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Angus Robertson

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Posts posted by Angus Robertson

  3. Posted

    There are subtle changes with new versions of windows.

     

    Getting the actual windows version is much harder than it used to be since Windows now fakes old versions to keep old applications happy. 

     

    Auto running from the registry is harder if your application has admin rights, since that is something hackers try to do to gain admin rights. 

     

    There must be a list of these things somewhere, these are just two in the old application I'm maintaining today.

     

    But generally, Delphi applications compiled 20 years ago still run today, as do new applications compiled with 20 year old compilers (mostly). 

     

    Never used .net, but I know security holes are fixed every month, and Microsoft keeps breaking Delphi 2007 by regularly deleting the  Borland.*.Targets files from the Framework directory.  I would never sell an application that Microsoft can so easily break. 

     

    Angus

     

     

    • Like 2

  7. Posted

    I was updating the check alive capability of one of my applications to add IPv6 support this week, so created a new ICS component TIcsInetAlive to check for IPv4 and/or IPv6 internet
    connectivity, using Ping and/or HTTP, defaulting to  www.msftconnecttest. com run by Microsoft for Windows 10 alive checking, online and offline check intervals may be set, event when online changes.   In SVN now.  There is a demo in OverbyteIcsHttpRestTst.dpr.

     

    It is also a sample for using TSslHttpRest, needing only a few lines of code for HTTP requests. 

     

    Angus

     

  8. Posted

    I've just written a new TIcsInetAlive component, will be in SVN shortly, it measures the round time for ping and HTTP requests, and these are my results from Windows 10 over FTTC to a London data centre where Microsofts hosts this domain. 

     

    08:31:24  Check Alive Ping to www.msftconnecttest.com (13.107.4.52) took 5 msecs
    08:31:24  Check Alive to http://www.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt (13.107.4.52) took 16 msecs
    08:31:49  Check Alive Ping to ipv6.msftconnecttest.com ([2a01:111:2003::52]) took 5 msecs
    08:31:49  Check Alive to http://ipv6.msftconnecttest.com/connecttest.txt ([2a01:111:2003::52]) took 15 msecs

     

    Note HTTP is the complete lookup DNS, connect, get a page, close cycle, not just send and receive a packet. I'm only timing with ticks, not performance counter, but I believe ticks are reasonably accurate in modern versions of Windows.

     

    Angus

     

  16. Posted

    Rather than accessing Google, you should check http://www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt and http://ipv6.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt  which are the Microsoft Network Connectivity Status Indicator web pages used by almost all Windows installations every few seconds for many years to detect network connectivity for IPv4 and IPv6 (one or other may not work). They are designed for heavy use, and return a two word text page.

     

    While you can use TCP to open a web page, there is a long timeout trying to connect, 30 seconds or more, so it's faster to use ICMP ping, to www.msftncsi.com, look at the OverbyteIcsPingTst.dpr sample, with ping you can set a five second (or less) timeout to get a quick response.

     

    Angus

     

  18. Posted

    Quote

    It is impossible for a server to detect middle man when the secure connection is TLS/HTTPS with only server side certificate authentication

    Which is why many servers insist on using JOSE technologies such as Json Web Signing which means the headers are signed with a password or private key before being sent, so can not be changed without the server knowing, this is how Let's Emcrypt and OAuth1/2 work.  Or Json Web Encryption if you don't want the headers read. 

     

    Angus

     

    • Like 1

  21. Posted

    That particular demo is obsolete and no longer works, since it does not support SSL, and that is needed for Google and almost everyone else nowadays.  I really should remove many of the old files from the ICS distribution, if there were more hours in the day...

     

    ICS has a new SSL REST and Json demo, OverbyteIcsHttpRestTst.dpr, you should be able to use the GUI to make the same search as the old demo.

     

    Angus

     

  22. Posted

    Displaying a replacement password character could be done by editing the form in the program resources, but would mean changing each TEdit component separately.  I guess developers should really set the replacement character before display to stop editing, to overcome that would mean a lot of debugging. 

     

    Of course all executables should be code signed against tampering, and the hash should be checked by the program itself before it runs, ideally the certificate as well.  I have a little unit that does that. 

     

    Angus

     

  23. Posted

    Your port access might be blocked by Windows Firewall, which can only be turned off completely on Windows 10 by disabling the service in the registry.  But that should not give an exception, just fail to work. 

     

    My comment about AnsiStrings was for unicode compilers, not Delphi 7.  You can write Windows services  in Delphi 7, very few Delphi applications benefit from the extra memory supported by 64-bit. 

     

    If it was my project, I'd simply replace those old TCP components with ICS, if you are using only UDP there is nothing complicated.  But the problem may be unrelated to UDP, hard to tell from your description.

     

    Angus

  24. Posted

    The main issue updating from Delphi 7 to Delphi 2009 or later is unicode, strings are now two bytes per character, all all TPC/UDP communication is a stream of bytes.  

     

    Changing all Striing definitions to AnsiString may work, although that will depend on how TServerSocket was implemented in unicode compilers, never used it myself since I've been using ICS for over 20 years instead.  For project maintenance, I'd just stick to Delphi 7 under Windows 10, it still works today, no benefit in changing compiler unless you plan a lot of new development with new components. 

     

    Angus

     

  25. Posted

    In ICS, there is a function that includes code attempting to open an IPv6 UDP socket, which fails if there are IPv6 addresses, you'd need something similar, if Indy does not have a similar function. 

     

                s := Ics_socket(AF_INET6, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_UDP);
                Result := s <> INVALID_SOCKET;
                if Result then begin
                    Ics_closesocket(s);
                    GIPv6Available := 1;
                end
                else
                    GIPv6Available := 0;

     

    Angus

     

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