Greetings, Earthling 🖖

I’m Shantanu, aka Shaan.

Your friendly neighborhood co-inhabitant of this tiny speck of dust, I maintain this site as a stochastic log of my calculations towards the futile aim of weeding out the anomalies from the equation that gives me my “42”.

In my Clark Kent mode, I spend my day at The Trade Desk, trying to crunch through petabytes of data and trillions of queries every day to understand the human behavior and make the advertising technology world a little bit better.

Before that, I spent a couple of decades in the Semiconductors world at Qualcomm and Google, building processors and AI accelerators, tinkering with chips, operating systems, device drivers, human interface devices, security et al.

When the lights go out everywhere, I like to don my maker hat and build stuff that no one wants.

I like to make and break things around me ranging from my smart toaster/TV to my web and phone apps to my car, strumming a bit of guitar, 3d printing stuff, and of course, shit-posting on twitter @shantanugoel.

Sometimes I post some of my travel and 3d print outputs on instagram, because I’ve been told by my gen-z interns that that’s a thing to do.

Do check out some of the other subdomains that I run.

Practical Reverse Engineering Tutorials Part 1: Introduction & Protostar Stack 0

Shantanu Goel

What is this about?

This article is the 1st part of the Practical Reverse Engineering Tutorials series. This series is geared towards a structured, but almost completely practical, approach to learn Reverse Engineering. Many of the existing articles/books take a long winded approach to teach RE which is prefixed with a lot of theory before the reader can get their hands dirty. This series will take a different approach of picking up various challenges in the order of increasing difficulty and help the reader in exploring ways how to break them. I’ll try to keep mundane theory limited to the portions needed to beat the current challenge in consideration. Hopefully, this keeps the articles short, precise and interesting enough for readers to keep their attention span intact.

Create a bit.ly like shorturl static website

Shantanu Goel

I decided to create my own shorturl website last week for personal use and ended up developing a python project (deecubes)that can be used by anyone to do the same. This is a post to explain what/why/how about it.

Why my own shorturl website?

So far I had been using sites like bit.ly or TinyURL whenever I needed to generate a shorturl (e.g. for giving to someone for easily remember, noting down on paper, putting links on resume, etc) but I had concerns that:

email-actions: An SMTP server that triggers actions from email

Shantanu Goel

Releasing my project email-actions today. You install it from github or from pypi.

email-actions

email-actions is a tiny SMTP server with a rules based engine to trigger any actions (notifications/commands etc) based on the emails sent to this server. Think of it like IFTTT but where input trigger is email and can be set up and run locally as well.

Why did you make email-actions

Like most of my projects, email-actions is a ‘scratch-your-own-itch’ project. I bought a NAS (Synology ds216j) which also doubled as a downloader of anime/tv shows etc through RSS using its inbuilt “Download Station” app. I also used Plex to watch them over the network but these needed to be moved to a proper folder and named in a specific format (and some crap deleted and other maintenance done or sometimes some post processing done) to have Plex display/play them properly. I used Filebot and a few custom scripts for this but had to either do this manually or use a fixed time task scheduling (which tended to delay watching). This was semi-irritating. I also wanted to know when something had been downloaded so I could binge on that latest episode as soon as it was done :) Download station had a hack (by changing internal files) to run custom script after a download was completed but it had to be redone after every firmware update and sometimes, after every restart. And finally it stopped working altogether with recent updates.

Bypass ISP DNS hijack by changing DNS port on Ubiquiti USG router

Shantanu Goel

The Background

We talked earlier about how certain ISPs block websites by using DNS hijack methods and I had recommended using DNSCrypt to bypass it. Well, as part of my home network overhaul, I moved over from the consumer grade (but still decent enough) Asus router over to Ubiquiti stack which, among other things, lead me to use their “Unify Security Gateway (USG)” as the router. Now, this router is pretty decent and is running Ubiquiti’s EdgeOS (derived from Vyatta OS, which in turn is based on linux/debian). You can install and tweak a lot of stuff through command line if you’d like but alas there’s no dnscrypt-proxy available for it.

ACT Fibernet blocks sites using deep packet inspection

#ACT Fibernet  #Deep Packet Inspection 

ISPs in India have been blocking websites since many years. It’s often done without much sense to it. The goveernment/telecom bodies and courts sometimes tell the ISPs to block content instead of telling the same to the websites that host the content. Sometimes, the orders are to block certain urls and ISPs are over-enthusiastic in implementing the orders and block complete websites. It’s all frustrating but it becomes enraging when you find out that the ISPs are messing with your traffic in a less than ethical way to implement this. Earlier, I pointed out how ACT was hijacking my DNS to implement the blocks. Now, they seem to have started doing something else, not sure if it is worse or better though. They are now doing deep packet inspection to find out the sites that I am visiting and thus block them by stopping the responses to my requests.