Category Archives: Archaeology

Beyond good ol’ Run key, Part 134

Posted on by

This one is for historical reasons, primarily.

Old Adobe Photoshop/ImageReady used to have a feature called “Jump to” which is neatly described here.

The feature was implemented via a simple directory structure located here:

  • c:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS2\Helpers

and its 2 subdirectories:

  • Jump To Graphics Editor
  • Jump To HTML Editor

Dropping your own LNK, EXE or any executable file inside these subdirectories would enable you to extend the menu, or… replace the existing LNK file. Basically implementing a lame persistent mechanism e.g. as shown on the below pic:

Yet another secret of hosts file

Posted on by

In my old post I mentioned not a very well known hosts.ics file. Today I cover one more secret that I stumbled upon while digging inside DNS API internals.

Turns out that dnsapi.dll and dnsrslvr.dll use an internal function called Util_IsRunningOnXboxOne to determine if the DLL is loaded on a XBOX system. And if it is, the path to hosts and host.ics files will not be resolved as relative to the path retrieved via GetSystemDirectory API, but by using a hard-coded XBOX path below:

s:\windows\system32

So, in theory, if you patch Util_IsRunningOnXboxOne function to return 1 (XBOX) you should be able to redirect local DNS requests via hosts(.ics) files to the following paths, respectively:

s:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
s:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.ics

Last, but not least – in case you don’t know, the hosts files can be saved using UTF-8, Unicode16-LE, and Unicode16-BE encoding (BOM is being checked).