Navy story continued.
And continuing from the arp poisoning and boredom, I started scanning the network...
So I found plenty of WinXP computers, even some Win2k servers (I shit you not, the year was 201X) I decided to play around with merasploit a bit. I mean, this had to be a secure net, right?
Like hell it was.
Among the select douchebags I arp poisoned was a senior officer that had a VERY high idea for himself, and also believed he was tech-savvy. Now that, is a combination that is the red cloth for assholes like me. But I had to be more careful, as news of the network outage leaked, and rumours of "that guy" went amok, but because the whole sysadmin thing was on the shoulders of one guy, none could track it to me in explicit way. Not that i cared, actually, when I am pissed I act with all the subtleness of an atom bomb on steroids.
So, after some scanning and arp poisoning (changing the source MAC address this time) I said...
"Let's try this common exploit, it supposedly shouldn't work, there have been notifications about it, I've read them." Oh boy, was I in for a treat. 12 meterpreter sessions. FUCKING 12. The academy's online printer had no authentication, so I took the liberty of printing a few pages of ASCII jolly rogers (cute stuff, I know, but I was still in ITSec puberty) and decided to fuck around with the other PCs. One thing I found out is that some professors' PCs had the extreme password of 1234. Serious security, that was. Had I known earlier, I could have skipped a TON of pointless memorising...
Anyway, I was running amok the entire network, the sysad never had a chance on that, and he seemed preoccupied with EVERYTHING ELSE besides monitoring the net, like fixing (replacing) the keyboard for the commander's secretary, so...
BTW, most PCs had antivirus, but SO out of date that I didn't even need to encode the payload or do any other trick. An LDAP server was open, and the hashed admin password was the name of his wife. Go figure.
I looked at a WinXP laptop with a weird name, and fired my trusty ms08_067 on it. Passowrd: "aaw". I seriously thought that Ophcrack was broken, but I confirmed it. WTF? I started looking into the files... nothing too suspicious... wait a min, this guy is supposed to work, why his browser is showing porn?
Looking at the ""Deleted"" files (hah!) I fount a TON of documents with "SECRET" in them. Curious...
Decided to download everything, like the asshole I am, and restart his PC, AND to leave him with another desktop wallpaper and a text message. Thinking that he took the hint, I told the sysadmin about the vulnerable PCs and went to class...
In the middle of the class (I think it was anti-air warfare or anti-submarine warfare) the sysad burst through the door shouting "Stop it, that's the second-in-command's PC!".
Stunned silence. Even the professor (who was an officer). God, that was awkward. So, to make things MORE awkward (like the asshole I am) I burned every document to a DVD and the next day I took the sysad and went to the second-in-command of the academy.
Surprisingly he took the whole thing in quite the easygoing fashion. I half-expected court martial or at least a good yelling, but no. Anyway, after our conversation I cornered the sysad and barraged him with some tons of security holes, needed upgrades and settings etc. I still don't know if he managed to patch everything (I left him a detailed report) because, as I've written before, budget constraints in the military are the stuff of nightmares. Still, after that, oddly, most people wouldn't even talk to me.
God, that was a nice period of my life, not having to pretend to be interested about sports and TV shows. It would be almost like a story from highschool (if our highschool had such things as a network back then - yes, I am old).
Your stories?

Ah very good, it seems Windows has taken the liberty of putting a link to Edge on my desktop again. Just in case I had accidentally removed it or something.

Everyday I fell my soul being sucked by this job.

We have too much liberty and it's all scattered, every fucking project uses a different framework.

Everything is a mess, no one seems to care and I'm feeling like shit for being the only one that seems to care.

Every time I start job hunting I fell depressed because of this nonsense bullshit they call job requirements.

Just wanna run away from this mess and never look back.

A couple of months back we were discussing sh with a third party vendor for a very large ass fuck system that another department uses. I had been called into the meeting because the entire I.T department counts on me to at least act as an assessor to the many issues that other departments might have.

the department for which i was working with manages the databases that our institution uses, and in this particular question the DBA (my best friend mind you) was part of the meeting.

Mind you, issues that the third party vendor were having were all fixed by our DBA, and he had documented and mentioned these items to me as I provided assistance to him through the 3 weeks prior to this meetings. Once such case was that we needed a transitioning as well as intermediary system for some processes to happen from one DB to the other and a lot of other technical babble. Well, the DBA used to be an excellent (fuck you) VB developer who recently re-learned the language into .net. He had shown me many of his old programs and even by the limitations of the language they were elegant and fascinating. They really are and ya'll devrant fam know that I ain't one to hate on tech at all.

When the DBA explained how he went around some of the issues by generating programs that could assist him, he mentioned the tech stack, I had coached him into knowing that being descriptive about the tools he used would be beneficial to everyone else. While he mentioned VB.NET the vendor snickered and my boy got quiet.

Then I broke the silence, fuck you. "what was that?" and the dude said "nothing, sorry"
So I said "no no, I want to know, I am not going past this point until you, the dude getting paid over $100 an hour for something YOU couldn't fix explain to me the little hehe moment you had"

The mfker went silent. then explained how he was aware that people were moving past vb.net and shit like that, me "imagine that, someone used a tech stack that your ignorance thought obsolete to fix something you could not solve, even though we are paying you for it, were it me or in my hands, and mind you i have direct access to the VP so this foolishness might change, I would have cut you and your little sect loose months ago, I have no patience, or appreciation from leeches like you or the rest of the "professionals" that work for your company or other similar entities, much less, as you can see, my patience runs even less when you people snicker at the solutions that our staff has to take when you all slack"

The entire meeting was uncomfortable as high heaven.

Fuck you, if someone I know manages to run shit on fucking liberty basic then so fucking be it. I will slap you 10 fucking times over, and then fuck your girl, if you try to put someone else down for the tech stacks you use.

I hate neck beards, BUT I hate fake ass neckbeards ever more

*Colin Farrell in true detective mode: FUCK....YOU

What was your guys first programming language? Mine was a form of BASIC called Liberty BASIC :)

#include <rant>
Using angry standard;

Int main()
{
cout << "So my mom recently started "exploring the web". I'm sure you already know where this is going; she ended up signing up for a free trail of some diet pills with her credit card on some sketchy website. The website never sent any product but attempted to charge her card over $300 multiple times. My mom's bank noticed and froze the account. She has now opened an investigation with the banks fraud department and is awaiting response. I took the liberty of running a whois look up and found the companies website is held by GoDaddy and is hiding behind Domains by Proxy (GoDaddy's sysadmin hider). I'm angry that she's in this situation but I have no idea of how to uncover the real company behind the diet pills site." << endl;

Return 0;
}

Update !!
/**
I’ve been given the liberty to choose my job title by my HR,
Can you guys suggest a good one
**/

My current title is Sr. Product Engineer.

They have suggested product manager or technical manager , but I feel these sound bossy

/**
Any recommendations are welcome
**/

Twenty years ago today (I double-checked) my father bought me the Liberty Basic compiler for my 8th birthday, marking what I consider my first foray into programming.

Thanks to that, I'm a tired and moderately happy 50 year old man.

Happy birthday, hobby from hell. :)

With the recent attacks by governments and corporations on our freedom, I feel like this is more relevant than ever.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." (Benjamin Franklin)

Hi my dear fellow coders, I have a small request for you.

If you are among those coders who are working on microchipping people / quantum dot something, tracking people, classifying people, AI, ML or any other such software which is going to harm or cage us or take away our freedom. Please stop doing so.

Why I came out with this rant?
I myself am working on a covid-19 screening app which would rate people based on symptoms and if they seem high risk they would not be allowed to enter unless they do a covid-19 test. I am tracking their movement and the requirement is to restrict people’s movement.
My conscience says that this is incorrect and and I should not be a part of such things which take away the freedom and liberty of people.
I am stopping it now.

I reached out to a developer who's site was being contracted out to Amazon devs, because when their site launched it had a couple of security issues. This was his response:

"An additional thought/opinion... Just because a college freshman from Arizona wasn't too hungover to make the effort to notify us and take the liberty of classifying this as a security issue for us doesn't mean we need to take their word for it."

Today I could finally spend some time reviewing the merge requests an intern made (and I occasionally helped).

My god, I want to put it this months amount of work an, put it in a trash, burn it and rewrite it before the fire is gone.

5 small and unrelated issues. The intern used branches with the correct naming scheme, but IT'S A FUCKING STRAIGHT LINE BUILDING ON TOP OF EACHOTHER.

Oh ans also they took the liberty to update the dependencies and the language versions used. There was no issue regarding this. It's the first branch in the line and it was called "update_<dependency>" where they just upped the version numbers of everything and then COMMENT OUT all mentions of <dependency> so that it compiles at the very least.

Now today I spend most of my time reviewing the code by fixing that mess. Thanks to updates I had to update the CI and replace some libraries that are now incompatible. Tomorrow I can finally inspect the shit itself.

On a positive side node, I removed node as a dev dependency and the size of the node modules went down from 128mb to 18mb

I just wondered that big celebrities and politicians don't even have the freedom to fart whenever they want. Imagine, Putin holding his farts in, while he's discussing some important matter in his office.
It's a tragedy of fame.

I've been working at a consulting company (lone programmer) as a Web Dev for about 2 or 3 months and I'm now skeptical about quitting.

I have the liberty to use any technologies I want, unless we get something already using a certain stack. The atmosphere is great and I only work part-time. The problem is that they have me working like a hog on many different projects simotaneously and expect me to meet deadlines despite new projects coming in weekly. Again, I'm the only programmer here, nobody to help me out. I don't make a killing but the pay isn't too bad considering it's part-time.

I've also noticed that my programming activity has degraded since I started working. I feel like I'm slowly losing the motivation I once had to keep working on my personal side projects.

Any tips on what to do?

Got frustrated with some code the other day so I took the liberty of uploading a hurricane of custom emoji on our Slack instead.

Rushing to get a feature completed for a client presentation tomorrow has turned my Sass sheets into a nightmarish hellhole of classes, nesting, and questionable specificity. This is taking a huge liberty with "if it works, ship it."

Had a new assignment(in liberty basic) in my computer studies course:

Ask user for the name of their favourite cartoon character. Then have the name move across the terminal screen with a once second delay.

So I spent about 30 minutes trying to find some sort of delay function in liberty basic. Finally I stopped using a for loop and instead move that code into a subroutine and tried to use the timer to run it every second.

Didn’t work.

So I finally gave in and asked the teacher. He explains for loops to me(after thoroughly investigating my keyboard(which is the same as his) for the cap locks key) and then use a incrementing for loop to 500000 as the delay. Next he told me that it felt like a second and he left.

Later he checked up on me making sure I understood.

Ok, so currently in my Java course on Udemy we are going more in-depth into scope and visibility, and I'm currently doing the challenge for it.

So I'm doing it and the challenge is to have every single name of a variable or method be called 'x' (just to better understand scope and vis, he mentions how this is not a good practice AT ALL) with the exceptions of the classes and scanner var (but there is an optional challenge to also make them named x).

Now that I progressed into it, I noticed something. This challenge is literally making me make my code so DRY and outside-the-box-thinking that, what if, this could be a practice?

Not the naming everything in your code the same var name, but doing that at the start and then renaming the variables after coding. Because right now, I feel as though I am using SO MUCH less code than if I had the liberty of naming my classes, methods, and variables different things, it's actually kinda cool.

I'll attach my code from the challenge to this after by it really amazed me how well my code looked compared to my previous challenges and even personal projects!