think this extension was almost impossible to do. One of the limitations was the unconnected parts between http transactions and UI being difficult to correlate an UI to a specific http request/response, more when AJAX/XmlHttpRequest (i.e: GMail) is involved.
The work involved mainly short term research and trying to push to the extreme FireFox capabilities without knowing nothing of Mozilla Extensions at the start of development.

What are the current known limitations:

Gecko 1.8.1 has some implementation errors: FireFox store cookies although our http observer changes the response header. This means the common cookies are changed in the FireFox extensions for every transaction on each tab. More information at: Mozilla Bugzilla

The reordering of tabs is breaking GMail account opened tabs.

GMail has added after we finish this extension, an alert we hope to repair it so GMail doesn't know about another connection on another tab or window.

User may experience problems with another Firefox extensions (for example Tab Mix Plus)

What are the features we would like to have in the future?

Listen to users feedback.

Complete Cookie commitment to standards/security

Compatibility to another extensions.

Add configuration options

Enable CookiePie by default

Cookies inheritance checkbox: If a user opens a new tab/window from a CookiePie tab, the new opened tab can inherit the cookie container.

Cookie pipeline handling: Have a configuration like the Firefox option to choose what cookies needs to be individualized and what cookies needs to be used from the firefox container.

Persist/Save/Load Tab Cookies

Code: better & cleaner.

Testing: Test & Fix in complex scenarios.

What we suggest for future versions of Firefox?

We suggest to have this capability embedded natively on Firefox and not as a third party addin. We know this will involve changing relations between objects in Firefox but it's an obvious step to do in the browser war.

What platforms are supported?

Currently it ran fine on Windows and Linux. We need to check why Mac is not supported because this software is standard JS code, not platform dependent.

Finally:

Webpage at: Cookiepie

You can subscribe directly to our mailing list at Nektra-CookiePie

OEAPI v2.3

2006-01-18T17:12:00.000-03:00

New release of Outlook Express API

We are proud to announce our new release of Nektra's Outlook Express API.

OEAPI is the first and unique Outlook Express API with all the functionality for adding your own toolbars, buttons, completely manage message storage, message selection and receive events. While a few other companies are giving a solution for adding toolbars and a few set of operations on messages, we give a full API for professional software development.

OEAPI goes beyond IStoreFolder and IStoreNamespace standard interfaces and enables you to develop addins for Outlook Express like: antispam, antiphishing, antivirus, integration of your company software with an email software built in Windows.

Resources for the developer:

OEAPI trials here
Detailed description of interfaces provided are in the OEAPI documentation
Community OEAPI Group
IStoreFolder and IStoreNamespace sample with source code in this zipped file.

Keyword Exchange Market

2006-01-13T15:25:00.000-03:00

KEM (Keyword Exchange Market)

Seeing impresive energy and room for improvement in the keyword advertising technology arena we ask ourselves when can we see something new.

Our main idea is to have a Keyword Exchange Market like the ones in Stock exchange, Foreign exchange, Futures exchange.

What are the real advantages of it?

You can contract with AdWords (from Google) and see your banners in the Overture network (i.e: Yahoo, MSN), whilst transactions between AdWords and Overture are being negotiated in the background.
If you like to implement your own mail service and want to receive ads revenue, you can do some analytics/text mining yourself and then sell keywords in the KEM to appear while the user reads his mail.
Build your own keyword server and integrate it on the KEM. Competing with the big players.

Main threat obviously is the Click Fraud and other kinds of attacks, but we hope to see research in the Economics Faculties about KEM soon.

There are incredible possibilities with this kind of free market.