How to access unrelated browser window? - vbscript

So I know this might sound crazy, as it is technically a security concern which I understand. So I'm just trying to find out if there's any ideas on how to handle something like this.
Anyways, long story short, I was told to look into figuring out a possible way to scrape information from another browser window/tab. I have been asked to do this because, and I know this sounds crazy too, but the users of our website are incompetent enough to not be able to copy/paste and or type correctly something from a different website. I know it's tough for some to have to have several things in their workflow, but this is basically what they do: Go to their first website (after logging in) and bring up a record with information on it...including an identification number. Then, the user should take that number and go to the second website, our website (after logging in), and type it that number in a textbox (and eventually do some other stuff). But we have found that getting that identification number from the first website to ours is difficult for them. Some copy/paste correctly, some copy/paste too much text from the page, some write it down on paper then type it in our website, and some just seem to have trouble visually "copying" the number from site to site.
What I was thinking was that this could happen: the user would have already brought up the record on the first site, then they would come to ours. They could click a button, and that would run whatever I/we here come up with, that goes and finds the other browser window, finds the specific text needed, and puts it in our textbox. Sounds simple, right? HA.
The first website is not owned or managed by us in any way, otherwise this might be a little easier.
A little bit of background information: unfortunately, I'm technically targeting IE >= 10 through 9, so if there's a solution just for this (why I tagged vbscript), then that's great. If there's a broader solution (like with an applet or browser extensions... http://crossrider.com/ ), then that's even better, but not important. If it helps, we already have a hidden applet on the page that accesses the OS (yes, it has the mayscript attribute on the element so it is able to), so I thought that could be something to incorporate with. Also, the way I expect to know which window/tab to access is by URL and/or document title - either will be very specific.
We cannot install stuff on the users' computers, at least something outside of the browser (like extensions). I'm not sure how browser extensions work, so I'm wondering if they'd need to be "installed".
I know of HTML5's postMessage, but it only has partial support in IE (and none in IE <= 7)...and the partial support refers to not including exactly what I might need. It also requires that the other website be listening (which we don't have control over, but technically might be possible to include). So it doesn't count :)
The things I found with Java are to possibly find the list of processes currently running, but I don't know how to access/control one. Especially how to access the browser's Document.
And vbscript...I just don't know. I don't know if it's just me, but I can't seem to find good documentation on it, so I'm not sure what can be done with it.
Even if I could get control of the other browser window, I don't know how I would get information from it (like the DOM).
I'm not looking for code, just ideas...I'll do the research. And although it may sound impossible, don't just brush it off because Javascript can't do it - I haven't.
UPDATE:
I ended up developing a browser extension with http://www.crossrider.com/ which wasn't ideal, but works.


You could use a bookmarklet for this ... the user would have to drag the bookmarklet into their bookmarks bar on their browser, but if doing that wasn't beyond your user's abilities/the technical restrictions you've mentioned, then you'd definitely be able to send the information you need back to your site that way.
You'd just need to give your users instructions to:
i) drag the bookmarklet into their bookmarks bar on their browser
ii) go to the website in question and click the bookmarklet
you could code the bookmarklet so that it would grab the info you need, and redirect the browser to your website. All done in one click.
I think you may be thinking about it in the wrong way when you talk about posting from one 'window' to another. You could write the bookmarklet so that it would do a http post of whatever information you wanted into your site from the other site, and it could also redirect the window that they were looking at when they clicked it (the other site) to your site. Or if, for some reason, you didn't want to redirect the the window that they had the 'other' site in to your site, then you could add a listener to your site so that once the bookmarklet had posted the info you require then the window with your displaying could automatically update. The first option would make more sense and be easier though.


Maybe to open the other site from button/link resided in your site using window.open() method?

Related

How can a browser extension alter the image

I have an April fools prank in mind and I will probably need some time to figure it out, so that's why I'm early:
I want to install an extension in the browser (needs to target botch FF and IE, so a cross browser implementation would be best) of my friend so that if he hits the news page he is visiting every morning, a fake image will make him think that he has been selected. The problem is, that I cannot just swap the images. I have to use the actual image from that website and put his head on the body of someone else.
I do have some graphics guys that can do that sort of stuff. My problem over here is to hook into the rendering process and do my own alterations to the image before it gets rendered. That is, taking the image, doing stuff to it and then passing in the modified image to the browser so that it is being redered instead of the original one.
Is that possible using extensions? If it may be only possible with eihter FF or IE, I might get him to use the browser of choice but I'd highly appreciate your suggestions, code snippets and starting points for research. Are there browser extensions that can do similar stuff?
Cheers everyone. There is a lot of reputation in that game so I don't care if it takes weeks or even months to complete the job.
Thank you guys, looking forward to suggestions!
Max

I think your intentions are harmless, but I must warn you: not all people may find your prank funny. But if you are sure that your friend will enjoy such a prank, it's really easy to set up.
You can use BFilter with site-specific filter to replace the image URL (it is very easy, just look at its examples and documentation). So when the user tries to open the web-page he will see your image instead of original picture. BFilter can be used as transparent proxy. I do not know how to setup transparent proxy in Windows, so you have to figure this part yourself. Alternatively, you can configure all installed browsers to use your filtering proxy.
You can use any other filtering proxy instead of BFilter.

Web Page Rendering Capture

I start with describing the problem itself. Rather than a problem I'm looking for a better solution. I have a asp.net page which has a bunch of images and a link underneath it, Each image is infact the latest rendering of the link underneath it.
I scheduled a bat script which runs every hour to fetch the images through IECapt a web page rendering capture utility. One thing am annoyed about this utility is it takes a lot of time for the 20 images I have and for few because of the flash content it misses to take the actual screenshot of the website.
Now I like to know can this rendering be done by traditional programming am not interested in using any utilities. I'm interested in trying this. The solution need not be necessarily a C# based am ready to try in any other language. Because it gives me a chance to learn.
Thank you.

You should probably look at moz-headless-screenshot
You should be able to embed the functionality you need.
http://blog.mozilla.com/ted/2010/07/29/moz-headless-screenshot/
he also provided a sample embedding client application called moz-headless-screenshot.
This is a simple command line tool that takes a URL, image size, and output filename
and generates a PNG screenshot of the webpage.

You should look into browser shots:
http://browsershots.org/
They do what you want to do for lots of different browsers. It is even open source.

There's no simple-simple solution for what you're asking to do. This is because rendering HTML, CSS, and Flash is actually a very sophisticated process.
If you're up for quite a bit of coding, you can use the Gecko engine (which powers firefox) or another open-source web-browser core (ie Dillo) to render the page onto a custom canvas. Then save that canvas to a file. Unless you implement support for browser plug-ins, you won't get Flash this way, though. You could try using Gnash or its like. Good luck with that.
I don't know of an open-source project that already does this. It would be neat, though :-). If you write something, please push it to the world; it would be really cool to have a "get a screencap of this URL" tool.

One way is to use IRobotSoft web scraper. You can design a robot to go to the URL every hour, and capture the whole web page as an image via a function CapturePage(imagefile).
I am not sure if it will be better than IECapt though.

We have used ACA WebThumb ActiveX Control (http://www.acasystems.com/en/web-thumb-activex/) quite successfully to capture parts or whole of a web page in the web server and then to write them to a file, just passing in the url. It performs fast enough for our need.
I am not familiar with IECapt, but this might be something you might want to have a look at.

Firefox: visually flag redirect in address bar

I'm wondering if there's any way to have Firefox 3 (or IE 7 or safari 3.1 or Opera) flag that a redirect has occurred (i.e. any deltas between the hyperlink or URL entered into address bar, and the page you land on), whether you've arrived from a hyperlink or entering URL into address bar.
I've googled some, looked at the linker addon, but the rightclick is an additional step I don't want to have to do.
Edit: If anybody can point me at the mozilla docs that show how to track clicked links and pages landed on in different tabs, i'll take a crack at writing a bookmarklet. TIA

I don't think this will help, since you don't want to do the right click for the linker add-on, but if I needed to do know if I was being redirected, I would use the LiveHTTPHeaders extension. It supports regular expressions, so you can only get headers that include 'Location'.
The reason I don't think it is what you are looking for is that you have to open it before the link, it won't "flag" a redirect and pop a message up or anything.

Not sure if that's exactly what you need, but the NoRedirect extension seems to be related to your problem. Quoting it's description:
NoRedirect lets the user take control of HTTP redirects. It can be used to interdict an ISP's DNS search redirection hijacks, preview/screen "shortened" URLs (e.g., TinyURL), stop the annoying redirection of "smart" error pages, etc.
If that's not what you wanted, looking into the extension's code might at least help you find some hooks for your proposed bookmarklet.

Best way to make a newsletter slideshow kiosk for the office?

So, I've been tasked with making a kiosk for the office for showing statistics about our SCRUM progress, build server status, rentability and so forth. It should ideally run a slideshow with bunch of different pages, some of them showing text, some showing graphs and so on.
What is the best approach for this? I first thought of powerpoint, but It should be able to take the images from a webserver so I can automate the graph generation procedure. I would also like to take text from an external source when showing "Who broke the build" or some page like that.
I have no doubt that ready-made systems exist, but I don't really know where to look for them.
Is this easy/hard in powerpoint? Or are there an ubiquous app that everybody but me knows about?

I would recommend creating it as a series of web-pages, which uses Javascript or the meta refresh tag to cycle though the different pages. Simply full-screen the browser on a spare machine, and connect it to a projector/monitor/big TV.
This has lots of benefits:
it's trivial to display images from an external server (an <img> tag)
it will cost nothing to setup (it can run on basically any functioning machine), and runs in a browser
it is quick to do (you do not have to worry about cross-browser compatibility, or different screen resolutions as you know the exact machine you are developing for
it's expandable - while what you describe is probably possible within Powerpoint, but if you do it as a web-page, you can use Javascript (or a JS framework like jQuery), and it's very easy to serve the pages via a web-server, then you can use any server-side scripting language.
Basically, you would have a series of files, say slide001.htm, slide002.htm and slide003.htm. Slide 1 would redirect to slide002 after 30 seconds, slide002 to slide 003, and slide003 would redirect to slide001..
The specific things you mention: graph generation and "Who broke the build" text:
Not sure which CI tool you use, but many of them generate graphs anyway, so that would be required is having one "slide" with something like <img src="http://hudson.abc/job/proj042/buildTimeGraph">
For the who-broke-the-build text, you would be easiest to run the slides as .php files served though a web-server, using XAMMP.
Then you would have a function that scrapes your CI server for whoever broke the last build, and in one of the slides, you would have <?PHP echo(who_broke_build()); ?>
(Obviously if you know some other language/system better, use that!)
The final benefit I can think of is that, if you serve the files through a web-server, you can allow people display it locally, say as their browsers home-page.

Thanks. I found jqS5 which did most of what you mentioned.
It requires 1 document where every h2 becomes a new slide.
I can then use the meta-refresh to reload to next page every 10 seconds. When I reach the end of the slides, I pull data from an aggregated RSS feed from all the different systems in order to pull information.
http://staticfree.info/projects/jqs5/

Firefox add-ons

What Firefox add-ons do you use that are useful for programmers?

I guess it's silly to mention Firebug -- doubt any of us could live without it. Other than that I use the following (only listing dev-related):
Console2: next-generation error console
DOM inspector: as the title might indicate, allows you to browse the DOM
Edit Cookies: change cookies on the fly
Execute JS: ad-hoc Javascript execution
IE Tab: render a page in IE
Inspect This: brings the selected object into the DOM inspector
JSView: display linked javascript and CSS
LORI (Life of Request Info): shows how long it takes to render a page
Measure IT: a popup ruler.
URL Params: shows GET and POST variables
Web Developer: a myriad of tools for the web developer

Here are mine (developer centric):
FireBug - a myriad of productivity enhancing tools, includes javascript debugger, DOM inspector, allows you to edit the CSS/HTML on the fly which is highly valuable for troubleshooing layout and display problems.
Web Developer - again another great developer productivity tool. I mostly use it for quickly validating pages, disabling javascript (yes I disable javascript sometimes, don't you?), viewing cookies, etc.
Tamper Data - lets you tamper with http headers, form values, cookies, etc. prior to posting back to a page, or getting a page. Incredibly valuable for poking and prodding your pages, and seeing how your web app responds when used with slightly malicious intent.
JavaScript Debugger - has a few more features than javascript debugger provided by firebug. Although I must admit, I sparingly use this one since firebug has largely won me over.
Live HTTP Headers - invaluable for troubleshooting, use it frequently. Lets you spy on all HTTP headers communicated back and forth between client and server. It has helped me track down nefarious problems, especially when debugging issues when deploying your web app between environments.
Header Spy - nice addon for the geeky types, shows you the web server and platform a web site runs on in the status bar.
MeasureIt - I don't use this all too frequently, but I've still found it valuable from time to time.
ColorZilla - again, not something I use all that frequently, but when I need it, I need it. Valuable when you want to know a color and you don't want to dig through a CSS file, or open up a graphics editing app to get a color embedded in some image.
Add N Edit Cookies - this has been a great debugging tool in web farms where the load balancer writes a cookie, and uses the cookie value to keep your session "sticky". It allowed me to switch at will between servers to track down problems on specific machine. Also a good tool if you want to try to mess with a site that uses cookies to track your login status/account, and you want to see how your code responds to malformed or hacked info.
Yellowpipe Lynx Viewer Tool - yeah I know what your thinking, lynx, who needs it, its so 1994. But if you are developing a site that needs to take web accessibility into account (meaning accessible to users with visual impairments who use screen readers), or if you need to get a sense of how a web spider/indexer "sees" your site, this tool is invaluable. Granted, you could always just go out and grab Lynx for yourselfhere's the windows xp port that I use.
I've got a handful of other addons that I've used from time to time that I'll just quickly mention: FireFTP (one I installed wasn't stable and I've not tried a newer release), Html Validator (also found this one unstable, least back when I installed like a year ago), IE Tab (I usually just have both IE and FireFox open concurrently, but that is just me, I know many others that find this addon useful).

I'd also recommend the Web Developer extension by Chris Pederick.

As far as web development, especially for javascript, I find Firebug to be invaluable. Web developer toolbar is also very useful.

The ones I have are...
Y-SLow
Live Headers
Firebug
Dom Inspector

One that wasn't mentioned yet is this HTML Validator extension that I found very useful.

#Flávio Amieiro
MeasureIt is an unnecessary extension to have if you install the Web Developer Toolbar. Web Developer Toolbar includes a ruler as one of its features. Under the "Miscellaneous" category for Web Developer click the option "Display Ruler" to use a ruler identical to the MeasureIt one.
That will allow you reduce the number of extensions needed by at least one.

Firefox addons:
FireBug:helps web developers and designers test and inspect front-end code. It provides us with many useful features such as a console panel for logging information, a DOM inspector, detailed information about page elements, and much, much more.
Web Developer-gives you the power disable CSS, edit CSS on the fly, measure certain areas of a page and much more.
ColorZilla
Just click on the icon, hover over the area you'd like to know the hex color for, and click.
Window Resizer
to make sure the layout is displayed properly in the standard resolutions of today.
Total Validator
validating websites much easier by checking HTML, links, CSS and doing a lot more.

Web Developer for web development. Scribefire if you're a blogger-progammer

For web developing I use the Web Developer Toolbar, CSS Viewer and MeasureIt.
But I'm really not one of those who has a thousand of extensions to do everything. I like to keep things simple.
EDIT: Thanks to Dan's answer I don't need MeasureIt anymore. Can't believe I've never seen that! I guess I'll just have to pay more atention to this WebDeveloper toolbar.

Adding to everyones lists, Tamper Data is quite useful, lets you intercept requests and change the data in them.
It can be used to bypass javascript validation and check whether the server side is doing its thing.

I use Web Developer, it's a real time saver.

+1 for LORI ("life-of-request-info"). It's a very convenient alternative for rough measurements of the load time of a particular web page -- the kind of thing that you might otherwise use an external stopwatch for.
New Tab Homepage. Combined with a "speed dial"-type homepage (a personal, fast-loading page of links that you use frequently), helps you get where you're going faster when you open a new browser tab.
LastTab. Changes the behavior of Ctrl+Tab to let you navigate back and forth between your most-recently-used tabs with repeated presses of Ctrl+Tab, the same way that Alt+Tab works in Windows. Also provides a nice view of all open tabs while Ctrl is still being held down for easy navigation. (The resultant behavior is very similar to the Ctrl+Tab behavior in recent releases of Visual Studio.)

FireFTP is good for grabbing/uploading any necessary files.

I find Hackbar to be quite useful. Very useful if you want to edit the querystring part of the url, to test for vulnerabilities, or just general other types of testing where you might end up with complicated query string values.

I was learning DOM inspector, but I've switched to Firebug.

Some of which has been missed above are here
Load Time Analyzer – View detailed graphs of the loading time of web pages in firefox. The graphs display events like page requests, image loading times etc.
Poster – A must have tool for web developers enabling them to interact with web services and other web resources.
Aardvark – A cool extension for web developers and designers, allows them to view CSS attributes, id, class by highlighting page element individually.

Fiddler is a really great debugging proxy. Think of it as a more powerful version of the "Net" panel in Firebug or the Live HTTP headers.
It used to be an IE-only extension, now it also has hooks into Firefox.

Groundspeed, is useful for testing server side code. It was created for input validation tests during pentest, but can be useful for any test that require manipulating input (similar to TamperData).
It lets you control the form elements in the page, you can change their type and other attributes (size, lenght, javascript event handlers, etc). So for example you can change a hidden field or a select to a textbox and then enter any value to test the server response and stuff like that.

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