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Comment by AJRF | Hacker News Reader

Dig at Apple from the third stage of the beginners' quest;

"Your first thought is "Why does the display stand need to announce its price? And exactly how much does 999 dollars convert to in Xenonivian Bucklets?"

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I wonder if Google will end up buying more of those $999 stands than any other individual customer.

Stuck on this one, can see readme.flag but not sure how to proceed

Same. As far as I can tell, none of the usual restricted shell escape tricks work, so you just have to search through all the binaries on the system until you find one you can abuse to print the file contents, and that seems like more of a time sink than it's worth.

Use iconv.

LOL; I used split in the temp directory to create files of a single byte each and ran md5sum on them.

That's quite a bit more straightforward :)

Well I spent an hour trying out as many commands as possible before giving up. Then came across this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252612 and went through his Twitch recordings to see if he could get past this stage. That is how I learnt about iconv. :)

Hehe. I kinda love this though :P

shuf also works (its in /usr/bin) -- this took me a ~long~ time to figure out

env /bin/busybox strings README.flag

Nice one! Was wondering if there would be a way to call BusyBox with one of the missing binaries.

Ended up using makemime which showed the data in base64. Good enough! Interestingly enough though the ORME.flag showed permission denied... I'll have to go back to that one later.

I think one of the binaries probably has a privilege escalation vulnerability. Looking with la -al you can see the last modified dates, there's a couple of interesting ones

i ended up using fold. theres also has to be a way to read the ORME.flag by modifying the file permissions but i haven't figured that one out yet.

Yeah I went through all of the non-deleted commands and fold ended up being the one I found too. The beginning instruction says some levels have multiple flags, so I'm guessing ORME.flag is the hardmode flag.

I bypassed the shell by executing the binary straight from the loader so I was able to do a chmod +r and cat to get it.

how did you do this? amazing

/lib/ld-musl-x86_64.so.1 /bin/busybox chmod +r ORME.flag /lib/ld-musl-x86_64.so.1 /bin/busybox cat ORME.flag

Google also sells expensive stands: https://cloud.withgoogle.com/hardware/

Though it does more (rolls) and actually made by BenQ.

Their Android team could learn a thing or two about proper framework development from Apple.

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