buzzword translations:

"cloud" -> someones computer

"big data" -> lots of somewhat irrelevant data

"ai" -> if if if if if if if if if if if if if else

"algorithm" -> something that works but you don't know why

"secure" -> https://

"cyber security" -> kali linux + black hoodie

"innovation" -> adding something completely irrelevant such as making a poop emoji talk

"blockchain" -> we make lots of backups

"privacy" -> we store your data, we just don't tell you about it

An incident which made a Security Researcher cry
--------------------------------------------------------
I was working on my laptop finishing up my code while waiting for the flight which was late . Meanwhile two guys (I'm gonna call them Fellas) in black suit and shades came to me

Fella : Sir you have to come with us .
Me : *goes along with them*
Fella : Sir please proceed *points towards the door . The room has a round table with some guys discussing something *
Fella 1 : Your passport please
Me : *Hands over the passport*
Fella 1 : Where are you traveling to sir?
Me : India
Fella 1 : Put your laptop in the desk sir.
Me : Sure thing
Fella 2 : What were you doing there? *Taps the power button*
Me : Just finishing up my work .
Fella 1 : Or hacking our systems?
Me : Seriously?
Fella 2 : The password please .
Me : Here you go
*5 minutes have passed and​ he still can't figure out how to use the machine*
Fella 2 : Which Windows is this?
Me : It's Linux
Fella 1 : So you are a hacker .
Me : Nope
Fella 1 : You are using Linux
Me : Does it matters?
Fella 1 : Where do you work?
Me : *I won't mention here but I told him*
Fella 2 : So what do you do there?
Me : I'm a Security Researcher
Fella 1 : What's your work?
Me : I find security holes in their systems .
Fella 1 : That means you are a hacker .
Me : Not at all .
Fella 2 : But they do the same and they use Linux .
Me : You can call me one .
*After 15 minutes of doo-laa-baa-dee-doo-ra-ba-doo amongst them I dunno what they were talking , they shutdown the computer and handed over it to me*
Fella 2 - So you are somewhat like a hacker .
Me - *A bit frustrated* Yes.

##And now the glorious question appeared like an angel from river ##

Can you hack Facebook?
Me - 😭😭😭

Guy left his computer unlocked. Boss came over looking for him, sat down at his computer and opened lots of porn and left saying 'that will teach him'.

So this was a couple years ago now. Aside from doing software development, I also do nearly all the other IT related stuff for the company, as well as specialize in the installation and implementation of electrical data acquisition systems - primarily amperage and voltage meters. I also wrote the software that communicates with this equipment and monitors the incoming and outgoing voltage and current and alerts various people if there's a problem.

Anyway, all of this equipment is installed into a trailer that goes onto a semi-truck as it's a portable power distribution system.

One time, the computer in one of these systems (we'll call it system 5) had gotten fried and needed replaced. It was a very busy week for me, so I had pulled the fried computer out without immediately replacing it with a working system. A few days later, system 5 leaves to go work on one of our biggest shows of the year - the Academy Awards. We make well over a million dollars from just this one show.

Come the morning of show day, the CEO of the company is in system 5 (it was on a Sunday, my day off) and went to set up the data acquisition software to get the system ready to go, and finds there is no computer. I promptly get a phone call with lots of swearing and threats to my job. Let me tell you, I was sweating bullets.

After the phone call, I decided I needed to try and save my job. The CEO hadn't told me to do anything, but I went to work, grabbed an old Windows XP laptop that was gathering dust and installed my software on it. I then had to build the configuration file that is specific to system 5 from memory. Each meter speaks the ModBus over TCP/IP protocol, and thus each meter as a different bus id. Fortunately, I'm pretty anal about this and tend to follow a specific method of id numbering.

Once I got the configuration file done and tested the software to see if it would even run properly on Windows XP (it did!), I called the CEO back and told him I had a laptop ready to go for system 5. I drove out to Hollywood and the CFO (who was there with the CEO) had to walk about a mile out of the security zone to meet me and pick up the laptop.

I told her I put a fresh install of the data acquisition software on the laptop and it's already configured for system 5 - it *should* just work once you plug it in.

I didn't get any phone calls after dropping off the laptop, so I called the CFO once I got home and asked her if everything was working okay. She told me it worked flawlessly - it was Plug 'n Play so to speak. She even said she was impressed, she thought she'd have to call me to iron out one or two configuration issues to get it talking to the meters.

All in all, crisis averted! At work on Monday, my supervisor told me that my name was Mud that day (by the CEO), but I still work here!

Here's a picture of the inside of system 8 (similar to system 5 - same hardware)

Another story on the spirit of wk93. TL;DR I DOS'd the whole campus network for some beers.

In highschool teachers had this blackboard system (a sort of moodle) and we used to have really lazy teachers who only read the PowerPoint presentations and made us take notes. One day I was fed up with their bullshit and figured these lazy ass professors wouldn't "teach" crap as soon as there was no internet connection...so the race was on...

10 minutes before the bell rang a friend and I managed to break in into a computer lab, I booted up Kali and searched for the access points, 3 routers through the building all with CISCO OS.

I figured they had all the default configs, time was running out so I decided to Smurf the three access points with the lab's IP range, scheduled an automatic shutdown in 2 hours and blocked the PC. The bell rang and as predicted, no internet, no class, my friends and I used that free time to go to a bar (on a Monday afternoon).

Funny side note, since the 3 routers were down the whole network collapsed, no cameras, no access control, no faculty network or any network. We kept doing it and every time we did campus security would be desperately searching for someone with a black hoodie.

My boss has a camera in the office for "security" reasons and I happen to be just right under it, exposing my computer screens to it. So I wrote a script that sends me an email whenever the camera port is accessed.

Navy story time, and this one is lengthy.
As a Lieutenant Jr. I served for a year on a large (>100m) ship, with the duties of assistant navigation officer, and of course, unofficial computer guy. When I first entered the ship (carrying my trusty laptop), I had to wait for 2 hours at the officer's wardroom... where I noticed an ethernet plug. After 15 minutes of waiting, I got bored. Like, really bored. What on TCP/IP could possibly go wrong?
So, scanning the network it is. Besides the usual security holes I came to expect in ""military secure networks"" (Windows XP SP2 unpatched and Windows 2003 Servers, also unpatched) I came along a variety of interesting computers with interesting things... that I cannot name. The aggressive scan also crashed the SMB service on the server causing no end of cute reactions, until I restarted it remotely.
But me and my big mouth... I actually talked about it with the ship's CO and the electronics officer, and promptly got the unofficial duty of computer guy, aka helldesk, technical support and I-try-to-explain-you-that-it-is-impossible-given-my-resources guy. I seriously think that this was their punishment for me messing around. At one time I received a call, that a certain PC was disconnected. I repeatedly told them to look if the ethernet cable was on. "Yes, of course it's on, I am not an idiot." (yea, right)
So I went to that room, 4 decks down and 3 sections aft. Just to push in the half-popped out ethernet jack. I would swear it was on purpose, but reality showed me I was wrong, oh so dead wrong.
For the full year of my commission, I kept pestering the CO to assign me with an assistant to teach them, and to give approval for some serious upgrades, patching and documenting. No good.
I set up some little things to get them interested, like some NMEA relays and installed navigation software on certain computers, re-enabled the server's webmail and patched the server itself, tried to clean the malware (aka. Sisyphus' rock), and tried to enforce a security policy. I also tried to convince the CO to install a document management system, to his utter horror and refusal (he was the hard copy type, as were most officers in the ship). I gave up on almost all besides the assistant thing, because I knew that once I left, everything would go to the high-entropy status of carrying papers around, but the CO kept telling me that would be unnecessary.
"You'll always be our man, you'll fix it (sic)".
What could go wrong?
I got my transfer with 1 week's notice. Panic struck. The CO was... well, he was less shocked than I expected, but still shocked (I learned later that he knew beforehand, but decided not to tell anybody anything). So came the most rediculous request of all:
To put down, within 1 A4 sheet, and in simple instructions, the things one had to do in order to fulfil the duties of the computer guy.
I. SHIT. YOU. NOT.
My answer:
"What I can do is write: 'Please read the following:', followed by the list of books one must read in order to get some introductory understanding of network and server management, with most accompanying skills."
I was so glad I got out of that hellhole.

"I really love the new $3k Fortigate firewall switch you bought for the office after our chat about security but it doesn't change the fact that you can access any computer in the company using Password123" - me

A conversation with our network/system admin.

Me : Can I install linux on my computer, windows is slow and terrible.

Him : No, if you use anything but Windows in this company, you will be fired for bypassing our security protocols. Its written in your contract.

Me : *boots up my Macbook*

Lads, I will be real with you: some of you show absolute contempt to the actual academic study of the field.

In a previous rant from another ranter it was thrown up and about the question for finding a binary search implementation.

Asking a senior in the field of software engineering and computer science such question should be a simple answer, specifically depending on the type of job application in question. Specially if you are applying as a SENIOR.

I am tired of this strange self-learner mentality that those that have a degree or a deep grasp of these fundamental concepts are somewhat beneath you because you learned to push out a website using the New Boston tutorials on youtube. FOR every field THAT MATTERS a license or degree is hold in high regards.
"Oh I didn't go to school, shit is for suckers, but I learned how to chop people up and kinda fix it from some tutorials on youtube" <---- try that for a medical position.

"Nah it's cool, I can fix your breaks, learned how to do it by reading blogs on the internet" <--- maintenance shop

"Sure can write the controller processing code for that boing plane! Just got done with a low level tutorial on some websites! what can go wrong!"

(The same goes for military devices which in the past have actually killed mfkers in the U.S)

Just recently a series of people were sent to jail because of a bug in software. Industries NEED to make sure a mfker has aaaall of the bells and whistles needed for running and creating software.

During my masters degree, it fucking FASCINATED me how many mfkers were absolutely completely NEW to the concept of testing code, some of them with years in the field.

And I know what you are thinking "fuck you, I am fucking awesome" <--- I AM SURE YOU BLOODY WELL ARE but we live in a planet with billions of people and millions of them have fallen through the cracks into software related positions as well as complete degrees, the degree at LEAST has a SPECTACULAR barrier of entry during that intro to Algos and DS that a lot of bitches fail.

NOTE: NOT knowing the ABSTRACTIONS over the tools that we use WILL eventually bite you in the ASS because you do not fucking KNOW how these are implemented internally.

Why do you think compiler designers, kernel designers and embedded developers make the BANK they made? Because they don't know memory efficient ways of deploying a product with minimal overhead without proper data structures and algorithmic thinking? NOT EVERYTHING IS SHITTY WEB DEVELOPMENT

SO, if a mfker talks shit about a so called SENIOR for not knowing that the first mamase mamasa bloody simple as shit algorithm THROWN at you in the first 10 pages of an algo and ds book, then y'all should be offended at the mkfer saying that he is a SENIOR, because these SENIORS are the same mfkers that try to at one point in time teach other people.
These SENIORS are the same mfkers that left me a FUCKING HORRIBLE AND USELESS MESS OF SPAGHETTI CODE

Specially to most PHP developers (my main area) y'all would have been well motherfucking served in learning how not to forLoop the fuck out of tables consisting of over 50k interconnected records, WHAT THE FUCK

"LeaRniNG tHiS iS noT neeDed!!" yes IT fucking IS

being able to code a binary search (in that example) from scratch lets me know fucking EXACTLY how well your thought process is when facing a hard challenge, knowing the basemotherfucking case of a LinkedList will damn well make you understand WHAT is going on with your abstractions as to not fucking violate memory constraints, this-shit-is-important.

So, will your royal majesties at least for the sake of completeness look into a couple of very well made youtube or book tutorials concerning the topic?

You can code an entire website, fine as shit, you will get tested by my ass in terms of security and best practices, run these questions now, and it very motherfucking well be as efficient as I think it should be(I HIRE, NOT YOU, or your fucking blog posts concerning how much MY degree was not needed, oh and btw, MY degree is what made sure I was able to make SUCH decissions)

This will make a loooooooot of mfkers salty, don't worry, I will still accept you as an interview candidate, but if you think you are good enough without a degree, or better than me (has happened, told that to my face by a candidate) then get fucking ready to receive a question concerning: BASIC FUCKING COMPUTER SCIENCE TOPICS

* gays away into the night

!rant
So it turns out that my dad accidentally took my spare laptop on a work trip. He's about as non-tech as you can get, and that laptop runs...Arch Linux. Yeah.

(call from dad)
M: hi dad
D: what's your desktop password?
M: (confused) {Password}
D: okay.
(cuts the call)

M: *shrug*

(call from dad)
M: hi dad
D: so where is PowerPoint?! where's the Windows button?! I've been at this for half an hour now and I have to edit a presentation for tomorrow!!
M: (realizes what's happened) oh...uh...dad...that's.. Linux...
D: don't you people do anything the way it's supposed to be done?
M: uh...
D: ugh! So you can't edit PPTs on this?
M: (processing...LibreOffice isn't installed on the laptop, and he will have to use the command line to connect to the internet to use Office Online or Google Slides since the Deepin WiFi module keeps fucking up for some reason)
D: well?
M: (internal sigh) No, you can't edit PPTs on that.
D: wow.
(cuts the call)

He either thinks we're all useless or that we have godlike computer skills to be able to edit PPTs on Linux. Oh well.

(He managed to use the hotel's "workstation" to get it done, so all is well. I should tell him to change his password though, hotel computers have rubbish security.)

I work at a small retail store and we have quite a few regular customers who know I'm studying computer science because I'm always coding at work on my laptop.

One lady who comes in quite often and is very sweet asked me if I would take a look at her phone. She said she bought it and paid the owner of a phone repair store to set it up for her, but was felt like he did something weird to it. I told her I wasn't an expert but would look at it.

Oh my god. This guy set up her phone connected to his own personal icloud account. All of his music was on there. All of his contacts were on there. All of his pictures were on there. Even nude pictures of multiple people that this lady said she definitely does not know. I tell her this is very very wrong and no one in their right mind should've set her phone up this way.

I automatically think to factory reset. I'm unfamiliar with iPhone, as the last time I used one was an iPhone4 many years ago. I was unaware that apple applies an authentication lock when the phone is reset.
The authentication is set up underneath yet ANOTHER email address that belongs to this guy, as this lady promised me she has no knowledge of any email address similar to the one listed, nor does she have access to it.

I tell her to call the guy and ask for her money back and to unlock her phone so that she can reset it herself.

He claims that he cannot accept refunds if a factory reset has been performed.

Uhm, I am calling SOOOOO much bullshit. There should be absolutely no reason why the owner of the phone cannot factory reset it. The owner should be able to do ANYTHING she wants with it, without being locked out of it because some creep at a repair store did NOT DO HIS JOB CORRECTLY AND HE KNOWS IT. Why else would he claim he can't refund if it's been reset, because he KNOWS she got locked out.

So long story short I talked on the phone with him and cussed him out telling him he was wrong for taking advantage of someone who doesn't know much about technology and that he was invading privacy and violating her security and that i would report him if he didn't fully refund her and unlock her phone.

He gave her all of her money back, unlocked the phone (which she is deciding to sell because she got so scared by this), and I'm still filing a complaint against this man and his store. Who knows how many more clueless people he did this too. Fucking scumbag.

It was fun to watch my entire high school (~1200 people) freak out when I ran "net send * Big brother is watching you..." on what I found to be an insecure computer in my high school's library. Every single computer in the building displayed the pop up message. The town's IT director even showed up to figure out what happened.

I was caught, but they were more happy it wasn't a hacker, and that I discovered that the IT firm the town hired totally botched properly implementing network security, so I was let off the hook.

"Hey nephew, why doesn't the FB app work. It shows blank white boxes?"
- It can't connect or something? (I stopped using the FB app since 2013.)

"What is this safe mode that appeared on my phone?!"
- I don't know. I don't hack my smartphone that much. Well, I actually do have a customised ROM. But stop! I'm pecking my keyboard most of the time.

"Which of my files should I delete?"
- Am I supposed to know?

"Where did my Microsoft Word Doc1.docx go?"
- It lets you choose the location before you hit save.

"What is 1MB?"
- Search these concepts on Google. (some of us did not have access to the Internet when we learned to do basic computer operations as curious kids.)

"What should I search?"
- ...

"My computer doesn't work.. My phone has a virus. Do you think this PC they are selling me has a good spec? Is this Video Card and RAM good?"
- I'm a programmer. I write code. I think algorithmically and solve programming problems efficiently. I analyse concepts such as abstraction, algorithms, data structures, encapsulation, resource management, security, software engineering, and web development. No, I will not fix your PC.

OH MY GOD

WHO NAMES A CONFERENCE ROOM AFTER AN -ADDRESS-??

At my new job, we had all day training on Friday. It was emphasized many times that we should not be late. I look at the meeting invite many times, and it says [123 Fake], with Fake being a Very Well Known Street, and I see on Google Maps that there's an office building there. Great, we must have an off-site training facility to help our clients become certified in our product. It doesn't say which floor, but I assume the small space we have in that large office building will become evident once I check in with lobby security.

Friday morning comes, I get to the office building 20 minutes early, and try to check in. They've never heard of my company. Maybe there's a computer lab we rent out? No, they don't know anything about that. I don't have work email or slack set up on my phone yet, so who do I call? I try reception, no one answers. Eventually I call our customer support line.

I shouldn't be at 123 Fake St. I should be at the office. Because that's the name of the conference room!

YOU HAD ONE JOB, ROOM NAMER!

Last night my boyfriend and I tried to think of worse names for conference rooms. The only ones I could think of were "meeting canceled" (but with that, at least I would be in the correct fucking building!) or just naming every conference room "conference room". Here's the thing: there's not just one 123 Fake St room! There's two of them right next to each other! So you can easily show up and think, I remember I was supposed to be in this room, but which one?

And I'm not even the first person to make this mistake. CLIENTS have gone to the wrong building before because they get included on meeting invitations that include conference room names! WTF!

It's pretty common to have Chicago conference rooms named after neighborhoods, or iconic buildings, etc. But nobody is going to think, "meeting in Bucktown? I'll just wander around the neighborhood until I find people with laptops". It's obviously a conference room. BUT A FUCKING ADDRESS OF A NEARBY OFFICE BUILDING? It's not even an iconic of a building!

Names matter. I care a lot about names in code. I never realized it could apply to the physical world as well. So now I am on a mission to change the names of these Goddamm conference rooms so I'm the last person to be directed to the wrong fucking building.

OH, and I'm out $9 for a taxi ride and a pair of gloves that got lost in the taxi so that's GREAT.

Alias coworker = high school classmate

This kid wore a trench coat to school every single day and I guess he had a chronic masturbation problem because the guy was caught 3 different times IN CLASS jerking off.
Most people would catch a sexual harassment / indecent exposure / public masturbation charge, but this kid was breaking all these national math competition records and was working with a local university doing research and had a 4.5+ GPA (in high school in U.S. that's possible) so the school decided to do 2 things.

1. Not punish the kid, and in fact nothing of this was ever put on any record at all.
2. Write him a note from school administrators saying that this student can leave class whenever he would like no questions asked, and that the teacher must notify the office so they could send a security guard in order for this masturbation obsessed student to literally occupy a bathroom as his jerk off chamber uninterrupted.

So if in the past 6-7 years you've been in a high caliber university studying computer science and there was a kid in a trench coat "feeding some geese" near you, you can thank my high school.

Dear Prof,

One does not simply encrypt the exam tips and give it to the students in a computer security introductory module.

Sincerely,
Disgruntled Undergraduate

The stupid stories of how I was able to break my schools network just to get better internet, as well as more ridiculous fun. XD

1st year:
It was my freshman year in college. The internet sucked really, really, really badly! Too many people were clearly using it. I had to find another way to remedy this. Upon some further research through Google I found out that one can in fact turn their computer into a router. Now what’s interesting about this network is that it only works with computers by downloading the necessary software that this network provides for you. Some weird software that actually looks through your computer and makes sure it’s ok to be added to the network. Unfortunately, routers can’t download and install that software, thus no internet… but a PC that can be changed into a router itself is a different story. I found that I can download the software check the PC and then turn on my Router feature. Viola, personal fast internet connected directly into the wall. No more sharing a single shitty router!

2nd year:
This was about the year when bitcoin mining was becoming a thing, and everyone was in on it. My shitty computer couldn’t possibly pull off mining for bitcoins. I needed something faster. How I found out that I could use my schools servers was merely an accident.
I had been installing the software on every possible PC I owned, but alas all my PC’s were just not fast enough. I decided to try it on the RDS server. It worked; the command window was pumping out coins! What I came to find out was that the RDS server had 36 cores. This thing was a beast! And it made sense that it could actually pull off mining for bitcoins. A couple nights later I signed in remotely to the RDS server. I created a macro that would continuously move my mouse around in the Remote desktop screen to keep my session alive at all times, and then I’d start my bitcoin mining operation. The following morning I wake up and my session was gone. How sad I thought. I quickly try to remote back in to see what I had collected. “Error, could not connect”. Weird… this usually never happens, maybe I did the remoting wrong. I went to my schools website to do some research on my remoting problem. It was down. In fact, everything was down… I come to find out that I had accidentally shut down the schools network because of my mining operation. I wasn’t found out, but I haven’t done any mining since then.

3rd year:
As an engineering student I found out that all engineering students get access to the school’s VPN. Cool, it is technically used to get around some wonky issues with remoting into the RDS servers. What I come to find out, after messing around with it frequently, is that I can actually use the VPN against the screwed up security on the network. Remember, how I told you that a program has to be downloaded and then one can be accepted into the network? Well, I was able to bypass all of that, simply by using the school’s VPN against itself… How dense does one have to be to not have patched that one?

4th year:
It was another programming day, and I needed access to my phones memory. Using some specially made apps I could easily connect to my phone from my computer and continue my work. But what I found out was that I could in fact travel around in the network. I discovered that I can, in fact, access my phone through the network from anywhere. What resulted was the discovery that the network scales the entirety of the school. I discovered that if I left my phone down in the engineering building and then went north to the biology building, I could still continue to access it. This seems like a very fatal flaw. My idea is to hook up a webcam to a robot and remotely controlling it from the RDS servers and having this little robot go to my classes for me.

What crazy shit have you done at your University?

Root rents an office.

Among very few other things, the company I'm renting an office from (Regus) provides wifi, but it isn't even bloody secured. There's a captive portal with a lovely (not.) privacy policy saying they're free to monitor your traffic, but they didn't even bother using WEP, which ofc means everyone else out to the fucking parking lot four floors down can monitor my traffic, too.

Good thing I don't work for a company that handles sensitive data! /s But at least I don't have access to it, or any creds that matter.

So, I've been running my phone's connection through a tor vpn and sharing that with my lappy. It works, provides a little bit of security, but it's slow as crap. GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER, REGUS.

AND WHILE YOU'RE AT IT, CLEAN THE SHIT OUT OF THE FUCKING BATHROOM FFS.

Ugh. $12/day to work in a freaking wind tunnel (thanks, a/c; you're loud as fuck and barely work), hear other people's phone conversations through two freaking walls, pee in a bathroom that perpetually smells like diarrhea, and allow anyone and everyone within a 50+ meter radius to listen to everything my computer says.

Oh, they also 'forgot' to furnish my office, like they promised. Three freaking times. At least I have a table and chair. 🙄

Desk? What desk?
Fucking hell.

I'm trying to sign up for insurance benefits at work.

Step 1: Trying to find the website link -- it's non-existent. I don't know where I found it, but I saved it in keepassxc so I wouldn't have to search again. Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 2: Trying to log in. Ostensibly, this uses my work account. It does not. Time wasted: 10 minutes.

Step 3: Creating an account. Username and Password requirements are stupid, and the page doesn't show all of them. The username must be /[A-Za-z0-9]{8,60}/. The maximum password length is VARCHAR(20), and must include upper/lower case, number, special symbol, etc. and cannot include "password", repeated charcters, your username, etc. There is also a (required!) hint with /[A-Za-z0-9 ]{8,60}/ validation. Want to type a sentence? better not use any punctuation!

I find it hilarious that both my username and password hint can be three times longer than my actual password -- and can contain the password. Such brilliant security.

My typical username is less than 8 characters. All of my typical password formats are >25 characters. Trying to figure out memorable credentials and figuring out the hidden complexity/validation requirements for all of these and the hint... Time wasted: 30 minutes.

Step 4: Post-login. The website, post-login, does not work in firefox. I assumed it was one of my many ad/tracker/header/etc. blockers, and systematically disabled every one of them. After enabling ad and tracker networks, more and more of the site loaded, but it always failed. After disabling bloody everything, the site still refused to work. Why? It was fetching deeply-nested markup, plus styling and javascript, encoded in xml, via api. And that xml wasn't valid xml (missing root element). The failure wasn't due to blocking a vitally-important ad or tracker (as apparently they're all vital and the site chain-loads them off one another before loading content), it's due to shoddy development and lack of testing. Matches the rest of the site perfectly. Anyway, I eventually managed to get the site to load in Safari, of all browsers, on a different computer. Time wasted: 40 minutes.

Step 5: Contact info. After getting the site to work, I clicked the [Enroll] button. "Please allow about 10 minutes to enroll," it says. I'm up to an hour and 50 minutes by now. The first thing it asks for is contact info, such as email, phone, address, etc. It gives me a warning next to phone, saying I'm not set up for notifications yet. I think that's great. I select "change" next to the email, and try to give it my work email. There are two "preferred" radio buttons, one next to "Work email," one next to "Personal email" -- but there is only one textbox. Fine, I select the "Work" preferred button, sign up for a faux-personal tutanota email for work, and type it in. The site complains that I selected "Work" but only entered a personal email. Seriously serious. Out of curiosity, I select the "change" next to the phone number, and see that it gives me four options (home, work, cell, personal?), but only one set of inputs -- next to personal. Yep. That's amazing. Time spent: 10 minutes.

Step 6: Ranting. I started going through the benefits, realized it would take an hour+ to add dependents, research the various options, pick which benefits I want, etc. I'm already up to two hours by now, so instead I decided to stop and rant about how ridiculous this entire thing is. While typing this up, the site (unsurprisingly) automatically logged me out. Fine, I'll just log in again... and get an error saying my credentials are invalid. Okay... I very carefully type them in again. error: invalid credentials. sajfkasdjf.

Step 7 is going to be: Try to figure out how to log in again. Ugh.

"Please allow about 10 minutes" it said. Where's that facepalm emoji?

But like, seriously. How does someone even build a website THIS bad?

Every single one of them, and every one that will come after them.

Google, it started out as 2 people in their garage, wanting to make a search engine that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

Microsoft, it started out with Bill Gates - young high school computer nerd - who wanted to make an operating system for the world to use. Something that's better than the competition. And boy did he do so. Well "better than the competition" aside, he did make it for the world to use. And the world adopted it. And look what it's become now. A megacorporation with little to no regards for their user base. Because who cares about users anyway?

See where I'm going here?

Apple, it started out with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in their garage, just like Google did, wanting to make hardware that was better than the others. Nothing else, nothing evil. Just to make the world a little bit better. And look what it's become now. Planned obsolescence has been baked into it, just like it is in every other piece of technology. Quality control and thinking through the design has become a thing of the past. User choice, yeah who cares about that.

Samsung, it started out centuries ago actually, and I don't really remember the details of it.. ColdFusion has a video on it if memory serves me right. Do watch it if you're interested. Anyway, just like all the others they started out as a company which wanted to make the world a little bit better. And damn right did they do so.. initially. Look what they've become now. Forcing their stupid TouchWiz UI upon their customers (or products?), a Bixby button that can't even be reprogrammed.. and the latest thing.. Knox, advertised as a security feature, but as everyone who likes rooting their devices and mucking with it knows, it is an anti-feature that only serves for lockdown. Why shouldn't you be able to turn in a phone for RMA when a hardware error occurs, when all you've personally modified is the software? Why should changing the software blow that eFuse, so that you can be sure that you can't replace it without specialized equipment and a very steady hand?

I could go on and on forever about more of the tech giants out there, but I feel like this suffices for now. Otherwise I won't have anything else left for future rants! But one thing I know for sure. Every tech company started, starts, and will start out with a desire to make the world a better place, and once they gain a significant customer base, they will without exception turn into the same kind of Evil Megacorp., just like the ones before them. Some may say that capitalism itself is to blame for this, the greed for more when you already have a lot. Who knows? I'd rather say that the very human nature itself is to blame for it. We're by design greedy beings, and I hate it. I hate being human for that. I don't want humans to be evil towards one another, and be greedy for ever more. But I guess that that's just the way it is, and some things do actually never change...

3 rants for the price of 1, isn't that a great deal!

1. HP, you braindead fucking morons!!!

So recently I disassembled this HP laptop of mine to unfuck it at the hardware level. Some issues with the hinge that I had to solve. So I had to disassemble not only the bottom of the laptop but also the display panel itself. Turns out that HP - being the certified enganeers they are - made the following fuckups, with probably many more that I didn't even notice yet.

- They used fucking glue to ensure that the bottom of the display frame stays connected to the panel. Cheap solution to what should've been "MAKE A FUCKING DECENT FRAME?!" but a royal pain in the ass to disassemble. Luckily I was careful and didn't damage the panel, but the chance of that happening was most certainly nonzero.
- They connected the ribbon cables for the keyboard in such a way that you have to reach all the way into the spacing between the keyboard and the motherboard to connect the bloody things. And some extra spacing on the ribbon cables to enable servicing with some room for actually connecting the bloody things easily.. as Carlos Mantos would say it - M-m-M, nonoNO!!!
- Oh and let's not forget an old flaw that I noticed ages ago in this turd. The CPU goes straight to 70°C during boot-up but turning on the fan.. again, M-m-M, nonoNO!!! Let's just get the bloody thing to overheat, freeze completely and force the user to power cycle the machine, right? That's gonna be a great way to make them satisfied, RIGHT?! NO MOTHERFUCKERS, AND I WILL DISCONNECT THE DATA LINES OF THIS FUCKING THING TO MAKE IT SPIN ALL THE TIME, AS IT SHOULD!!! Certified fucking braindead abominations of engineers!!!

Oh and not only that, this laptop is outperformed by a Raspberry Pi 3B in performance, thermals, price and product quality.. A FUCKING SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER!!! Isn't that a great joke. Someone here mentioned earlier that HP and Acer seem to have been competing for a long time to make the shittiest products possible, and boy they fucking do. If there's anything that makes both of those shitcompanies remarkable, that'd be it.

2. If I want to conduct a pentest, I don't want to have to relearn the bloody tool!

Recently I did a Burp Suite test to see how the devRant web app logs in, but due to my Burp Suite being the community edition, I couldn't save it. Fucking amazing, thanks PortSwigger! And I couldn't recreate the results anymore due to what I think is a change in the web app. But I'll get back to that later.

So I fired up bettercap (which works at lower network layers and can conduct ARP poisoning and DNS cache poisoning) with the intent to ARP poison my phone and get the results straight from the devRant Android app. I haven't used this tool since around 2017 due to the fact that I kinda lost interest in offensive security. When I fired it up again a few days ago in my PTbox (which is a VM somewhere else on the network) and today again in my newly recovered HP laptop, I noticed that both hosts now have an updated version of bettercap, in which the options completely changed. It's now got different command-line switches and some interactive mode. Needless to say, I have no idea how to use this bloody thing anymore and don't feel like learning it all over again for a single test. Maybe this is why users often dislike changes to the UI, and why some sysadmins refrain from updating their servers? When you have users of any kind, you should at all times honor their installations, give them time to change their individual configurations - tell them that they should! - in other words give them a grace time, and allow for backwards compatibility for as long as feasible.

3. devRant web app!!

As mentioned earlier I tried to scrape the web app's login flow with Burp Suite but every time that I try to log in with its proxy enabled, it doesn't open the login form but instead just makes a GET request to /feed/top/month?login=1 without ever allowing me to actually log in. This happens in both Chromium and Firefox, in Windows and Arch Linux. Clearly this is a change to the web app, and a very undesirable one. Especially considering that the login flow for the API isn't documented anywhere as far as I know.

So, can this update to the web app be rolled back, merged back to an older version of that login flow or can I at least know how I'm supposed to log in to this API in order to be able to start developing my own client?

Everyone in family and friends allways ask me "You're a programmer and know a lot about computer, so why you're not in Facebook/Twitter/Instagram?"

My answer: We create these services for you (average people) we don't use them ourselves. It's a security hole to put your information in public.

Scammer calls claiming to be windows security expert.

Them: "sir, your windows computer is sending error code. Please turn it on so I cam Fix it. "

Me: "windows? I have a mac."

Them: "um.... " *hangs up*

Me: gotcha

M - Me
F - Family member

F: So you study computer science... Could you recover my Gmail login data? I don't remember my email address, password or security question. (7th request to me like that from the same person, they don't bother to write down the recovered pw)
M: I can't do it if I don't know any of the above
F: Wow, I thought you're a good student... Could you at least create a new account for me?
M: But you won't even remember the new... [gets interrupted]
F: So, are you going to talk trash or get to work? You would have already been 50% done

PLEASE I'M SO TIRED OF IT. HOW DO I DEAL WITH THESE OTHER THAN TELLING THEM WHAT I THINK ABOUT THEM. I SEEK HELP

My parents told everyone at church that I have a computer science degree. I got asked to install security cameras 5 minutes after. Cool :/

Person: So what do you do for a living..
Me: (here we go)... I am an information security analyst working in an incident response team for x company. I do log collection and manage a large scale correlation engine.
Person: Oh, so are you super smart or something? (Blinks her eyes and continues with blank stare)
Me: Uh... Smart enough I guess.
Person: Can you hack things like a hacker.
Me: That really isn't my job...
Person: What's your job again?
Me: Computer guy
(She lights up)
Person: Why didn't you just say that? I can understand that.

Yeah... I seem to have painful conversations like this often.

I just had to print out some bills for a colleague.
Nothing too bad you say?

Well.. She doesn't seem to care about security or privacy at all.
I opened the website of her email provider at my computer and moved away from the keyboard, so she could log in.
But instead she told me her email and password... In an office with some other colleagues... Multiple times and wrote it onto a piece of paper that the later left on my table.
After that I should look through her inbox to find the bills.
(Yup, I know a lot more about her now)
After finding and printing out her bills, she just thanked me and walked out of the office, because hey, why should I log out of her account?

It's nice that she trusts me... But that was a bit too much...

Rant about a german problem in english

I think we as the people should just sue the german government for neglect of progress and neglect of the education system. If your not familiar with the state of german IT we have worse internetspeeds than uganda or the notoriously shitty australia, our neighbourstates look at us in disbelief while laughing in optic fibre. Our school system seperates all students after 4th grade in 3 tiers, the lowest one gives you the future perspective as a social security case. The second and highest tier require masses of useless knowledge, so called "competences"(Kompetenzen) which are totally useless skills with no real world application because they are derived from real skills, a median ground between all possible applications of that skill. And while doing that they terribly insist on doing everything the "proper" way, meaning handwritten. Most people you would expect to have basic computer literacy, meaning age 40 and below, are incapable of using basic functions of a non-smartphone computer and do not understand the slightest of what they are actually doing or supposed to do. And I mean nothing technical. Germans are the reasons they still put word as a job requirement for devjobs because this disqualifies half of our population. This leads to many people having the archaeic "we versus the machines" mentality, thinking that if they ever let the computer do parts of the job, they will then lose all of it to the machines. Thats why you never strive past basic mathematical principles in mathematics, which is a big misnomer because you never do actual mathematics, only calculating and basic calculus and statics. If you get to use your calculator, its some basic casio with no actual functionality then standard operations. And even using that is shunned upon. How is this country ever supposed to become something more than it was in the 90's, if we teach people nothing of use and kill all progress in its root.

My school just tried to hinder my revision for finals now. They've denied me access just today of SSHing into my home computer. Vim & a filesystem is soo much better than pen and paper.

So I went up to the sysadmin about this. His response: "We're not allowing it any more". That's it - no reason. Now let's just hope that the sysadmin was dumb enough to only block port 22, not my IP address, so I can just pick another port to expose at home. To be honest, I was surprised that he even knew what SSH was. I mean, sure, they're hired as sysadmins, so they should probably know that stuff, but the sysadmins in my school are fucking brain dead.

For one, they used to block Google, and every other HTTPS site on their WiFi network because of an invalid certificate. Now it's even more difficult to access google as you need to know the proxy settings.

They switched over to forcing me to remote desktop to access my files at home, instead of the old, faster, better shared web folder (Windows server 2012 please help).

But the worst of it includes apparently having no password on their SQL server, STORING FUCKING PASSWORDS IN PLAIN TEXT allowing someone to hijack my session, and just leaving a file unprotected with a shit load of people's names, parents, and home addresses. That's some super sketchy illegal shit.

So if you sysadmins happen to be reading this on devRant, INSTEAD OF WASTING YOUR FUCKING TIME BLOCKING MORE WEBSITES THAN THEIR ARE LIVING HUMANS, HOW ABOUT TRY UPPING YOUR SECURITY, PASSWORDS LIKE "", "", and "gryph0n" ARE SHIT - MAKE IT BETTER SO US STUDENTS CAN ACTUALLY BROWSE MORE FREELY - I THINK I WANT TO PASS, NOT HAVE EVERY OTHER THING BLOCKED.

Thankfully I'm leaving this school in 3 weeks after my last exam. Sure, I could stay on with this "highly reputable" school, but I don't want to be fucking lied to about computer studies, I don't want to have to workaround your shitty methods of blocking. As far as I can tell, half of the reputation is from cheating. The students and sysadmins shouldn't have to have an arms race between circumventing restrictions and blocking those circumventions. Just make your shit work for once.

**On second thought, actually keep it like that. Most of the people I see in the school are c***s anyway - they deserve to have half of everything they try to do censored. I won't be around to care soon.**

Ten Immutable Laws Of Security

Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not solely your computer anymore.
Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it's not your computer anymore.
Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore.
Law #4: If you allow a bad guy to run active content in your website, it's not your website any more.
Law #5: Weak passwords trump strong security.
Law #6: A computer is only as secure as the administrator is trustworthy.
Law #7: Encrypted data is only as secure as its decryption key.
Law #8: An out-of-date antimalware scanner is only marginally better than no scanner at all.
Law #9: Absolute anonymity isn't practically achievable, online or offline.
Law #10: Technology is not a panacea.

So I'm back from vacation! It's my first day back, and I'm feeling refreshed and chipper, and motivated to get a bunch of things done quickly so I can slack off a bit later. It's a great plan.

First up: I need to finish up tiny thing from my previous ticket -- I had overlooked it in the description before. (I couldn't test this feature [push notifications] locally so I left it to QA to test while I was gone.)

It amounted to changing how we pull a due date out of the DB; some merchants use X, a couple use Y. Instead of hardcoding them, it would use a setting that admins can update on the fly.

Several methods deep, the current due date gets pulled indirectly from another class, so it's non-trivial to update; I start working through it.

But wait, if we're displaying a due date that differs from the date we're actually using internally, that's legit bad. So I investigate if I need to update the internals, too.

After awhile, I start to make lunch. I ask my boss if it's display-only (best case) and... no response. More investigating.

I start to make a late lunch. A wild sickness appears! Rush to bathroom; lose two turns.

I come back and get distracted by more investigating. I start to make an early dinner... and end up making dinner for my monster instead.

Boss responds, tells me it's just for display (yay!) and that we should use <macro resource feature> instead.

I talk to Mr. Product about which macros I should add; he doesn't respond.

I go back to making lunch-turn-dinner for myself; monster comes back and he's still hungry (as he never asks for more), so I make him dinner.

I check Slack again; Mr. Product still hasn't responded. I go back to making dinner.

Most of the way through cooking, I get a notification! Product says he's talking it through with my boss, who will update me on it. Okay fine. I finish making dinner and go eat.

No response from boss; I start looking through my next ticket.

No response from boss. I ping him and ask for an update, and he says "What are you talking about?" Apparently product never talked to bossmang =/ I ask him about the resources, and he says there's no need to create any more as the one I need already exists! Yay!

So my feature went from a large, complex refactor all the way down to a -1+2 diff. That's freaking amazing, and it only took the entire day!

I run the related specs, which take forever, then commit and push.

Push rejected; pull first! Fair, I have been gone for two weeks. I pull, and git complains about my .gitignore and some local changes. fine, whatever. Except I forgot I had my .gitignore ignored (skipped worktree). Finally figure that out, clean up my tree, and merge.

Time to run the specs again! Gems are out of date. Okay, I go run `bundle install` and ... Ruby is no longer installed? Turns out one of the changes was an upgrade to Ruby 2.5.8.

Alright, I run `rvm use ruby-2.5.8` and.... rvm: command not found. What. I inspect the errors from before and... ah! Someone's brain fell out and they installed rbenv instead of the expected rvm on my mac. Fine, time to figure it out. `rbenv which ruby`; error. `rbenv install --list`; skyscraper-long list that contains bloody everything EXCEPT 2.5.8! Literally 2.5 through 2.5.7 and then 2.6.0-dev. asjdfklasdjf

Then I remember before I left people on Slack made a big deal about upgrading Ruby, so I go looking. Dummy me forgot about the search feature for a painful ten minutes. :( Search found the upgrade instructions right away, ofc. I follow them, and... each step takes freaking forever. Meanwhile my children are having a yelling duet in the immediate background, punctuated with screams and banging toys on furniture.

Eventually (seriously like twenty-five minutes later) I make it through the list. I cd into my project directory and... I get an error message and I'm not in the project directory? what. Oh, it's a zsh thing. k, I work around that, and try to run my specs. Fail.

I need to update my gems; k. `bundle install` and... twenty minutes later... all done.

I go to run my specs and... RubyMine reports I'm using 2.5.4 instead of 2.5.8? That can't be right. `ruby --version` reports 2.5.8; `rbenv version` reports 2.5.8? Fuck it, I've fought with this long enough. Restarting fixes everything, right? So I restart. when my mac comes back to life, I try again; same issue. After fighting for another ten minutes, I find a version toggle in RubyMine's settings, and update it to 2.5.8. It indexes for five minutes. ugh.

Also! After the restart, this company-installed surveillance "security" runs and lags my computer to hell. Highest spec MacBook Pro and it takes 2-5 seconds just to switch between desktops!

I run specs again. Hey look! Missing dependency: no execjs. I can't run the specs.

Fuck. This. I'll just push and let the CI run specs for me.

I just don't care anymore. It's now 8pm and I've spent the past 11 hours on a -1+2 diff!

What a great first day back! Everything is just the way I left it.

Customer: Do you need my computer password?

Me: Yes, I do. Why don't you write it down for me? *fills out work order form while she writes down her password*

Customer: Here you go *slides me sticky note with password on it*

Me: *usual spiel about computer repair stuff*

Customer: *leaves*

Me: *to Coworker* So this lady's password is "AmishForLife* (modified for security purposes).

Coworker: On her iPad?!

Me: And her computer, yes

Coworker: *laughs*

Me: I wonder how well that's working out for her...

So at work with the Macs we use, we have some guy come in after hours to service the Macs, and that means the security risk of leaving our passwords on our desks.

Not being a fan of this I tell my boss, he knows it's a risk and despite that he doesn't want this guy coming in while we're here.

Though my main problem is the Mac guy Steve is arrogant and thinks he's a know it all, and with the software I have on the Mac may end up deleting something important, I have git repo and all but I feel off just letting someone touch my computer without me being there.

I tell my boss about the software and stuff he just says contact Steve and tell him about it, to ignore the software and such, I say alright, I write up an email telling him not to touch the software listed and the folders of software documents (again it's all backed up).

No reply, I tell my boss and he says call him, I call him and he hangs up on me on the second ring!

Not sure if he's busy, but I left him a message, asking if he got my email, no reply and it's coming close to the end of the day (going to service Macs in the weekend)

I'm just not going to leave my info because if this guy can't check emails or even get back to someone why should I bother with this bullshit of risking my work.

From all the info I hear about him and my previous rants he's an arrogant prick who loves Macs.

Can't wait to leave this company, pretty sure leaving my password on my desk is a breach of our own security policy, and since 8-9 people are doing it, it's a major risk.

But he's friends with the CEO so apparently it's fuck our own security policy.

Classroom fuckery: I'm in a Computer Information Technology program and I usually spend the last hour of class working on code. Most of the people in this program are going into networking or security. This kid looks over and freaks out, starts yelling that I'm breaking into the school's network. I was on freecodecamp.com.

Red flags in your first week of your software engineering job 🚩

You do the first few days not speaking to anyone.
You can't get into the building and no one turns up until mid day.
The receptionist thinks you're too well dressed to work in this building, thinks you're a spy and calls security on you.
You are eating alone during lunch time in the cafeteria
You have bring your own material for making coffee for yourself

When you try to read the onboarding docs and there aren't any.
You have to write the onboarding docs.

You don't have team mates.
When you ask another team how things are going and they just laugh and cry.😂😭

There's no computer for you, and not even an "it's delayed" excuse. They weren't expecting you.
Your are given a TI PC, because "that's all we have", even though there's no software for it, and it's not quite IBM compatible.
You don't have local admin rights on your computer.💀
You have to buy a laptop yourself to be able to do your job.

It's the end of the week and you still don't have your environment set up and running.
You look at the codebase and there are no automated tests.
You have to request access every time you need to install something through a company tool that looks like it was made in 2001.

Various tasks can only be performed by one single person and they are either out sick or on vacation.
You have to keep track of your time in 6 minute increments, assigned to projects you don't know, by project numbers everyone has memorised (and therefore aren't written down).
You have to fill in timesheets and it takes you 30 minutes each day to fill them in because the system is so clunky.🤮

Your first email is a phishing test from the IT department in another country and timezone, but it has useful information in it, like how to login to the VPN.
Your second email is not a phishing test, but has similar information as the first one. (You ignore it.)
Your name is spelled wrong in every system, in a different way. 2 departments decide that it's too much trouble, and they never fix the spelling as long as you work there. One of them fixes it after you leave, and annoys you for a month because you haven't filled out the customer survey.

Started a new job today... but I couldn't actually do anything because I had to wait for 4 hours to get an ID card (necessary for computer access because security) only to get told to come back tomorrow to try again. Off to a great start!!

At least my manager realized that this is fucked and filed a complaint against their department.

iPhones are ridiculously picky when it comes to finding a mate- um charger. And knowing why doesn't really make it any easier to understand why. If anything it baffles me more.

So, let's start with appliances that are not phones. Think Bluetooth headsets, keyboards, earbuds, whatever. Those are simple devices. They see 5V on the VCC line and 0V on ground, and they will charge at whatever current they are meant to. Usually it will not exceed 200mA, and the USB 2.0 spec allows for up to 500mA from any USB outlet. So that's perfectly reasonable to be done without any fuss whatsoever.

Phones on the other hand are smarter.. some might say too smart for their own good. In this case I will only cover Android phones, because while they are smarter than they perhaps should be, they are still reasonable.

So if you connect an Android phone to the same 5V VCC and 0V ground, while leaving the data lines floating, the phone will charge at 500mA. This is exactly to be within USB 2.0 spec, as mentioned earlier. Without the data lines, the phone has no way to tell whether it *can* pull more, without *actually* trying to pull more (potentially frying a charger that's not rated for it). Now in an Android phone you can tell it to pull more, in a fairly straightforward way. You just short the data lines together, and the phone will recognize this as a simple charger that it can pull 1A from. Note that shorting data lines is not a bad thing, we do it all the time. It is just another term for making a connection between 2 points. Android does this right. Also note that shorted data lines cannot be used to send data. They are inherently pulled to the same voltage level, probably 0V but not sure.

And then the iPhones come in, Thinking Different. The iPhones require you to pull the data lines to some very specific voltage levels. And of course it's terribly documented because iSheep just trying to use their Apple original white nugget charger overseas and shit like that. I do not know which voltage levels they are (please let me know!), but it is certainly not a regular short. Now you connect the iPhone to, say, a laptop or something to charge. An Android phone would just charge while keeping data transmission disabled (because they can be left floating or shorted). This is for security reasons mostly, preventing e.g. a malicious computer from messing with it. An iPhone needs to be unlocked to just charge the damn thing. I'm fairly sure that that's because the data lines need to be pulled up, which could in theory enable a malicious computer to still get some information in or out of it. USB data transmission works at at least 200mV difference between the data lines. It could be more than that. So you need to unlock it.

Apple, how about you just short your goddamn data lines too like everyone else? And while you're at it, get rid of this Lightning connector. I get it, micro USB was too hard for your users. I guess they are blind pigs after all. But USB-C solved all of that and more. The only difference I can think of is that the Lightning connector can be a single board with pads on either side on the connector, while in USB-C that could be at the socket end (socket being less common to be replaced). And at the end of the day, that really doesn't matter with all the other things that will break first.

Think Different. Think Retarded. Such tiny batteries and you can't even fucking charge them properly.

It's a new semester and the introductory class for a General Ed is going on.
Prof: What do you want to be when you are done with engineering?
Me: I'd like to be in the security domain but I'm still not sure.
Prof: Then why are you doing Computer Science? You can just get a job as a security personnel.
FML.

I had a week off at Christmas, didn't do any coding and barely touched my computer for 10 days. By Jan 6th I was still getting 7-8 hours sleep every night. "This is great", I thought, " I think I'm going to take at least a month off coding at home". Halfway through Season 2 of Brooklyn Nine Nine, my brain goes, "Why don't you learn some security stuff and join HackThisSite?" And that was the end of early nights.

SeniorDev: “OMFG..MalwareBytes is taking up almost 50% of my CPU!”
Me: “Didn’t you have a virus on your machine couple of days ago?”
SeniorDev: “Uh..yea..but it was cleaned up.”
Me: “Your OS might have been compromised. If your antivirus is still busy doing something, then it may be time to start over with a fresh re-install.”
SeniorDev: “No, that’s not it. This is just BS our Network admins don’t want to fix because I’m not a VP”
Me: “I’m pretty sure they don’t care.”
-in as much of a ‘I’m kidding’ tone as I could -
Me: “They would care more if you stopped going to inappropriate web sites on the company computer.”
SeniorDev: “I never go to those sites. It was a link to a charity web site my wife sent me. You know how those sites are. They are built by college kids, so they have no security and was hijacked. That’s how I got the virus.”
Me: “You actually said that to Jim and he believed it?”
SeniorDev: “Well ...yea because….oh …–bleep- you.”
"Jim" sits about 50 feet away, popped his head over the cube wall and smiled. It was awesome.

Hey! You there!
Are you sick of windows 10 sending you intrusive reminders about updates? Are you tired of random unscheduled restarts? Tired of feeling like you have no control over your own computer?

Take back control!
DO THE FUCKING UPDATE, YOU FUCKING INCOMPETENT, USELESS, LAZY, PIECE OF DRY WANK!

Seriously guys: pick a time convenient to you, and take 5 or 10 minutes (when you're likely spending hours at your computer), and do them. Not only will you get rid of the annoying notifications, but you'll also keep your pc safe and secure by keeping up with security patches. C'mon people, it's really not that difficult.

And can we please, for the love of all things holy, stop the circlejerking? You're developers, you are the computer proficient. The only things a PC will do are the things you tell it to do. Dig deep, dig into the registry, dig into the services manager, dig into the fucking settings cos a good number of the most common complaints can be fixed in the basic options menu. Tell your computer to stop doing the things you don't like and it will stop.

It's really not hard!

I """""accidentally"""'" found some security holes in my school's Windows public computer setup.

Every student and teacher has a personal Active Directory, obviously they should be able to only see their own right?
oh wait the directory up button in explorer shows me all of them and I have r/w access to teacher and student ADs.

That's cool.

Also, the command prompt, Run prompt ad Explorer path bar are disabled...

...but batch scripts work.

Sweet.

Surely I can't do something dumb like--- oh, regedit's blocked but not the reg command.

They use the-- WHY IS GPEDIT NOT BLOCKED

Well what the fuck.

(All of this was responsibly handled by emailing the tech department. They have an email just for this! ...got a bounceback "this person is no longer employed at XYZ School.")

I was working in a manufacturing facility where I had hundreds of industrial computers and printers that were between 0 and 20 years old. They were running on their own clean network so that someone has to be in the manufacturing network to access them. The boss announced that the executives will be pushing a “zero trust” security model because they need IoT devices. I told him “A computer running Windows 98 can’t be on the same VLAN as office computers. We can’t harden most of the systems or patch the vulnerabilities. We also can’t reprogram all of the devices to communicate using TLS or encrypt communications.“ Executives got offended that I would even question the decision and be so vocal about it. They hired a team to remove the network hardware and told me that I was overreacting. All of our system support was contracted to India so I was going to be the on-site support person.

They moved all the manufacturing devices to the office network. Then the attacks started. Printers dumped thousands of pages of memes. Ransomware shut down manufacturing computers. Our central database had someone change a serial number for a product to “hello world” and that device got shipped to a customer. SharePoint was attacked in many many ways. VNC servers were running on most computers and occasionally I would see someone remotely poking around and I knew it wasn’t from our team because we were all there.

I bought a case of cheap consumer routers and used them in manufacturing cells to block port traffic. I used Kali on an old computer to scan and patch network vulnerabilities daily.

The worst part was executives didn’t “believe” that there were security incidents. You don’t believe in what you don’t understand right?

After 8 months of responding to security incident after security incident I quit to avoid burning out. This is a company that manufactures and sells devices to big companies like apple and google to install in their network. This isn’t an insignificant company. Security negligence on a level I get angry thinking about.

second path is more interesting... 😂

The more I look into Windows 11 the more I hate it. There's just 1 (one) more thing that's wrong with it every time I look.

It's a security and ethical nightmare. I almost wish I didn't specialize in computer recovery & cybersecurity.

So thankful that my high-end gaming-built PC is apparently "not compatible" with Windows 11. Oh, you don't want to break my computer and ruin my entire life? That's actually a complement, man.

Howdy this is a daily reminder on why you can't trust anyone with shared information.

I am back home from uni for the holidays and like any computer person who is back in town became responsible for fixing every tech problem that has occurred since my last visit. But what caught my eye when I approached the family computer is not the problem with the computer itself, it's the paper in front of the computer that, in giant lettering, has not only the passwords and account names of my mom and brother's AOL (She's old ok) and FAFSA account respectively but also someone's social security number. Any goddam baffoon who looks through the window or is able to take literally three goddam steps past the front door now has enough information to commit identity theft or just take over one of their accounts. I know it's not that likely but I still had a heart attack when I saw that.

How badly have I failed them?

Time for a REAL fucking rant.

io_uring manpages say you can set the CAP_SYS_NICE capability to allow SQPOLL to work. You can't, you still get an operation not permitted errno result.

Why? I checked, it says 5.10 mainline is required. Pretty sure I just manually downloaded and installed the Deb's myself. uname reports that I am at 5.10. So what gives?

Maintainer submitted a patch because they fucked up and made the *actual* capability check look for what's basically root permissions (CAP_SYS_ADMIN... c'mon...) and is now trying to rectify a glaring security shortcoming.

Patch hasn't been accepted or even addressed yet but they already updated the manpages with the estimated mainline kernel release as if it had made it into the release candidate. Manpages have made it into latest debs but the actual change has not.

Where the fuck is the Linus Torvalds that would ream the fuck out of shitty developers doing shitty things? The political correctness climate has discouraged such criticism now and the result... this. This fucking mess, where people are allowed to cut corners and get away with it because it would hurt their feelings when faced with pressure.

I'm not just guessing either. The maintainer has already said some of the "tone" of criticisms hurt his feelings. Yes, sorry, but when you claim 90% speedup over a typical epoll application using your new magical set of syscalls, and nobody can even get 1-2% speedup on a similar machine, people are going to be fucking skeptical. Then when you lower it to 60% because you originally omitted a bunch of SECURITY RELATED AND CORRECTNESS CHECKING CODE, we're going to call you the fuck out for fudging numbers.

Trying to maintain the equivalent of academic integrity within the computer science field is an exercise of insanity. You'd be fired and shunned from publishing in journals if you pulled that shit in ANY OTHER FUCKING FIELD, but because the CS scene is all about jerking each other off at every corner because the mean people keep saying mean things on Twitter and it hurts your feelings therefore we're all allowed to contribute subpar work and be protected from criticisms when others realize it's subpar.

These aren't mistakes anymore, it's clear you're just trying to farm clout at Facebook - maybe even FOR Facebook.

Fuck you. Do it right, the first time. Sick of shitty code being OK all of a sudden.

So today I found a way to break into any Apple Mac (provided the exploit hasn't been fixed by the owner) and access all private files, as long as I have physical access to it, in less than 5 minutes.

After finding this, a quick Google on the method reveals this has been a workaround for years.

And to think I once praised Apple for their security standards.

Edit: this was done to an in-house Mac that my company own, and had been password locked by a member of staff who had been fired, but held important company documents on the computer. It was in no way a breach of privacy.

WARNING: There is a dangerous malware out in the wild, and chances are, you have it installed on your computer.

It's called Windows Update, and it is marketed as a software that "delivers security patches to your PC". Wrong. What it actually does is hard-reboot your computer at randomly picked time intervals without asking for your consent, or even showing any type of warning, basically deleting all unsaved progress that you've made in your programs or games. It also deletes/undoes all registry tweaks that you might have made (e.g. to the context menu), it deletes your nvidia display configurations, uninstalls any custom themes that you might have installed, possibly even downloads another malware disguised as "Microsoft Edge" and shoves it in your face on next boot without giving a possibility to close it. Oh and it might also make your computer unbootable so you have to go to the advanced recovery settings to fix it manually.

Yes, everything I just mentioned above happened to me about an hour ago. This LITERALLY classifies the software as a malware (Google: "software that is specifically designed to disrupt, damage, or gain unauthorized access to a computer system"). If we throw in all the data collection that happens without your consent, Microsoft actually manages to check not only one, but all three boxes in the "malware" definition.

Pleas, stop using microshit, and switch to linux as soon as possible if you can.

Hey Citrix:

FUCK YOU.

Learn to make an accessible log in page you fucks.

Maybe instead of vague fucking "you're user name and password is wrong" say things like "your account is locked because we somehow decided we don't like your password anymore. . . . without telling you"

Fucking 2 hours of my day wasted trying to log into my company's VM because first it wouldn't take my password (that I've had for over a month and doesn't expire for another month) over and over again. I changed it, logged in. Got up to do something that'd take less than 5 minutes. And OF COURSE the people who set up the VM made them log you out if you're gone for more than 3 minutes (fuck that guy too). Come back to a log in screen and it won't accept my new password.

Change it again. Except this time it won't accept my new password because it's "like my old password." It is in that it uses the alphabet and numbers, but it's also different in that those alphanumeric characters are LITERALLY DIFFERENT IN EVERY PLACE. I finally get it to accept a new password.

I'm also loving the whole "answer these security questions that literally anyone who does minimal research on you can answer" before I get to change my password. Yeah. Because finding my mother's maiden name or the city I was born in is so fucking hard. Literally impossible to find out what my Dad's dad's name is. Shit like that isn't publically available. Nope. Why the fuck are we still using "security" questions?

I log into Citrix again. And it takes me to . . . the log in for Citrix.

There is no word in elvish, entish or the tongues of men for this stupidity.

Fuck Citrix. Fuck the people behind the password manager (Aviator or something like that), and fuck whatever administrator setting turns my computer off due to inactivity in such a stupid short amount of time. 10 minutes, 15 minutes, that'd be fine. But it's more like 3 or 5, like wtf.

What you are expected to learn in 3 years:

power electronics,
analogue signal,
digital signal processing,
VDHL development,
VLSI debelopment,
antenna design,
optical communication,
networking,
digital storage,
electromagnetic,
ARM ISA,
x86 ISA,
signal and control system,
robotics,
computer vision,
NLP, data algorithm,
Java, C++, Python,
javascript frameworks,
ASP.NET web development,
cloud computing,
computer security ,
Information coding,
ethical hacking,
statistics,
machine learning,
data mining,
data analysis,
cloud computing,
Matlab,
Android app development,
IOS app development,
Computer architecture,
Computer network,
discrete structure,
3D game development,
operating system,
introduction to DevOps,
how-to -fix- computer,
system administration,
Project of being entrepreneur,

and 24 random unrelated subjects of your choices

This is a major called "computer engineering"

Installs Ubuntu 16.04
Try to put my favorite software installed.
Reboot failed, drops to BusyBox shell.
Me thinking : I fucked up.
Friend walks by, couldn't read shit.
Friend: Look at his kid, he's trying to hack into someone's computer.
Me: (Agrees just for reputation) Yeah, damn teachers been giving me bad grades.
Friend: Could you help me too?
Me: (Don't have hacking experience, making shit up) NO, because your not my best friend. And school security is hard to crack.

Got away safely

First year: intro to programming, basic data structures and algos, parallel programming, databases and a project to finish it. Homework should be kept track of via some version control. Should also be some calculus and linear algebra.

Second year:
Introduce more complex subjects such as programming paradigms, compilers and language theory, low level programming + logic design + basic processor design, logic for system verification, statistics and graph theory. Should also be a project with a company.

Year three:
Advanced algos, datastructures and algorithm analysis. Intro to Computer and data security. Optional courses in graphics programming, machine learning, compilers and automata, embedded systems etc. ends with a big project that goes in depth into a CS subject, not a regular software project in java basically.

Wow the security by captcha!

Guess what? IIT Kharagpur is considered one of the best institute in India to study Computer Science and its major in research include image processing

TL:DR
Why do so shitty "API"s exist that are even harder to write than proper ones? D:

Trying to hack my venilation at home.
This API is so horrible D:
The API is only based on POST requests no matter if you want to write values or get values and the response only contains XML with cryptic values like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<PARAMETER>
<LANG>de</LANG>
<ID>v01306</ID>
<VA>00011100000000000000000010000001</VA>
<ID>v00024</ID>
<VA>0</VA>
<ID>v00033</ID>
<VA>2</VA>
<ID>v00037</ID>
<VA>0</VA>

Also there are multiple API routes like
POST /data/werte1.xml
POST /data/werte2.xml
POST /data/werte3.xml
POST /data/werte4.xml
And actually the real API route is only given in the request body and not in the path.

Why is this so shitty? D:<

Btw in terms of security this is also top notch. It just globally saves if one computer sends the login password.
I mean why even ask for a password then? D:
That made me end up with a cronjob to send a login request so I don't have to login on any device.

PS:
You see, great piece of German engineering.

Oh boy, this is gonna be good:

TL;DR: Digital bailiffs are vulnerable as fuck

So, apparently some debt has come back haunting me, it's a somewhat hefty clai and for the average employee this means a lot, it means a lot to me as well but currently things are looking better so i can pay it jsut like that. However, and this is where it's gonna get good:

The Bailiff sent their first contact by mail, on my company address instead of my personal one (its's important since the debt is on a personal record, not company's) but okay, whatever. So they send me a copy of their court appeal, claiming that "according to our data, you are debtor of this debt". with a URL to their portal with a USERNAME and a PASSWORD in cleartext to the message.
Okay, i thought we were passed sending creds in plaintext to people and use tokenized URL's for initiating a login (siilar to email verification links) but okay! Let's pretend we're a dumbfuck average joe sweating already from the bailiff claims and sweating already by attempting to use the computer for something useful instead of just social media junk, vidya and porn.

So i click on the link (of course with noscript and network graph enabled and general security precautions) and UHOH, already a first red flag: The link redirects to a plain http site with NOT username and password: But other fields called OGM and dossiernumer AND it requires you to fill in your age???
Filling in the received username and password obviously does not work and when inspecting the page... oh boy!

This is a clusterfuck of javascript files that do horrible things, i'm no expert in frontend but nothing from the homebrewn stuff i inspect seems to be proper coding... Okay... Anyways, we keep pretending we're dumbasses and let's move on.

I ask for the seemingly "new" credentials and i receive new credentials again, no tokenized URL. okay.

Now Once i log in i get a horrible looking screen still made in the 90's or early 2000's which just contains: the claimaint, a pie chart in big red for amount unpaid, a box which allows you to write an - i suspect unsanitized - text block input field and... NO DATA! The bailiff STILL cannot show what the documents are as evidence for the claim!

Now we stop being the pretending dumbassery and inspect what's going on: A 'customer portal' that does not redirect to a secure webpage, credentials in plaintext and not even working, and the portal seems to have various calls to various domains i hardly seem to think they can be associated with bailiff operations, but more marketing and such... The portal does not show any of the - required by law - data supporting the claim, and it contains nothing in the user interface showing as such.
The portal is being developed by some company claiming to be "specialized in bailiff software" and oh boy oh boy..they're fucked because...

The GDPR requirements.. .they comply to none of them. And there is no way to request support nor to file a complaint nor to request access to the actual data. No DPO, no dedicated email addresses, nothing.

But this is really the ham: The amount on their portal as claimed debt is completely different from the one they came for today, for the sae benefactor! In Belgium, this is considered illegal and is reason enough to completely make the claim void. the siple reason is that it's unjust for the debtor to assess which amount he has to pay, and obviously bailiffs want to make the people pay the highest amount.

So, i sent the bailiff a business proposal to hire me as an expert to tackle these issues and even sent him a commercial bonus of a reduction of my consultancy fees with the amount of the bailiff claim! Not being sneery or angry, but a polite constructive proposal (which will be entirely to my benefit)

So, basically what i want to say is, when life gives you lemons, use your brain and start making lemonade, and with the rest create fertilizer and whatnot and sent it to the lemonthrower, and make him drink it and tell to you it was "yummy yummy i got my own lemons in my tummy"

So, instead of ranting and being angry and such... i simply sent an email to the bailiff, pointing out various issues (the ones

Alright lads here is the thing, have not been posting anything other than replies to things cuz I have been busy being miserable at school and dealing with work stuff.

Our manager left us back in February. Because she was leaving I decided that I wanted to try a different path and went on to become a programmer analyst for my institution, if anything I knew that it was going to be pretty boring work, but it came with nice monetary compensation and a foot in the door for other data science related jobs in the future. Thing is, the department head asked me to stay in the web technologies department because we had a lack of people there and hiring is hard as shit, we do not do remote jobs since our work usually requires a level of discretion and security. Thus I have been working in the web tech department since she left albeit with a different title since I aced the interview for the analyst position and the team there were more than happy to have me. I have done very few things for them, some reports here and there and mostly working directly with the DBA in some projects. One migration project would have costed my institution a total of 58k and we managed to save the cost by building the migration software ourselves.....honestly it was a fucking cake walk, if you had any doubts about the shaddyness of enterprise level applications regarding selling overpriced shit with different levels of complexity, keep them, enterprise is shaddy af indeed. But I digress.

I wrote the specification for the manager position along the previous manager, we had decided that the next candidate needed to be strong with development knowledge as well as other things as to properly understand and manage a software team, we made the academic requirement(fuck you, yes we did ask for academic requirements) to be either in the Computer Science/software engineering area or at least on the Business Administration side. We were willing to consider BA holders in exchange for having knowledge of the development process of different products and a complete understanding of what developers go through. NOT ONE SINGLE motherfucker was able to satisfy this, some of them were idiots that I knew from before that had ABSOLUTELY no business even considering applying to the position, the courage it took for some of these assholes to apply would have hurt their mothers, their God if they had one, and their country, they were just that fucking bad in their jobs as well as being overall shit people.

Then we had 1 candidate actually fall through the cracks enough to get an interview. My dude here was lying out of his ass through the interview process. According to him he had "lots of Laravel experience and experience managing Laravel projects" and mentioned repeatedly how it would be a technology that we should consider for our products. I was to interview him alongside the vice president of our institution due to the head of my department and the rest of the managers for I.T being on vacation leave all at the same bloody time.

Backstory before the interview:
Whilst I was going over the interview questions with the vice president literally offered me the job instead. I replied with honesty, reflecting how I did not originally wanted him but feeling that our institution was ready to settle on any candidate due to the lack of potentials. He was happy to do it since apparently both him and the HOD were expecting me to step up sooner or later. I was floored.

Regardless, out of kindness he wanted to go through the interview.
So, going back to the interview. As soon as the person in question referenced the framework I started to ask him about it, just simple questions, the first was "what are your thoughts on the Eloquent ORM? I am not too fond of it and want to know what you as a full time laravel dev think of it"
his reply: "I am sorry I am not too familiar with it, I don't know what that is" <--- I appreciated his honesty in this but thought it funny that someone would say that he was a Laravel developer whilst not knowing what an ORM was since you can't really get away from using it on the initial stages of learning about Laravel, maybe if one wanted to go through the hurdle of switching to something like doctrine...but even then, it was....odd.

So I met with the hod when he came back, he was stoked at the prospect of having me become the manager and I happily accepted the position. It will be hell, but I don't even need to hit the ground running since I have been the face of the department since ages. My team were ecstatic about it since we are all close friends and they have been following my directions without complaints(but the ocational eat a dick puto) for some time, we work well together and we are happy to finally have someone to stop the constant barrage that comes from people taking advantage of a missing manager.

Its gonna get good, its gonna get fun, and i am getting to see how shit goes.

OKAY BUT WHY THE FUCK DO PEOPLE HAVE TO ACT LIKE THEY'RE SOME KIND OF GOD WHEN THEY CAN'T EVEN PASS AN INTRO CLASS. Some background: I go to an early college in high school program which offers computer science where you take two college classes a semester starting you junior year in high school. AND THIS GIRL TALKS ABOUT THIS PROGRAM LIKE IT'S AWFUL AND SHE HATES IT AND HOW THE PROFESSORS DON'T TEACH AND SHE FAILED AN INTRO TO PROGRAMMING CLASS WHICH TEACHES JAVA BUT THEN SHE ACTS LIKE SHE'S WAY ABOVE THE OTHER KIDS IN MY CLASS BECAUSE SHE'S RETAKING IT. SHE'S ALSO A STUDENT ASSISTANT IN MY CYBER SECURITY CLASS BUT DOESN'T KNOW WHAT THE localhost IP IS. I UNDERSTAND THAT I DON'T KNOW EVERYTHING BUT AT LEAST I DON'T ACT LIKE I DO. IT'S SO INFURIATING!!!!!!

Me: I'm a computer major along with an added specialisation in Information Security. So besides learning code and software development, we also do a variety of security related stuff like penetration testing and so on.

Others: Oh great that means you must know how to hack Facebook.

*makes me flip every time*

Omg how stupid some people are... Today at my university I used the first time one of the computers in the computer room and there is a portable Firefox installed in a shared space on the computer and that is also where it saved settings etc. So this is the same for every user on that particular computer.

And when I checked the security settings I found that about 10 different accounts were saved and accessible with website username and password.

So of course the shared space Firefox is bad, but you still shouldn't save you password on a public computer :S

PS: If anyone needs a webmail account or an account for the german university network contact me :P

Client contacts our company that his site is down, we do some investigating and the only way we can access the site is on a mobile phone. From the office computers the site never loads and times out. Since we don't host the site and I've never logged into it before I don't have a lot of details so I suggest they contact whoever hosts their site. This is where things get weird.

Client tells me that the site is hosted on someone's home server. I tell him that this is quite strange in 2018 and rather unlikely and ask if he was ever given access to the site to log in or if he has access to his domain registration, GoDaddy.

He says he doesn't understand any of this and would rather I just contact his current developer and figure it out with him. We agree that he needs to get access to his site so we are going to migrate it once I get access to it.

I email his current developer letting him know the client has put me in contact with him to troubleshoot the issues with the site. I ask him some standard questions like: where is the site hosted? Can you access it from a computer? Do you have some security measures in place to block certain IP ranges? Can you give me from access to get the files? Will you send me a backup of the site for me to load up on my server?

*2days pass*

Other dev: Tell me the account number and I'll transfer the domain.

Me: I'll have to get back to you on that once I talk to the client and set up his GoDaddy account since we believe the business owner should own their domain, not their developers. In the meantime you didn't answer any of the questions I asked. Transferring the domain won't get the site on my server so I still need the files.

*3 days pass*

OD: You are trying the wrong domain. The correct domain is [redacted].com I'll have my daughter send you the files when she gets in town. We will transfer the domain to you, the client will forget to pay and the site will go down and it'll be your fault.

Me: I appreciate your advice, but the client will own their domain. I'm trying to get the site online and you have no answered any of my questions. It's been a week now and you have not transferred the domain, you have not provided a copy of the site, you have not told me where the site is hosted. The client and I are both getting impatient at this point when will we receive a backup of the site and the transfer of the domain?

OD: Go fuck yourself, tell the client they can sue me.

If the client is that terrible, wouldn't you want to hand them off to anyone willing to take them? I have never understood why developers and agencies try to hold clients hostage by keeping their domain or website and refusing access. From what I can tell this is a freelance developer without a real company so a legal battle likely isn't going to go well since the domain is worthless to him as the copyright to the name is owned by the client. This isn't the first time we've had to help clients through this sort of thing.

Had network and computer security presentation just now, they had windows xp... :D

Windows 10 updates. I see many posts about singular events that people have experienced, so I thought I'd try to sum up all the problems I have had.

Home computer, always on:
Is scheduled to update during 'inactive hours' but the options for that window are too narrow. So almost daily the 'required updates' overlay pops up WHILE I'M DOING STUFF and I have to say 'Ok' then close the update settings window that opens automatically so I can get on with what I'm doing.
Now, if I'm just browsing, writing or something like that, it's just really annoying.
But when I'm gaming and it causes the game to freeze up (because, you know, ubisoft and ea and such) and I lose my progress, that pisses me off.
When I'm hosting movie night with my friends and the movie gets interrupted, that pisses me off.
Even when I'm just trying to relax with a good show after a hard day and THAT gets interrupted, it really bugs me.
And then when there's a major update and I don't want to schedule it right away, they decide that I probably meant 'do it in an hour'. And then a message pops up every hour with only the option to postpone one more hour. What happened to all the options for scheduling it for several days in the future? Nope! Can't decide? We'll do it RIGHT NOW, NO TAKEBACKS, THAT'S FINAL!
I cannot fathom that they can't find a way to ACTUALLY do the 'inactive hours' thing.

And then there's the work computer. For the last two years, that has been a laptop that I shut down and take home every day. The common problem with that is that it always tells me it has to update when I want to shut down for the day because I have to go home. I can't leave the pc turned on in my bag, it would overheat. So since there is no option to shut down without updating anymore, I have had to rely on the fact that using the power button to shut down circumvents the update.
And if I don't remember to update at home, it's then going to waste my time the next morning at work.
Just give me the option to delay for a bit, then remind me NON-INTRUSIVELY so I can do it when I have the time.
And then there was the update that prevented the machine from booting and I had to waste TWO working days reinstalling EVERYTHING! And we were about 6-7 people hit by that update in our organization.

So yeah. Windows updates are a real fucking problem. Yes, I wan't critical fixes for security problems and other serious software flaws.
But the current policy of 'fuck you, we're doing this' is just not fucking acceptable in any way.

Let's talk about the cargo cult of N-factor authentication. It's not some magic security dust you can just sprinkle onto your app "for security purposes".

I once had a client who had a client who I did server maintenance for. Every month I was scheduled to go to the site, stick my fingerprint in their scanner, which would then display my recorded face prominently on their screens, have my name and purpose verified by the contact person, and only then would the guards let me in.

HAHA no of course not. On top of all of that, they ask for a company ID and will not let me in without one.

Because after all, I can easily forge my face, fingerprints, on-site client contact, appointment, and approval. But printing out and laminating a company ID is impossible.

---

With apologies to my "first best friend" in High School, I've forgotten which of the dozens of canonicalisations of which of your nicknames I've put in as my answer to your security question. I've also forgotten if I actually listed you as my first best friend, or my dog - which would actually be more accurate - and actually which dog, as there are times in my High School life that there were more tails than humans in the house.

I have not forgotten these out of spite, but simply because I have also forgotten which of the dozen services of this prominent bullshit computer company I actually signed up for way back in college, which itself has been more than a decade ago. That I actually apparently already signed up for the service before actually eludes me, because in fact, I have no love for their myriad products.

What I have NOT forgotten is my "end of the universe"-grade password, or email, or full legal name and the ability to demonstrate a clear line of continuity of my identity from wherever that was to now.

Because of previous security screwups in the past, this prominent bullshit company has forced its users to activate its second, third, and Nth factors. A possibly decade-old security question; a phone number long lost; whatever - before you can use your account.

Note: not "view sensitive data" about the account, like full name, billing address, and contact info. Not "change settings" of the account, such as changing account info, email, etc. Apparently all those are the lowest tier of security meant to be protected by mere "end of the universe"-grade passwords and a second factor such as email, which itself is likely to be sold by a company that also cargo cults N-factor auth. For REAL hard info, let's ask the guy who we just showed the address to "What street he lived in" and a couple others.

Explaining this to the company's support hotline is an exercise in...

"It's for your security."

"It's not. You're just locking me out of my account. I can show you a government ID corroborating all the other account info."

"But we can't, for security."

"It's not security. Get me your boss."

...

"It's for security."

I don't want new features or updates anymore. Almost every OS gets bloated with new features I don't want, while also breaking backwards compatibility and a working setup.
Phone? Apps not compatible anymore since update or just disappearing from the phone.
Computer? Often unstable updates, and since this has happened many times before I try to delay updates as long as possible but then caves in from the annoying update notifications.
Would love to get security updates, but come on, stop it with the bloat apps. Let me just uninstall the features I don't want and let me opt in instead. Make it possible to build extensions and plugins to customize behaviour. Why does software have to spoil like this?

Ranting kinda

I'm studying for a CEH certification so I can enter a computer security competition that my school is holding, and I have to cram the whole subject in my head.

Before anyone asks why, I have a great interest in the subject and its fun to learn the problem is the amount I have to learn in such little time

My teacher also wanted me to enter so I could go up against the guy who almost placed in nationals last year, and he thinks I can do it, many people do. looking at it realistically if I crammed it all and reviewed I could place in regionals which is the goal.

Wish me luck if you read all of that!..

When I was in 11th class, my school got a new setup for the school PCs. Instead of just resetting them every time they are shut down (to a state in which it contained a virus, great) and having shared files on a network drive (where everyone could delete anything), they used iServ. Apparently many schools started using that around that time, I heard many bad things about it, not only from my school.
Since school is sh*t and I had nothing better to do in computer class (they never taught us anything new anyway), I experimented with it. My main target was the storage limit. Logins on the school PCs were made with domain accounts, which also logged you in with the iServ account, then the user folder was synchronised with the iServ server. The storage limit there was given as 200MB or something of that order. To have some dummy files, I downloaded every program from portableapps.com, that was an easy way to get a lot of data without much manual effort. Then I copied that folder, which was located on the desktop, and pasted it onto the desktop. Then I took all of that and duplicated it again. And again and again and again... I watched the amount increate, 170MB, 180, 190, 200, I got a mail saying that my storage is full, 210, 220, 230, ... It just kept filling up with absolutely zero consequences.
At some point I started using the web interface to copy the files, which had even more interesting side effects: Apparently, while the server was copying huge amounts of files to itself, nobody in the entire iServ system could log in, neither on the web interface, nor on the PCs. But I didn't notice that at first, I thought just my account was busy and of course I didn't expect it to be this badly programmed that a single copy operation could lock the entire system. I was told later, but at that point the headmaster had already called in someone from the actual police, because they thought I had hacked into whatever. He basically said "don't do again pls" and left again. In the meantime, a teacher had told me to delete the files until a certain date, but he locked my account way earlier so that I couldn't even do it.
Btw, I now own a Minecraft account of which I can never change the security questions or reset the password, because the mail address doesn't exist anymore and I have no more contact to the person who gave it to me. I got that account as a price because I made the best program in a project week about Java, which greatly showed how much the computer classes helped the students learn programming: Of the ~20 students, only one other person actually had a program at the end of the challenge and it was something like hello world. I had translated a TI Basic program for approximating fractions from decimal numbers to Java.
The big irony about sending the police to me as the 1337_h4x0r: A classmate actually tried to hack into the server. He even managed to make it send a mail from someone else's account, as far as I know. And he found a way to put a file into any account, which he shortly considered to use to put a shutdown command into autostart. But of course, I must be the great hacker.

Well, throughout my life I've never really thought about programming. Then one day during some downtime on a backpacking trip with a friend, while I had nothing to do my friend sat there with his computer with the screen all dark, filled with funny colourful text in lines of different length, with some lines even starting more towards the middle of the page than to the left, almost following a vertical wave pattern. He said he was writing a program to control his home remotly as well as working as a security feature that could unlock his home automatically when he got home. I was amazed by the colorful text as well as the fact that he could just create this crazy program out of nothing.
Half a year later I attended my first lecture at the computer science programme. My first program was a command line tool used for baking bread. It asked you how much flour you'd use and how many eggs, then it'd tell you wether or not you'd got the correct ratio. I was blown away by the intuitive nature of programming. I could imagine the control flow as a tree or flow chart in my head. I mean the whole program was only a couple of user inputs followed by an if-statement and a print-statement, but for me it was awe inspiring. I knew then that I'd probably chosen the right path in education.

*leaning back in the story chair*

One night, a long time ago, I was playing computer games with my closest friends through the night. We would meet for a whole weekend extended through some holiday to excessively celebrate our collaborative and competitive gaming skills. In other words we would definitely kick our asses all the time. Laughing at each other for every kill we made and game we won. Crying for every kill received and game lost. A great fun that was.

Sleep level through the first 48 hours was around 0 hours. After some fresh air I thought it would be a very good idea to sit down, taking the time to eventually change all my accounts passwords including the password safe master password. Of course I also had to generate a new key file. You can't be too serious about security these days.

One additional 48 hours, including 13 hours of sleep, some good rounds Call of Duty, Counter Strike and Crashday plus an insane Star Wars Marathon in between later...

I woke up. A tiereing but fun weekend was over again. After I got the usual cereals for breakfast I set down to work on one of my theory magic decks. I opened the browser, navigated to the Web page and opened my password manager. I type in the password as usual.

Error: incorrect password.

I retry about 20 times. Each time getting more and more terrified.

WTF? Did I change my password or what?...

Fuck.

Ffuck fuck fuck FUCKK.

I've reset and now forgotten my master password. I completely lost memory of that moment. I'm screwed.

---

Disclaimer: sure it's in my brain, but it's still data right?

I remembered the situation but until today I can't remember which password I set.

Fun fact. I also could not remember the contents of episode 6 by the time we started the movie although I'd seen the movie about 10 - 15 times up to that point. Just brain afk.

So today a colleague confessed to an attempt to troll my computer by SSHing into it and playing random songs. Thankfully he did not manage but he would just happen to do it the day we have a security audit.

So, the Network I was on was blocking every single VPN site that I could find so I could not download proton onto my computer without using some sketchy third-party site, so, being left with no options and a tiny phone data plan, I used the one possible remaining option, an online Android emulator. In the emulator running at like 180p I once again navigated to proton VPN, downloaded the windows version, and uploaded it to Firefox send. Opened send on my computer, downloaded the file, installed it, and realized my error, I need access to the VPN site to log in.

In a panic, I went to my phone ready to use what little was left of data plan for security, and was met with no signal indoors. Fuck. New plan. I found a Xfinity wifi thing, and although connecting to a public network freaked me out, I desided to go for it because fuck it. I selected the one hour free pass, logged in, and it said I already used it, what? When?, So I created a new account, logged in, logged into proton, and disconnected, and finally, I was safe.

Fuck the wifi provider for discouraging a right to a private internet and fuck the owner for allowing it. I realize how bad it was to enter my proton account over Xfinity wifi, but I was desperate and desperate times call for desperate means. I have now changed my password and have 2fa enabled.

Of course, I just swiped the wrong way on my fucking laptop trackpad and list everything I just typed. FUCKING MARVELOUS.

TL;DR: Teacher stopped me from being productive. Principal almost called cops on me. Nearly threw chair at librarian.

So I'm at school yesterday, and we have a presenter in 2nd hour, so naturally, I'm gonna be on my computer doing things for other classes at the same time. Efficiency. Teacher doesn't like it, I refuse to put the computer away telling her that I'll be more productive and still pay attention, which HAS BEEN PROVEN MIND YOU, but she ends up calling security on me and I get sent down to the principal's office.

I talk to him, and he says 'Yeah, I know it's in the way, but you have to follow the directive given by the teachers.' Fine, fuck it. Won't go to her class for third hour. (I have her twice in a row for two different classes.) Next day.

I walk in, asking her if she's gonna do the same thing she did yesterday, hoping that she realized her error and will fix it, but no. She says I STILL can't have the computer out. I'm sorry, do you not realize I have 6 other fucking classes, most of which are required to graduate, unlike YOURS, as well as a FUCKING COLLEGE CLASS TONIGHT?! She gives the ultimatum. 'Obey or leave.' Fine, I'll leave. I go to the principal's office again, he must have a stick up his ass or something today because he's not budging. We argue for a while and he gives a WORSE ultimatum: 'Obey, Go to the Library, In House Suspension, or I'll call the police.' What the actual FUCK MAN?! You're gonna call the POLICE on a NONVIOLENT STUDENT?! Are you fucking MAD? I keep trying to tell him that there's an easy solution to this, but as he's getting up to call the cops, I say 'Fine! I'll go to the library!' He follows me over to make sure I don't kill anyone on the way.

I slam the door to the library open, and when I walk in, the librarian is there at her computer, and she asks 'Where are you coming from?' 'Principal!' 'I need a pass-' 'Well, I'm sorry, I can't exactly get anything for you right now, I was just sent down here.' She says 'Either way, I need some kind of note or pas-' 'Listen, I'm not in the mood for any of this right now. Please, just leave me be.' She then tries to say something, but I cut her off quickly, 'Just back off and leave me alone right now. The more you push it, the more you're gonna make me want to throw this chair!' Imagine the volume just gradually getting louder on that last one. She quickly runs out and talks to the security desk or something, which is right outside the library door, but she's the only one who comes in, thankfully. I was expecting to be fucking dragged out for no good reason. I'm loud, not violent. I have no history of violence.

So yeah. Here I am in the school library, angrily tapping away at my keyboard, trying not to throw the entire table to the fucking moon. All because this broken-ass public school system has no idea how to deviate from the norm when it's actually productive and efficient to do so. And now, the obligatory:

FUCKING PIECES OF SHIT WHY DON'T YOU REALIZE THAT YOU ARE COMPLETELY WRONG IN EVERY SINGLE THING YOU ARE DOING YOU IDIOTIC SCUM-FILLED MEAT SACKS OF NO FORSEEABLE VALUE! FUCK!

Fucking windows.... Let's go back about 20 days earlier first day in February I had the genius idea of updating my windows and it did actually update except 2 of them failed..... But I was like alright then don't matter and disabled updates for Windows....... Next day I found a program called windows 10 update assistant installed and running a background download....... I was bothered by this but it's no big deal but what's FUCKING stupid is that it fails after a while downloading (I have 1.6 Mb/s download speed but it's limited to 200 GB a month which mostly stays) when it fails it doesn't stop instead when I restart my computer it starts the same program and keeps downloading in the background and then failing for 15 days.

I've tried disabling the updates but it just ignores that and enables them, also tried uninstalling the program windows 10 update assistant but it reinstalls itself!

The problem is that the only thing the website mentioned is that some versions are not supported by security updates, but they don't mention what I could do when it keeps failing.

"Grub installation failed would you like to try again or continue without a bootloader?"

I was like well why in the burning hell would you even touch the bootloader on a completely different drive then you are installed on.

Boy, never was I so wrong...

That motherfucker deleted the windows bootloader and I've tried everything to get it back. Even tried to restore the whole frickin boatloader from scratch, with no success.

Best I could do was to make a pendrive with the bootloader on so I can boot up that shit. Four days have passed and still no luck in fixing it.

Well I guess I will call this a security feuture. If you don't insert the correct thumb drive you couldn't access the computer.

TL;DR: Microsoft updates break drivers, make unbootable. Hours wasted. Such rage.

Lol. I come home, try booting my windows desktop. Need desperately to play some videogames. Power is on. Monitor lights up. Bios splash. Windows startup spinner.

Suddenly, windows startup spinner gone, monitor shuts off. Wait 5 minutes, no change. Force power off and reboot, same behavior.

Google says it's probably a bad video driver. I don't remember installing any in the last month, but heck I don't use this computer for shit outside of games, so may as well do a full OS reinstall and hope the problem drivers are gone.

Reboot and force power off halfway through boot to let windows know something's wrong next boot. Literally no other way to get to alternate boot methods.

Run the reset. First time, percent-counter starts. I leave the room at 30% to go get a sandwich. Come back and it says it's "undoing changes". Something went wrong and I have no way of knowing what.

Oh well, I'll just try again and see what the problem was. NOPE! Completes windows reinstall without a hitch on the second attempt.

Okay, now let's get my stuff back on here. First things first, Microsoft updates for my processor, graphics card, "security". Halfway through the updates, monitor shuts off and I'm back to square one. IT WAS THE MICROSOFT DRIVER, NOT THE ONE FROM NVIDIA GEFORCE EXPERIENCE!!!!

Fucking Microsoft. To all ye who rail against Linux as a gaming platform because of its unstable drivers, observe here the stupidity of Microsoft and weep.

I had a coworker that NEVER restarted his computer or installed updates of any kind. Any time he showed me some code I got distracted by the "new updates are available" popup that was always there in his IDE.

I can't even imagine the backlog of critical security updates that were waiting to be installed when we left after 3 years.

Dependency hell is the largest problem in Linux.

On Windows, I just download an executeable (.exe) file, and it just works like a charm! But Linux sometimes needs me to install dependencies.

At one point, I nearly broke my operating system while trying to solve dependencies. I noticed that some existing applications refused to start due to some GLIBC error gore. I thought to myself "that thing ain't gonna boot the next time", so I had to restore the /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/ folder from a backup.

And then there is a new level of lunacy called "conflicting dependencies". I never had such an error on Windows. But when I wanted to try out both vsftpd and proFTPd on Linux, I get this error, whereas on Windows, I simply download an .exe file and it WORKS! Even on Android OS, I simply install an APK file of Amaze File Manager or Primitive FTPd or both and it WORKS! Both in under a minute. But on Linux, I get this crap. Sure, Linux has many benefits, but if one can't simply install a program without encountering cryptic errors that take half a day to troubleshoot and could cause new whack-a-mole-style errors, Linux's poor market share is no surprise.

Someone asked "Why not create portable applications" on Unix/Linux StackExchange. Portable applications can not just be copied on flash drives and to other computers, but allow easily installing multiple versions on a system. A web developer might do so to test compatibility with older browsers. Here is an answer to that question:

> The major argument [for shared libraries] is security, that if there is a vulnerability in a commonly-used library, then only that library has to be updated […] you don't have to have 4 different versions of a library installed

I just want my software to work! Period. I don't mind having multiple versions of libraries, I simply want it to WORK! To hell with "good reasons" for why it doesn't, and then being surprised why Linux has a poor market share. Want to boost Linux market share? SOLVE THIS DAMN ISSUE!.

Understand that the average computer user wants stuff to work out of the box, like it does in Windows.

TLDR: I need advice on reasonable salary expectations for sysadmin work in the rural United States.

I need some community advice. I’m the sysadmin at a small (35 employee) credit card processing company. I began as an intern and have now become their full time sysadmin/networking specialist. Since I was hired in January I have:

-migrated their 2007 Exchange server to Office 365

-Upgraded their ailing Windows server 2003 based architecture to 2012R2

-Licensed their unlicensed VMware ESXi servers (which they had already paid for license keys for!!!) and then upgraded them to 6.5 while preventing downtime on hosted VMs using tricky transfers and deployments (without vMotion!)

-Deployed a vCenter server to manage said ESXi servers easier

-Fixed a three month gap in their backups by implementing Veeam, and verifying its functionality

-Migrated a ‘no downtime’ fileserver to a new hypervisor host, implemented a ‘hot standby’ server as a backup kept up to date by the minute with DFS replication.

-Replaced failing hard drives in a RAID array underlying their one ‘business critical’ fileserver, which had no backups for 3 months at that time

-Reorganized Active Directory and Group Policy deployment from a nightmare spiderweb of OUs and duplicate policies

-Documented the entire old network and now the new one as I’ve been upgrading this

-Audited the developers AWS instances and removed redundant machines, optimized load balancing on front end Nginx servers, joined developer run Fedora workstations to the AD domain and implemented centralized syslog monitoring on them.

-Performed network scans and rewrote firewall exceptions to tighten security

There’s more, but you get the idea. I’ve now been tasked with taking point on an upcoming PCI audit which will be my first.

I’m being paid $16/hr US, with marginal health benefits. This is roughly $32,000 a year, before taxes.

I have two years previous work experience managing a third party Apple repair facility (SimplyMac) and every Apple certification for warranty repair and software troubleshooting. I have a two year degree in general sciences, with about 4 years of college credit (Two years of a physics education and two years of computer science after I switched focus) I’m actively pursuing a CCNA and MCSA server 2016 with exams paid for and scheduled.

I’m going into a salary negotiation in two months. What is a reasonable salary to request, from your perspective, for someone in my position?

Thanks in advance!

Start with it at age 4, learn children to protect themselves on the internet, but also show them the possibilities. It's not something I expect this generation to properly teach the next one

And name it something like Computer Security

!rant
Recently I started to be interested in how code actually work. I do a for-loop or an if-statement but how do they actually work at the lowest level.

Another thing I've been interested in is security. I thought about learning how to hack my own systems in order to learn how to write more secure code and keep people out. But I'm a little afraid that as soon as I start look at how to hack, the police will storm through the window and take my computer 😂😂

!rant

I'm a computer engineering student.
I'm very much interested in Systems and networking.
That's why I was thinking of persuing cyber-security as a career option.
But I'm not quite sure if that is a good choice.
Also I don't know how to proceed in order to achieve excellence in cyber-security.

It would be a great help if you guys could help me.

Thanks :)

hi devrant!

about six months ago i posted that i was accepted into and starting at a coding bootcamp. next week is the last week of curriculum for me before i can choose to be a teachers assistant or finish my capstone project and graduate!

some basic info about the course i took:

- 6 months (3 months web dev 2 months CS 1 month capstone project )
- starts by learning the MERN stack
- includes noSQL and SQL dbs
- transitions into C and then python for computer science
- includes basic security info
- lots and lots of algorithm practice
- lots of job readiness stuff (resume writing, linkedin, etc, but i havent done that yet)
- lots of portfolio-able projects throughout the schooling experience
- previous cohorts have something like 40% (after 1month) and 70% (after two) job placement rates (rough estimate)

let me know if anyone is curious about anything related and id be happy to answer what questions i can! :)

Today, carrying my dinner to a table in our universities cafeteria, I passed by the table of a professor. He had a book on his table titled "Hacking Handbook". It contains chapters on httrack, ping, port scans and the like (I checked that on Amazon).

The professor drank a coffee, then got up to get some food. His table was directly next to the wall separating the food corner from the tables. He stayed away from his computer for two or three minutes. Both table and computer where totally out of his field of vision during that time. His computer was not locked and Outlook was open.

The professor teaches IT security.

TLDR; WINE+me=system binaries gone. (HOWTHEFUCKDIDIDOTHAT) Kernel panic. Core program files gone. I'll never have it fixed right. Will backup, then install fedora tomorrow.

I really like games and I'm sure there are many of you who can relate. Imagine my perpetual pain, being on the job hunt, no money, and only my Linux laptop for games. (It's only Linux because of a stupid accident and a missing windows installation disk, partly explained in a previous rant). My stack of games my dad and I have played over the years, going back to populous and before, looked light enough for my laptop to run them smoothly. I wanted to see if I could get one to work. My eyes settled on simcity 4 and Sid Meier's railroad tycoon, 13 and 10 years old, respectively. Simcity didn't work as many times as I tried following online instructions. Disk 1 went fine. Disk 2 showed up as Disk 1. Didn't think much of it, so long as the computer could read the contents. I downloaded playonlinux as that could apparently do the complex stuff for me. Didn't work. I gave up with it after an hour and a half.

Next was railroads. Put the disk in aaaand it says SimCity disk 1 is in the tray. Fuck right off, thank you very much. Eject, put back, reject, eject, fiddle in wineconfig, eject, more of this, and voilà it read as railroads :) Ran autoplay.exe with wine, followed instructions, installed it, and it worked! Chose single player, then the map and setting, pressed play, and all the models of the buildings and track were floating in the air over a green plane, the UI is weird and the map doesn't represent anything but trains. All the fkin land is gone, laying track is gonna be a ballache.

I quit it and decided bedtime.
Ctrl+alt+t
sudo shutdown -h now
shutdown not found.
sudo reboot
reboot not found
Que?
Nope, I don't like this.
Force choked my laptop by the power button. Turned it on again.
Lines of text appear.
Saw a phrase I've only ever seen on Mr Robot.
Kernel panic.
Nooooo thanks, not today, this is fiction.
I turned it off and on. Same thing. I read the logs and some init files couldn't be found. I got the memory stick I used to install mint in the first place and booted from that. I checked the difference between my stick's bin and sbin and the laptop's, and it was indeed missing binaries. Fuck knows what else has happened, I only wanted to play games but now I don't know what is or isn't in my computer. How can I trust what's on it now?
I go downstairs and tell my dad. He says something about rpm, but this is Linux so it won't work. I learn that binaries can be copied over, so maybe I can fix it.
Go upstairs again, decide not to fix it. Fedora is light, has a good rep for security, and is even more difficult to get games on, which is my vice. There are more reasons, but the overriding one is that I'm spooked by the fact that something I did went into and removed system binaries, maybe even altered others, so I want something I'm less likely to do that with. Also my fellow cs students used to hate on it but my dad uses and recommended it so I want to try it.

Also, seriously, fuck wine/PlayOnLinux/my inability to follow instructions(?)/whatever demons haunt me. Take your pick, at least one if not more is to blame and I can't tell which, but it's prooooobably the third one.

It's going to be 16 hours before I touch my laptop again, comments before I backup then install fedora are welcome, especially if they persuade me to do differently.

P.S thanks for reading this mind dump of a post, I'm writing while it's fresh but I'm tired AF.

Hello everyone !
I am a self taught programmer. Currently in last semester in electronics engineering. I want to become a software developer but can't decide the right career path for me to take. I like back end, Android, Data structures and algorithm, Parallel programming, Machine learning and computer vision, and even security. I am afraid I will remain the jack off all trades and won't be the master of any. This way I won't be doing any good in my career. Any advice as what to do ?

Malwares are nasty applications, that can spy on you, use your computer as an attacker or encrypt your files and hold them on ransom.

The reason that malware exists, is because how the file system works. On Windows, everything can access everything. Of course, there are security measures, like needing administrator permissions to edit/delete a file, but they are exploitable.

If the malware is not using an exploit, nothing is there to stop a user from unknowingly clicking the yes button, when an application requests admin rights.

If we want to stop viruses, in the first place, we need to create a new file-sharing system.

Imagine, that every app has a partition, and only that app can access it.

Currently, when you download a Word document, you would go ahead, start up Word, go into the Downloads folder and open the file.

In the new file-sharing system, you would need to click "Send file to Word" in your browser, and the browser would create a copy of the file in a transfer-partition. Then, it would signal to Word, saying "Hey! Here's a file that I sent to you, copy it to your partition please!". After that, Word just copies the file to its own partition, signals "Ok! I'm done!", and then the browser deletes the file from the shared partition.

A little change in the interface, but a huge change in security.

The permission system would be a better UAC. The best way I can describe it is when you install an app on Android. It shows what permission the app wants, and you could choose to install it, or not to.

Replace "install" with "grant" and that's what I imagined.

Of course, there would be blacklisted permissions, that only kernel-level processes have access to, like accessing all of the partitions, modifying applications, etc.

What do you think?

Under the guise of being security conscious, our section had a informal "doughnut charter" whereby if you leave your computer unlocked and someone managed to send an email to the section (cc'ing you) shouting everyone doughnuts then you must comply with the "promise". I was referred to at the time as the "god of email" and everyone knew not to do it to me or I would retaliate. This is because it happened once before. In that case, I set up a secure hidden rule in the person's email so that if they received a doughnut email they would automatically send a doughnut email from them... this also meant it was possible to trigger it at any time. They quickly begged for it to be removed. From then on, no dared touch my unlocked computer. When we got a new boss he was informed of the charter and was repeatedly warned not to 'doughnut' me but one day he ignored the warnings. In his case I set up a rule so that if he sent any email, he also sent out a doughnut email as well. Over the next four days he sent sooo many doughnut emails... He went from happy, to frustrated, to angry and then simply desperate. No one dared tell him I was my doing... He eventually came out of his office and begged for it to stop... Seeing his desperation, I stopped it. He was very appreciative but never put two-and-two together (that his actions caused it). He didn't find out till three months later that I was the one who did it to him. That was the second and last time I was ever doughnut'd.

So after waiting 3 days for an ID to get into a computer, I'm now told it's going to take 12-14 hours before I can do online security training just so I can actually start working. I'm only at this job for a month and I'm not going to even touch any real work at this rate...

Oh well, at least I'm paid by the hour, not by the amount of work

Is there a way to sign code for free (or atleast not need to pay over £200 for it)? Im a student and cant really afford much but I have been working on a website and made an electron build for it, however downloading the installer prompts the user to discard it in chrome, then running the installer prompts the user to select do not run in the windows security thingy as its from another computer.

What would be the best way around this if I cant get a certificate for it?

I'm a computer science student who is finishing up a year long internship tomorrow, based in Melbourne Australia. I'm going into my final year now and have been looking into other software engineering jobs to do alongside studies.

I have been fortunate enough to be offered a full-time position, leaving me with the decision of putting studies on hold (temporarily or indefinitely) in order to take this job, or to decline and continue with my studies.

Wondering if anyone has been in a similar situation or can give some insights into having a degree vs real world experience.

Some additional info:

From my internship I have a year of commercial/industry experience from a large multinational company.

I have 6 units left on my degree (4 in semester 1 and 2 in semester 2).

The job I have been offered has growth potential and job security. The salary offered is also higher than what I expected.

Let me know what you all think.

in the workplace, i have no access to internet, am not admin to my own computer and am not allowed to install anything (due to security reasons). i also happen to have quite some spare time so i'm writing nokia's good old snake game in visual studio and opengl so i can amuse myself both coding and playing. in a way, company pushes creativity and productivity even for slacking.

Aside from simple programs I wrote by hand-transcribing code from the "Basic Training" section of 3-2-1 Contact magazine when I was a kid in the '80s, I would say the first project I ever undertook on my own that had a meaningful impact on others was when I joined a code migration team when I was 25. It was 2003.

We had a simple migration log that we would need to fill out when we performed any work. It was a spreadsheet, and because Excel is a festering chunk of infected cat shit, the network-shared file would more often than not be locked by the last person to have the file open. One night after getting prompted to open the document read-only again, I decided I'd had it.

I went to a used computer store and paid $75 out of pocket for an old beater, brought it back to the office, hooked it to the network, installed Lunar Linux on it, and built a simple web-based logging application that used a bash-generated flat file backend. Two days later, I had it working well enough to show it to the team, and they unanimously agreed to switch to it, rather than continue to shove Excel's jagged metal dick up our asses.

My boss asked me where I was hosting it, as such an application in company space would have certainly required his approval to procure. I showed him the completely unauthorized Linux machine(remember, this was 2003, when fortune 500 corporations, such as my employer, believed Ballmer's FUD-spew about Linux being a "virus" was real and not nonsense at all), and he didn't even hesitate to back me up and promise to tell the network security gestapo to fuck off if they ever came knocking. They never did.

I was later informed that the team continued to use the application for about five years after I left.

I’d been working event based and freelance jobs in the security and entertainment fields for years, with odd stints as a bartender sprinkled in. My pay was mostly decent, but I had no job security, and I was more on the road than at home. A few years before this job search experience I had already realised I can’t continue on this path for ever, especially if I ever want a serious relationship (e.g. 16 weeks straight touring Europe with on avg. 16h work days pretty much every day isn’t ideal in that regard, and also really though on both body and mind). So I decided to study. As I applied in autumn, not every line of study accepted students. The closest to my interest I found was BBA in Business IT.

Fast forward 1,5 years. After moving away from my previous base due to then-gfs studies, I had also been able to accept less work. Well, there were really two reasons: I didn’t want to go on weeks long big tours anymore, and I’d had to price up on my freelance job due to reasons. I still managed to keep our household going, but not knowing when the next paycheck would be available was becoming a little too stressful. I wanted job security. So a few weeks after my wedding I scoured the internetz for positions I could apply to, and applied to a dozen or so places. They were a variety of positions I had a vague understanding of from what I’d learned at UAS: from sales to data analytics to dev… I was aware pretty much all of the applications were a long shot by best, so I expected to be ghosted…

Two of the organizations I applied to wanted to go forward with me. Both dev jobs. I can’t even remember the specifics of the other one anymore, but I do remember the interview: I got in to their office (which was ridiculously open), and got marched into a tiny conference room. The interviewer was passive-aggressive and really bombarded me with questions, not really leaving a socially awkward introvert with any time to answer. I started to get really anxious and twitchy, sweating like a pig. Just wanted out. But nooo, they wanted me to do a coding test live. So they sat me on a computer with Eclipse open, gave me an assignment and told me not to use the internet. What’s even worse is that I could literally feel the interviewer breathing down my neck when I tried to do the test. Well, didn’t happen cause I was under so much pressure that I couldn’t think at all… yeah, that was horrible.

Anyhow, the other position I really applied to because it was in my hometown and I recognised the company name from legendary commercials from the 90s - everyone in this country who watched TV in mid-to-late 90s remembers those. Anyway, to my surprise, my present day manager contacted me and wanted me to do a coding test. At the time he asked I was having a bout of fevers after fevers, not really able to get healthy. I told him that I’d do it as soon as I’m healthy. A month went by, maybe more. He asked again. Again I replied that as soon as I get healthy, but promised to do it next week the latest. I didn’t deliver on that, but the next week after that, even if I was the most feverish I had been, I did the tests. I could only finish half of them, cause I couldn’t look at a screen for long at a time and had to visit the loo every 10min or so, but apparently that was enough. Next week I was already going to the interview… oh I also googled what is PHP on the way there, since it was mentioned as a requirement and I had no idea what it was. Imagine that…

The interview itself couldn’t have been more different from the other one. We were sitting in a nice conference room with my manager and the product’s lead dev, drinking coffee, our feet on the table and talking smack. Oh, and we did play a game of NHL<insertNumber> on PS4 during the interview… it was relaxed. Of course the more serious chat was there, too, but I can only really remember how relaxed it was. When I left the interview, I had been promised the position and that I would be sent the contract to be signed as soon as the CEO had reviewed and approved it. Next day, I had signed it and some time later I started at my current job (I gave a date when I was available to start, since there was a tour still agreed upon between the interview and the start).

Oh, and the job’s pretty much like the interview. Relaxed. It’s a good place to be in, even though the pay could be better (I regularly get offers for junior positions with more pay, and mid level positions with double the pay). I do value a pleasant working environment and the absence of stress more than big munny, what can I say?

I know I'm a bit late with this, but I thought I'd share it anyway.
A few years ago me and my friend were messing around in computer class and I decided to look at the network devices.
I couldn't believe, what I saw. All of the school security cameras were there, and the best part: when I connected to their ip addresses, they were just showing the live feed, no password or anything.
I didn't really do anything with it since I couldn't think of any great ideas and it has since been fixed.
Technically not hacking but still somewhat related.

I'm studying computer security and learning Linux on my free time, yet at my work I spend most my time in MS Excel and PowerPoint... what even is my life

The near future is in IOT and device programming...
In ten years most of us will have some kind of central control and more and more stuff connected to IOT, security will be even a bigger problem with all the Firmware bugs and 0-day exploits, and In 10 years IOT programmers will be like today's plumbers... You need one to make a custom build and you must pay an excessive hour salary.
My country is already getting Ready, I'm starting next month a 1-year course on automation and electronics programming paid by the government.

On the other hand, most users will use fewer computers and more tablets and phones, meaning jobs in the backend and device apps programming and less in general computer programs for the general public.

Programmers jobs will increase as general jobs decrease, as many jobs will be replaced by machines, but such machines still need to be programmed, meaning trading 10 low-level jobs for 1 or 2 programming jobs.

Unlike most job areas, self-tough and Bootcamp programmers will have a chance for a job, as experience and knowledge will be more important than a "canudo" (Portuguese expression for the paper you get at the end of a university course). And we will see an increase of Programmer jobs class, with lower paid jobs for less experienced and more well-paid jobs for engineers.

In 10 years the market will be flooded with programmers and computer engineers, as many countries are investing in computer classes in the first years of the kids, So most kids will know at least one programming language at the end of their school and more about computers than most people these days.

The importance of not using static salt / IVs.

I've been working on a project that encrypts files using a user-provided password as key. This is done on the local machine which presents some challenges which aren't present on a hosted environment. I can't generate random salt / IVs and store them securely in my database. There's no secure way to store them - they would always end up on the client machine in plain text.

A naive approach would be to use static data as salt and IV. This is horrendously harmful to your security for the reason of rainbow tables.

If your encryption system is deterministic in the sense that encrypting / hashing the same string results in the same output each time, you can just compile a massive data set of input -> output and search it in no time flat, making it trivial to reverse engineer whatever password the user input so long as it's in the table.

For this reason, the IVs and salt are paramount. Because even if you generate and store the IVs and salt on the user's computer in plaintext, it doesn't reveal your key, but *does* make sure that your hashing / encryption isn't able to be looked up in a table

I'm founding a company on machine learning with two others where one of them is an economics guy who decided his work was boring so he did his PhD in Engineering.

He started about three months ago to also invest some time in computer and dev stuff.

As a free software and Linux guy I wanted to get clear about stuff like open sour...

Economics guy: "We should definitely make all of that stuff open source to give back to the community."

Me: I love you. I truely do.

The same thing happened with security, svn etc.

I mean... Well... So unexpected! o.O

I am a web-dev wannabe marketing person. I was locked up in mental ward twice because I often get paranoid way too much about security issues that might never happened to me. Last time I even refused to use hexcode because I believed that my computer is being used for someone's crypto mining. I am still scared of node.js,CDN and googlefont or TIFF, pdf files, and many other things that I don't understand perfectly.

It's always breathtaking, cliffhanging, and thrilling session when I'm working on something with my computer. My heartbeat gets faster, my palms gets sweaty when I start to type <script>. It's like when you watch horror movie, or wearing seatbelt on roller coaster before the session begins. You are frightened but excited at the same time. 🤤

I recently joined DevRants, and with me joining any new site or media where you can share I am usually the guy who is shy and likes to sit back and watch/read. However I wanted to post a question as I am trying to get a job within the Cyber Security field. I have a computer science degree and honestly I feel like I can't even code at a level I should be able to. I am also currently working/studying for my CompTIA Security+. It has been going good but, I always second guess myself and doubt my abilities. I guess this a a slight rant and question so far.

My question is how can I better improve both my skills (coding, linux, and security) and also my mental. I would say its imposter syndrome but I don't have a job so I don't think it would be fair to say it is. I just want to break into the job field and show people that if given the help and resources I can excel at the task given. I do learn fast and pick things up pretty good. Any help/recommendations is much appreciated, and I look forward to more talks.

I'm a bit frustrated. I'm 23 and I finished a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering last 2015. Working on a career path in cyber security. Is it normal to just understand and test the concepts and not fully memorize everything? It really bothers me that I feel I don't know anything despite developing small tools, testing other people's work, reading about related topics and playing with Kali.

A few months back I tried to get the company I work for to invest in software to located and recover lost/stolen devices. I brought a few offerings to the table but I was told we didn't need to worry about that because it never happens and we already have software in place.

Fast forward a few months and I'm looking at the software we're using and it seems we haven't actually configured the computers to allow for tracking. I send a message to our CTO about this and point out that, in the event of a missing device, we can't actually relocate it. Not 5 minutes later a manager comes in to let us know that his computer is missing and may have been stolen because his car was broken into the previous night.

Well I'm laughing because this is just the kind of thing I needed to happen, and the manager is freaking out because he's afraid the CEO is going to be furious. I get a few emails from other members of the leadership team requesting we set up a meeting to go over our security and asset protection procedures.

So I finally get to start implementing some actual security protocols around here. And fortunately the lost laptop was actually recovered because it was left at a bar and not in the car when it was broken into.

"Dear TitanLannister : You are in the final year. A lot of shit is happening around u. its now time to make a career and take tough decisions. What would you do?"

CHOICE 1: COMPETITIVE
>>>>background : "a lot of super companies like wallmart, fb, amazon, ms, google,.. etc simply takes a straight coding test for fresher placement. They ask tough bad ass level questions, but with right guidance, a hell ton of dedicated hours of coding, and making it to the top of various coding tests could make you a potential candidate"
>>>>+ve points :
- "You got the teachers and professionals with great experience to guide you"
- "a dream job come true.you can go there and join teams that interests you"
- "it was your first exposure to computer world. maybe you would like doing it again, after 4 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You have always been an average 70 percentile guy. The task requires 2000-3000 hours of coding an year. it will be hard and you always grow bored out of this pretty quickly"
- "Even If you did that , you stand a lesser chance because your maths is shitty.There are millions running in this race with brains faster than your IDE"
- "your college will riot with you because they expect 75% attendance"
- "You are virtually out of college placements, in which , even though shitty companies come and offer even shittier 4LPA packages($6000 per annum), would take a tough logical/aptitude based test for which you won't be able to prepare"

CHOICE 2: PROFESSIONAL WORK
>>>>background: "you always wanted to create something , and therefore you started taking android based courses. you have been doing android for over 2 years and today you know a lot of things in android. you might be good in other professional lines like web dev, data analytics, ml,ai, etc too if you give time to that"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will love doing this, you always did"
- "With the support of a good team, you will always be able to complete tasks and build new things quickly"
- "Start ups might offer you the placement, they always need students with some good exposure"
>>>>-ve points :
- "Every established company which provides interesting dev work takes their first round as coding, and do not considers your extra curricular dev work. So you are placing your all hopes in 1 good start up with super offerings that would somehow be amazed by your average profile and offer you a position"
- "start ups are well, startups and may not offer a job security as strong as est. companies"
- "You are probably not as awesome dev as you think you are. for 2 years, you have only learned the concepts , and not launched more than 1 shitty app and a few open source work"

CHOICE 3: NON CODING
>>>>background: "companies coming in college placements have 1-2 rounds of aptitude,logical reasoning , analysis based questions and other non tech tests. There are also online tests available like elitmus,AMCAT, etc which, when cleared with good marks help receive placements from decent established companies like TCS, infosys, accenture,etc"
>>>>+ve points :
- "you will eventually get placed from college, or online tests"
- "there will be a job security, as most of these companies bonds the person for 2-3 years"
>>>> -ve points:
- "You really don't like this. These companies are low profile consultant/services based companies which would put you in any area: from testing to sales, and job offers are again $5000-6000 per annum at max"
- "Since it includes college, the other factors like your average cgpa and 1 backlog will play an opposing role"
- "Again, you are a 70 percentile avg guy. who knows you might not able to crack even these simple tests"

Ugh... I am fucking confused. Please be me, and help.The things that i wrote about myself are true, but the things that i assumed about super companies, start ups or low profile companies might not be correct, these points comes from my limited knowledge ,terrified and confused brain, after all.
:(

Sometimes wondered how the avalanche effect works on hashing a message,tried making mine but was shit, I guess I need a PhD in maths lol

I have a small NUC-like machine in my home with an old external hdd connected to it. I use it to run my local gitlab, nextcloud and to test a few websites I build for the lolz.
If you too have a homelab, whether it's a single raspberry or an entire room full or racks, you know damn well that everything you have running locally as a web service keeps going until it doesn't, for whatever fucking reason. This time, it was the turn of my nextcloud.
The machine has arch linux running, I chose it since I already use it on my coding laptop and being a rolling release means I don't have to manually upgrade to a newer version, risking various fuck-ups and consequent screaming of profanity.
The downside is that arch is a bleeding-edge distro, so, despite being pretty good for what concerns security, as updates are pushed out some packages may still require legacy software to work as intended, since obviously not all developers for all packages can release simultaneously.
The problem was that php reached 8.2.x but nextcloud couldn't use anything beyond 8.1, so the highlighted solution was to download php-legacy, a package with a set of utilities which the cloud could use instead of mainline php.

Pretty easy, right? fuck my life, here we go.

I edited apache-httpd's configurations to link the new libraries, updated every reference in every virtual host that could possibly screw up the web server.

Done.

Then I went on and disabled the php-fpm mainline, creating a new systemd unit that would instead run the legacy executable and afterwards I edited nextcloud's additional configs so they use that instead.

Done, getting a bit dizzy, but I reboot everything and breathe.

At this point the migration should be complete, but wait, the server returns an error saying that the application is still trying to use php 8.2+...wait, what in the sysadmin Christ?

Back to nextcloud config, everything is set, everything else in every other fucking php-legacy and web server is fine, the old fpm service is disabled, I am confused, and why in the FUCKING FUCK is the new php-fpm unit failing to start at boot with "error 78/config - directory not found"? Hello? Am I being trolled by a shitty dual-core amazon fake NUC?
Maybe yes, cause it turns out that the unit was referencing a directory in the external hdd, which gets mounted at boot time after the unit itself starts, so nothing much, just a matter of tinkering with cron jobs, a reboot and at least this one is off my balls.

But why still isn't the server responding correctly? why? WHY?

After slamming my cock on the keyboard here and there scrolling back through all the config files I think to myself, hmmm, my gitlab is working flawlessly, well yeah, I didn't need to install the whole web stack, everything was nice and easy wrapped in a docker container...so why am I even here, why the fuck am I bothering with all this layered web-app bullshit, why don't I just run the up-to-date docker image that someone else has already set up for me, back up all the data and reupload them on the application?

Oh joy, you can't imagine, after 3...almost 4 hours of pure computer-touching the relief I had from seeing the blue web page with the "welcome to nextcloud" title.

Right now it's copying back all the files, and the external hdd is now linked to include the data folder.
Like really, everything was solved in two lines of bash.

I am still fuming, but at least I learned a valuable lesson, if you want a service up for yourself, implement it and deploy it as fucking easy straight-forward as you can, giving MAXIMUM priority to already fully-working options that are out there just waiting to be downloaded and used. I swing my scrotal sack on web-apps elegance as long as it's MY homelab in MY place.

Eat a fat dick php.

sudo pacman -Rns nextcloud
sudo systemctl disable --now php-fpm-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns php-legacy
sudo pacman -Rns $(sudo pacman -Qdtq)

In college, during Novell's heyday, I was working on my Certified Network Administrator certification (totally worthless, in retrospect). As I was becoming an expert in all things Novell, I found a security flaw. Using Visual Basic it was possible to code up an exact replica of the Novell login screen that launched at boot time from a batch file stored on a floppy. You could log peoples' usernames and passwords all day as long as they didn't realize your floppy was in the drive, which worked in certain computer lab setups on campus. I wasn't in it for stealing info or being a criminal. I just did it for the lulz. But if I had gained access to a few of the right computers in admin offices on campus, I could've gotten access to anyone's student profiles and grades.

That moment when you in Computer Security Management and the Professor shows you the different between

Alt+ Tab and Windows + Tab.

Professor: did you guys know about these shortcuts?
Me: of course how else do I code, write a post and check one on Stack Overflow, Google help on a code, check my work email for the boss response, and see how the codes runs on a browser?

I'm learning Kotlin while trying out Android Things and that sparked my interest in learning more about Java platform again. I tripped upon the news that Oracle had change their commercial plans for the platform by going with the rolling release model and limiting LTS releases for paying customers.

Java SE 8 was one of those former LTS releases that was on my computer, leaving me vulnerable, despite that version still being the most compatible with many applications, and that's been on my computer well passed the date they cut off public support. And I'm, like, "WTF!?"

Luckily this is when open source shines at it's brightest. Both the home brew and corporations, such as Amazon and IBM, alike - mostly the latter - both agreed to create their own LTS releases using the OpenJDK code and all disturbing to the public FOR FREE with no strings attached and the sources opened. I'm sure Richard Stallman is smiling with glee.

It isn't a total finger towards Oracle. Java SE is based on OpenJDK with no difference between the two anymore aside from loss of LTS support from the public - that's it. So Oracle still benefits despite the retaliation. Probably?

Did Oracle learn nothing from OpenOffice? If the point was to get users to pay for security then they've failed in the long run because Java is open source. People have used that fact to create their own free distributions that bypass their paywall, making the need to go through Oracle pointless. And I'm glad. Open source aside, security is a big issue these days and the last thing people need is yet another thing to subscribe too.

finally found what was messing up with virtualbox. the problem? bank security module. also my computer is much faster now 😑

What are good resources to keep up with the latest developments on the field of computer security?

One of our senior colleagues in my last project at TCS had brought a pen drive with him, not sure why! He worked on a client system, which he believed was not monitored by TCS. So what he did was, he plugged in the pen drive in his computer and tried to copy some files from his pen drive to the computer. However, he wasn’t able to copy the files.

We weren’t aware of this until our project manager, who sits at the farthest end of the ODC shouted at the top of his voice, calling out his name. In front of the entire ODC, he was scolded since the HR team had called the manager informing that the machine assigned under this employee’s name has detected a security breach.

He had to explain the reason; where he said he wanted to copy some codes that he had to office machine in order to reduce his manual effort, which was probably very silly of him! For the next few days I hardly saw him inside the ODC, probably had to visit people to show cause or other things and was harrassed by our manager, insulted every time he passed by him.

He was not suspended although, maybe the manager or someone else saved him, although normally such violations would have seen him terminated.

I think the thing that sucks about high school (or school in general, really) is that they don't really have many opportunities for the people that like to program or do anything with computers.
The only classes that have to do with computers at all (In my high school) is Intro to Programming (Which is what I'm taking, which has HTML, CSS and JavaScript), some computer science classes and finally the Cyber-patriot team. (Which is for Navy ROTC and it consists of Cyber Security, competitions and actual Linux computers).
The only few of eight classes I find actually interesting is Intro to Programming, NJROTC, and Plant Science. (Because not only the subjects, but the teachers (and Sergeant) actually make it fun, interesting and easy to understand, while the rest don't feel like they're doing a good job.)

I use to have a very slow computer so i google search how to speed it

It came with a .bat script that refresh the ram, after that i wanted to know how that script had work.
And 11ish years later is my life and career

And, yeah, at that time i didn't care about security and why you shouldn't run a script without know what does it do 😅

Also, that script get lost forever in my broken old computer

Hey all. So I'm a bit of an aspiring developer/engineer. I am in highschool right now and am getting to the point where I should start looking at colleges. Ive wanted to do something computer related and for a while now ive had my heart set on some sort of security engineer/tech/researcher what have you. But it has been pointed out to me that computer sciences often require several high level math courses namely Calc. Problem being I'm pretty bad at Calc and haven't been able to do too well.

I'm not too sure what I should do. I'm struggling with my highschool calc classes and and fear that college level course will just go over my head. Ive never had issues with math before until I got to Calc. Ive got some of the basics of cryptography such as hashes and cryptographic alorithms but thats about it. Do computer science degrees really rely that heavily on Calc?

Looking at colleges on summer break between learning python and some projects can't decide between computer science and cyber security as a major 😰 why can't I choose

Dell with Windows 10 and security tools. worst computer ever. it crashes every night and when I log in in the morning the security tools freeze and I have to hard boot the machine and repeat about 10 times

I'm fucking tired of my computer having random
2 seconds latency on any basic action and being slow as fuck regardless of powerful processor, ssd and 32GB RAM. Music via bluetooth is basically unusable since every few seconds the music stops for a 0.2s then plays again. I installed this system (opensuse tumbleweed) in February this year and it's just sad that I have reinstall again (any ideas for distro) ?

I made a dummy mistake of buying a CPU without internal graphics and this resulted in having to buy a GPU. So I got myself Nvidia(another mistake) since i though i would be using CUDA on the university. Turnes out CUDA cannot be installed for some retarded reason.
With Nvidia GPU the screens on my two monitors are swapping every time I use a hdmi switch to use other computer. On AMD GPU this problem does not exist. AMD GPU pro drivers are impossible to install. Computers barely fucking work, change my mind. Shit is breaking all the time. Everything is so half assed.

The music player that i use sometimes swaps ui with whatever was below it like for example the desktop background and i need to kill the process and start again to use the program. WTF.

Bluetooth seems to hate me. I check the bluetooth connected devices on my computer, it says headphones connected. BULLSHIT. The headphones are fucking turned OFF. How the fuck can they be connected you dumbass motherfucker computer. So I turn on the headphones. And I cannot connect them since the system thinks that they are already connected. So I have to unpair them and pair them again. WTF. Who fucking invents this bullshit?
Let's say i have headphones connected to the computer. I want to connect them to phone. I click connect from the phone settings. Nothing happens. Bullshit non telling error "could not connect". So I have to unpair from computer to pair to phone. Which takes fucking minutes, because reasons. VERY fucking convenient technology.
The stupid bluetooth headphones have a loud EARRAPE voice when turning them on "POWER ON!!! PAIRING", "CONNECTED", "DISCONNECT". Loudness of this cannot be modified. The 3 navigation buttons are fucking unrecognizable so i always take few seconds to make sure i click the correct button.

Fucking keyboard sometimes forgets that I remapped esc key to caps lock and then both keys don't work so i need to reconnect the keyboard cable. At least it's not fucking bluetooth.

The only reason why hdmi switches exist is because monitor's navigation menus have terrible ui and/or infrared activated, non-mechanical buttons.
Imagine the world where monitors have a button for each of it's inputs. I click hdmi button it switches it's input to hdmi. I click display port button - it switches to display port. But nooo, you have to go through the OSD menu.

My ~ directory has hundred of files that I never put there. Doesn't feel like home, more like a crackhead crib.

My other laptop (also tumbleweed) I click on hibernate option and it shuts down. WTF. Or sometimes I open the lid and screen is black and when i click keyboard nothing happens so i have to hold power button and restart.

We've been having computers for 20 + years and they still are slow, unreliable and barely working.

Is there a cure? I'm starting to think the reason why everything is working so shitty and unreliable, is because the foundations are rotten. The systems that we use are built with c, ridden with cryptic abbreviated code, undefined behavior and security vulnerabilities. The more I've written c programs the more convinced I am, that we should have abandoned it for something better long ago. Why haven't we? And honestly what would be better? Everything fucking sucks. The rust seems to be light in the tunnel but I don't know if this is only hype or is it really better. I'm sure it can't be worse than c or c++. Either we do something with the foundations or we're doomed.

Ok so I'm parts UI/UX designer in a corporate setting so I use graphic editing software like Photoshop rather extensively.

Obviously, I'm confronted to a lot of admin rights restrictions, which is to be expected.

What I'd like to know is why the f*** does ADDING A FONT in W10 require admin rights ?

What's potential security loophole could one exploit using TrueType font installation exactly ? Or are they afraid someone's going to remove all system fonts from the Fonts folder ? Anybody that does that shouldn't be allowed access a computer afterwards.

Though I’ve seen devices like the following I’ve only ever seen them used for horrible purposes.

I was envisioning facility control being made capable by the use of a larger tablet device or tablet computer. The device would have no internet connection. It would not attach to the outside world at all.

It would not receive non manual software updates

It could view all air flow, temperature, lights, locks, electrical outlets, power draw, water usage, heaters, air conditioners, computer statins etc
And control and report statistics on them all.

Impractical you people said last time. But I would say cool if the device is kept super secure . That being said who knows how to do that since everything sucks once someone who knows what they’re doing has physical access lol

Personally all I don’t know how to break into is smart phones
Comps I could always figure out even if they had disk encryption given enough time.

The only reason phones are hard is you’re limited to network attacks and the boot loader is on the chip page.

Cause in the end a computer is just it’s hard drive in terms of security lol

Hey guys, i have problem with local security authority process (win 10) it is in system32 folder and it is called lsass.exe ... it is just burning my pricessor and i can not kill process, because it turns off my computer.. any solution? i am mad :(

the red haired girl and the blue haired girl.

there was this story about a programmer who spent years studying computer science before finally getting a job.

the dev studied only computer science and was put on blue team after a few days.

a few hours into one of the constant coding sessions, the boss told the devs that red team members and blue team members would be working in pairs.

the person from red team transferred the devs work to their data base without the dev knowing, then locked down the devs computer. the dev could not do anything. later, the dev got fired for not doing any work. after that, the company got millions of dollars, and the dev did not see any of it.

both the dev and the managers made a note not to hire any programmer who cannot secure their work.

it is not ethical to teach people programming without also teaching them cyber security.

computer networking, programming and security should all be the same major.

it is a bad idea to teach people how to build anything without telling them how to secure it.

the story above was just a scenario, but it probably happens way more often than people think.

Schools should teach both things in the same major.

Firstly give me the skill equivalent to the best in the field. If the rules allow it all of these skills listed and if not any of these :-
1. Computer networking to the point of having the same knowledge as the best in the field. Why? I am curious about that stuff and being able to work as a network engineer if I don't get a good Dev job

2. Cyber security. Why? I enjoy it and being able to make sure my code is not easily exploitable is a cherry on top. Also having a backup job in case I don't get a good dev job

3. Being able to communicate with non dev people about developer or non developer stuff easily and being a really good leader.

4. Being a good developer in whatever language I use and instantly being able to learn new programming languages and frameworks or libraries with ultra in depth information.

So idk how to start this but ... ohm the short version would be that I'm in a little life crisis because idk where my career should go, i know the basics (maybe a bit more) about it security, i know how to setup a nodeJs server from scratch, i know frontend dev. , swift, kotlin, java, C , R and a lot of useless frameworks but nothing of this I'm really good in (what's ok because im in my 3 semester) i just don't know where i should go.
I seriously love every aspect of computer science but i also know it make no sense for my future not to focus on one suspect.
Now how can i find out with way i want to go ?

Mongodb CEO and the developer who build this shit for brains interface should be tarred and feathered. Almost 90minutes in and I cannot connect to anything other than error codes. What in the actual fuck is your job other than to make it difficult for a "free tier" user to connect?
"connect ECONNREFUSED 127.0.0.1:27017"

Oh ok another 20 minutes of work and you give me a bland beige error code like "```TLS/SSL is disabled. If possible, enable TLS/SSL to avoid security vulnerabilities.```"... um ok how do I enable it for your site, your database or on my computer... oh wait you don't say shit do you?

So now I'm fully 81 minutes into this shit show and all I get for error codes are these really descriptive gems 'getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND cluster0.hudbd.mongodb 'dot' net` comes up if I choose `mongo` with "connection string scheme" above it or `bad auth : Authentication failed'