Change is required. Atlassian engineer's blog

  In the intricate world of software protection and cybersecurity, VMProtect holds a prominent place. This software protection tool, known for its use of virtualization technology, is designed to obscure and secure executable files from reverse engineering and tampering. However, even the most sophisticated protection methods invite scrutiny and analysis. In this review, I explore the intriguing and innovative  VMProtect-devirtualization  project by Jonathan Salwan and evaluate how it can significantly assist in uncovering bugs and vulnerabilities in protected game software. Thread emulation by x64unpack (x64Unpack: Hybrid Emulation Unpacker used for VMProtect analysis) What Makes VMProtect Stand Out? VMProtect is widely acclaimed for its robust approach to software protection. By converting executable code into a unique virtual machine language, it ensures that the protected code is extremely difficult to interpret or modify. This layer of virtualization acts as a formid...

While most of us enjoy the casual work environment that Slack offers, including the fun avatars we upload, sometimes not everyone is on board, and some might even forget to upload their avatar. I was recently tasked with a fun and intriguing project: to identify who didn’t upload a Slack avatar or uploaded a non-human face. This was just a one-time request, but for me, it turned out to be an exciting journey into the world of face detection technologies. (All lab data is there:  https://github.com/gonchik/face_recognition_slack ) The Face Detection Showdown To get the job done, I decided to compare three different libraries:  face_recognition ,  dlib , and  opencv-python  (commonly abbreviated as cv2). Each of these libraries has its strengths, and I was curious to see which one would perform best in accurately detecting human faces in Slack avatars. face_recognition The face_recognition library is known for its simplicity and high accuracy for face detection an...

Managing your Atlassian Bamboo Remote Agents can be a breeze once you understand the initial setup and the commands needed to control the service. Let’s dive into the process of getting your agent up and running and explore how to manage it effectively. Initial Run and Setup Scripts When you run your agent for the first time, it generates control scripts to handle the installation and service management. To start the agent, use the following command, making sure to replace <Bamboo Base URL> with your Bamboo server’s base URL: java [parameters] -jar atlassian-bamboo-agent-installer- X . X - SNAPSHOT . jar < Bamboo Base URL >/agentServer/ [console] Stopping the Agent There might be times when you need to stop your remote agent. To do this, you can identify the process and force it to terminate using the following commands: ps aux | grep -i bamboo | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill - 9 Installation Directory Move to the directory where the Bamboo agen...

When you use a Windows computer or server, you might find a feature called NTFS compression. This is supposed to make your files take up less space on your hard drive, which sounds great, right? But there’s a catch: sometimes, this compression can make your computer slower. Let’s explore why that happens. What Does NTFS Compression Do? NTFS compression squishes your files and folders so they use less space. Each time you open or change a file, the system needs to un-squish (decompress) it or squish it again (compress). This can use a bit of your computer’s brain power — its CPU for LZNT1 or LZX algorithm, which optimised to utilise minimum CPU. Compress by LZNT1 Testing How It Works Some people think that if you have a strong CPU and a slow hard drive, NTFS compression will make your computer faster. To see if this is true, you can do a test. First, check if compression is turned on or off with this command: fsutil behavior query DisableCompression To turn it off, type: fsutil behavior...