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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Using Kali? Easy if you have training. The capstone for our security course a decade ago was too find and exploit 5 remote machines (4 on the same network, 1 was on a second network only one of the machines had access to) in an hour with Kali. I found all 5 but could only exploit 3 of them. If I didn’t have to exploit any of them 7 would be reasonably easy to find.

    Kali basically has a library of known exploits and you just run the scanner on a target.

    This isn’t novel exploit discovery. This is “which of these 10 windows machines hasn’t been updated in 3 years?”






  • I don’t think either is actually true. I know many programmers who can fix a problem once the bug is identified but wouldn’t be able to find it themselves nor would they be able to determine if a bug is exploitable without significant coaching.

    Exploit finding is a specific skill set that requires thinking about multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously (or intentionally methodically). I have found that most programmers simply don’t do this.

    I think the definition of “good” comes into play here, because the vast majority of programmers need to dependably discover solutions to problems that other people find. Ingenuity and multilevel abstract thinking are not critically important and many of these engineers who reliably fix problems without hand holding are good engineers in my book.

    I suppose that it could be argued that finding the source of a bug from a bug report requires detective skills, but even this is mostly guided inspection with modern tooling.




  • fkn@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlWhat a classic song though
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    5 months ago

    Them: “How do I get to your place in my career?”

    Me: “What do you mean?”

    Them: “You… Have the position I want eventually. What did you do?”

    Me: “Well. 20… No that cant be right… I mean… Yeah… 20 years ago… I graduated college… Then uhh. I’m… Uh…”

    At this point either you make up some bullshit or you say it’s just experience. Then you realize what a midlife crisis is and wonder if you are having one which like like 20% of the definition of a midlife crisis.


  • I was this person. Most people who do this are what people would usually call travelers. People who do it voluntarily, like I did, usually had enough money to get to another interesting place or buy a meal anytime they are hungry. Many people have odd jobs in remote places that preclude housing (I have had these jobs too). Some people are also begging as they travel. I never begged. I worked whenever I needed money. Generally speaking, living like this without facing extreme difficulties is exclusively a white male privilege from a country with a strong passport. Non-white people are routinely arrested. Women are routinely raped. Weak passports get deported.

    Non-consecutively I spent a little over 4 years living in a tent or on the ground in some capacity. The longest period of time I lived exclusively in a tent was 14 months consecutively.

    I hiked backcountry trails, city streets and traveled extensively through a number of countries. I rode a bicycle for some of those years as well. In total I walked somewhere around 1500-2000 miles and rode between 3000 and 4000 miles. The farthest I have ever walked in a single day is 30 miles. The farthest I have ever cycled in a single day is just over 120 miles. The longest period of time I spent in a single national forest was 5 months, but I worked in the back country there for 3 of them so I don’t know how to count that. There are thousands of people who work in the back country for many many months on end doing things like trail maintenance throughout the US.



  • fkn@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlWarm Water Port Envy
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    5 months ago

    Most Americans on the west coast call any place a shipping container can unload or an aircraft carrier to dock a port.

    A grand total of zero Americans would ever think to disambiguate a warm water port or not. Especially from Texas. That’s the weird part. Not the word port itself.

    Harbor is usually reserved for non-commercial or fishing use only.