More Glitches in the ATS Matrix

[l0st]

---

QUESTION ... The members list there since June 2 has all the new accounts last activity being in 1969.  Does this mean there is a glitch and all new accounts are screwed up and people can't post from them?

That would explain why it's been so quiet for the past week and a half.  The serial returnee trolls haven't been able to get through.

ATS runs on forum software called XMB. It's typically run on Linux. All linux dates are based off of what's called a Unix Epoch which starts at time code zero or January 1, 1970. If the field in the DB that contains this data is blank(null) some software will show the last day of 1969. That's probably what's happening here.

In other words, the column in the DB with the timestamps in it isn't being updated properly, likely because the DB is corrupt and the column can't be read at all.

Sadly, DB corruption has a tendency to just get worse and worse if its not addressed, as we are observing live.

---

That would be NO ONE.  
No one on ATS has admin credentials.

And, AFAIK, passwords cannot be reset as of about June 2, 2024.

The person who sql injected their way back into ATS could probably do a lot more with the exploit... in terms of fixing the DB, if they chose to do so.

I'm not going to pretend I know what the backend is, because I don't, but given that it runs XMB which typically runs on a LAMP stack I'm going to guess it MySQL/MariaDB(same thing really). Given the age of the site, its fairly likely that the tables are MyISAM format. If that's the case, the sql injector might be able to run a "repair tables" command, which might fix it.

Probably something like this:

flush tables with read lock;
check table <table name> extended;
unlock tables;

Would need to be repeated for every table. If online repair fails someone would have to exploit their way in to running commands at the shell.

---

I believe that Darko, in his arrogance, ignorance and spitefulness, took deliberate destructive action on the three amigos’ accounts. He was probably afraid they may have had backdoor access; so, instead of simply banning them, he reset the accounts, thus defaulting them back to that epoch date.

In his paranoia, he even removed admin permissions from DTOM and took over the admin account himself, possibly only giving the same privileges to the tech guy, who has also disappeared.

He was so callous that for some upstanding Moderators, he completely nuked their accounts, making it impossible even for Ghost to bring them back to life.

I stand corrected if I’m wrong.


  

I suspect its all intentional as well. However, I wouldn't necessarily jump to conclusions. If the user DB is in fact corrupt(sure sounds like it) then the results of that corruption could be literally anything, or as we would say in programming "undefined."