Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Upside-Down-Ternet (2006) (ex-parrot.com)
58 points by Tomte on March 15, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments


Can't do this with HTTPS everywhere nowadays :) At least not without certificate validation errors.


Each bit could be flipped, but that's not going to put interesting pixels in the browser.

Seems like there are still plenty of latency-based attacks to turn things "upside down." For example, websites could load lightning fast but streaming could be a drip, drip, drip.

Or perhaps everything except pornhub stream lightning fast. :)


Oh cmon now, how hard can it be to get a user to install a cert? ;)


I came across this about 13 years ago. Just noticed (2006) so that fits. I happen to have quite a lot of IT at home. A quick (lol) emerge of squid in a VM, a fiddle with the DNS server to create wpad.example.co.uk and a copy n paste of a wpad.dat from a customer site etc and my wife's browser went a bit odd.

The following April 1st, I did it to my entire company. The PHB can also be a BOFH!


A small thread from 2008 ("Dude, that's like 2 years old"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=337638

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116728


Glad to see that the community hasn’t changed in all these years ;)


Oh, I'd say there's much more tolerance now for historical material. 10+ years' worth of dates in titles has conditioned the culture.


We had a LAN party a long while ago where they used a similar proxy. But instead of turning all images upside down they displayed all images not going via https on the main beamer screen. It was a valuable lesson in how secure your bare http connections where. Until the trolls woke up and we learned about all the kinds of porn that existed.


Ah, yes. Probably driftnet And you will not need trolls for that.

As the debian description says:

== ...Driftnet is a program which listens to network traffic and picks out images from TCP streams it observes. It is interesting to run it on a host which sees a lot of web traffic. . (Obviously, this is an invasion of privacy of a fairly blatant sort. Also, if you are possessed of Victorian sensibilities, and share an unswitched network with others who are not, you should probably not use it.) ==


Through all of my bookmark purges and reorganizations throughout the years, this url has always remained a part of them. The first one, in fact, as it's lasted the longest!

Had a field day with this back in college.


I remember Upside-Down-Ternet module from when I was playing with MITMf - framework for MitM attacks. Now I know where the idea originated from.


I had done this in a small office; it was definitely a fun prank to pull on folks. Of course with TLS everywhere, this is no longer possible.


Just need a root CA cert installed on the machines. Plenty of companies do this already


I remember having fun with my roommates in college with this.


I first came across this via the alt text of this particular XKCD. https://xkcd.com/341/


Did anyone else notice the bit at the end?

I laughed.


excited! I usually ban them without kidding. Not a humorous person lol




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: