The DMZ

7:57 AM

@forest That's what I meant by "modem processor". I oversimplified.

8:45 AM

cat /home/mechmk1/motd

@forest This sounds to me like a guy who just has enough Linux knowledge to feel like he knows everything there is to know

@VipulNair In my opinion, this is what Sec.SE should be. More OS internals and less "How do I become 1337?"

@ConorMancone To me, it was if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] === 'POST')

Which leads me to the next PHP rant: Why on earth does PHP not support ENUMERATIONS?

Why not if($_SERVER.RequestMethod === RequestMethod.POST)?

Or even better: Make == the "sane" equals operator, and add a new operator ~=, which does type juggling

Aka, make potentially dangerous behavior something that users have to explicitly want

Have you heard of the concept of backward compatibility? Of not breaking existing code? If you change PHP to make it better, it will not be PHP anymore.
Python 3 was mostly backward compatible with Python 2 because of a tool to convert code from the previous version. The semantics of PHP is such a mess that one cannot build such a tool.
PHP is doomed and cannot be saved, deal with it.

@A.Hersean I am completely aware, but in regards to backwards compatibility, such changes could be introduced, one-by-one, with a new major version

I know that you are just ranting against PHP. Allow me to rant against those ranting against absurdity ;)

Breaking changes can be introduced in new major versions. And I am honestly disappointed that there were so few in PHP 7

@MechMK1 You can only go so far in your changes.

8:58 AM

Believe me, I fully understand that PHP will never be fine, and that many people suggested a lot better things than I did

@A.Hersean Sadly, yes.

I wish other web-focussed languages would be as easy to deploy as PHP

Aka. "copy a file into a directory"-kind-of-easy

@MechMK1 Like Python with Django?

I have way too little experience with Django

I really need to get into that more

But then again, I need to learn more about Windows Infrastructure, Reverse Engineering, Binary Exploitation, go to the shooting range more often, spend more time with my gf, paint my warhammer minis, etc....

As long as you do not need performance or scaling (which should be the case if you are using PHP), go for it.

I wish I could edit /etc/world/settings and change daylength to 72

I just want to do some fun little projects

@MechMK1 The others would change it too, nullifying your relative gain.

9:03 AM

My "server" is literally this: asrock.com/microsite/IntelX99

The more I think about it, the more I realize I just spend too much time at work and have too little time for my personal life

It's faster to learn Django basics than any of Windows Infrastructure, Reverse Engineering, Binary Exploitation.

Once my gf finally gets a job, I'll change to a 32 hour week

@A.Hersean I absolutely believe that, since if you know a few programming languages, learning a new one with similar paradigms is easy

@MechMK1 Yes, as long as you do not try to learn C++.

Did that once. Never again.

Seriously, what even is C++?

Whenever I look at really weird C++ code, I am internally asking myself why I don't just use C# for this

Because C# is not compiled to native code and depends on Windows.

9:08 AM

It depends on a runtime, not necessarily on Windows

Mono works really really well

It used to be unusable, and had bugs in stuff like Console.ReadLine(), but in the past years, Mono has become quite good

9:46 AM

@MechMK1 well security has a lot of flavours to it.But yeah the gist of "hacking" is diving deep into o.s internals and figuring things out.

@VipulNair Doesn't need to be OS internals. Can be web stuff too

Knowing how exactly Windows 7 handles keyboard input doesn't help when my task is to exploit a potentially unsafe web API

@MechMK1 i asked around about writing malwares and apparently game hacking is very closely related to it a guy told me

Are you refering to the Live Overflow video about why all speedrunners are cheaters? :D

And if not, it's a great video to watch

@MechMK1 havent seen that,A malware researcher told me this

@VipulNair Some would argue that cryptography would be the most important part of information security. They would be wrong IMHO, but crypto is still fundamental, and being a cryptographer does not leave much time to do other stuff

9:50 AM

It was about reverse engineering and finding specific points in the code

E.g. how to reliably detect that a specific event has occured (e.g. a specific level is being loaded)

@MechMK1 but no reversing in web stuff

security is vast i guess

and different skill set in each

learned lock picking(just the theory part) and it has more to do with actual practising and getting the feel with your hands than anything else

Computers are vast

Security is vast

My knowledge is but a drop in an endless sea of knowledge that I even barely begin to comprehend

Socrates was a wise man indeed. Probably would have been a good hacker too

haahahh

2 hours later…

Q: What if I don't know whether my program will be linked to a GPL library or not?

11:38 AM

Suppose a program uses an API which has two implementations: An MIT implementation which uses GPL libraries A newer version of it which no longer uses any GPL libraries Neither is distributed along with the program, one is already present on the system. I don't know which version the programs...

gpl

how often do these people feel the need to say "I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice"

At this point they may just create a script that prepends "I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice" to every answer.

It's honestly annoying how the vast majority of posts I see there are like "Well, I think, but I'm not a lawyer..."

If it's such a big deal, they should just put a disclaimer on the page like law.se did

2 hours later…

Rory Alsop

1:52 PM

@VipulNair that is only one flavour. There are many types of having that do not require OS knowledge. My own specialisations focused on network protocols and stacks, but not OS flavours at all.

@VipulNair yes, there is reversing in OS, app, web, anything

@MechMK1 that is definitely the fault of lawyers. In order to protect yourself from them, you need to ensure any message that could be interpreted as legal guidance has explicit instructions to not do that :-)

@RoryAlsop I just use "I'm not a lawyer, so I can't answer that" when a question has some "Is this legal?" notion to it