The DMZ

MechMK1

04:28

Wow, the guy who asked that question was sure a genius

@FireQuacker Cool animation, but I'm not a crypto guy

Fire Quacker

@MechMK1 Obviously I didn't post it for you then :P

"For those who are interested..."

ThoriumBR

interesting

Fire Quacker

To be honest, I don't understand what's going on with it at all, but 4n1m4710n

MechMK1

I do find it interesting, I just don't get any use out of it

Very 1337

Also, give me a keyword for the song of the day please :D

MechMK1

05:16

Alright, then here is the song of the day:

Type O Negative - Paranoid (Black Sabbath cover)

►

Conor Mancone

09:38

@ThoriumBR I've used thinkpads for years too (although not nearly as many) and they've been pretty tough in my experience. But yeah... never trust kids.

My mother in law was once "watching" my (then) 1.5 year old. She put down her macbook and her drink and then walked away. The 1.5 hear old poured the drink over the keyboard. Completely fried the machine...

How's life in Austria @MechMK1?

MechMK1

10:05

@ConorMancone Well, leaving a 1.5 year old alone is...ehhh

@ConorMancone Surprizingly good. I have a really neat project this week

How're you doing yourself?

Conor Mancone

10:22

@MechMK1 Seems so obvious it's hardly worth saying but: I definitely enjoy it when my work is fun. Things should start settling down a bit at work soon. The security team here is effectively a service provider, providing the services the rest of the company uses to keep things secure. I was dropped into a new service they were trying to provide but which was never really finished

Right before I got there the team discovered that the disaster recovery system for this (soon to be) critical service was completely borked. Also, even though the service had never really been finished and was in more of a beta state, it was being used for critical production stuff. As you can imagine, this put everything in a very interesting state

we've been trying to get the disaster recovery side of it running again without also breaking the actual service, since doing so would be bad.

MechMK1

@ConorMancone "interesting" seems to be a strange word. "absolutely fucking awful" seems more appropriate :D

Also, in other news, I am now a 𝐂𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝔼𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕝 1338 𝖧𝖺𝖼𝗄𝖾𝗋

Conor Mancone

Really though, it's been a lot of fun

@MechMK1 lol, nice! Congrats, although I take that to mean that we no longer get to see the ridiculous questions that the CEH test asks :)

MechMK1

@ConorMancone I'm honestly glad to hear you are enjoying your new job!

@ConorMancone Sadly not, but I did have a "best of" compilation :D

I also made a puzzle, if you fancy solving it

Conor Mancone

Yup, I hope it works out for a long while

I'm hopping off in just a few but if you post it I'll come back to it later

MechMK1

May 6 at 14:56, by MechMK1

FE4C BFC1 0450 6E9A
CBB7 5CC5 DBAB A2EC
1065 07FA AAFE 0051
00C7 070C 684D A59D
B2CC B3A0 5A10 FF97
0DC0 8AA2 7CA4 2F7A
E154 8A8C FA80 6BC6
BFAF AA70 5011 1BA6
FFAD D19F 92E8 8C13
0557 69FE F9DC

@ConorMancone Yeah, I wish you the best!

And the official first hint to the puzzle is [io]base

Conor Mancone

10:30

lol! I'll totally try but this reminds me that I'm terrible at puzzles :)

MechMK1

I won't be like that and give another hint: U+2588

Anonymous

11:00

Hello.

Anonymous

Long time no see.

MechMK1

@J.J Yooooooo!

My man, how are you doing?

Anonymous

Heya :)

Anonymous

Burned out like fuck.

Anonymous

And very much missing my girlfriend.

Anonymous

11:02

You?

MechMK1

What happened?

I'm...well, I am as always. But now I am a 𝐂𝐞𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝔼𝕥𝕙𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕝 1338 𝖧𝖺𝖼𝗄𝖾𝗋

Anonymous

COVID happened, lol.

MechMK1

You missed a lot of posts of me going WTF at CEH content xD

Yeah, I thought about you and the concert you wanted to go to some time ago

Anonymous

I cannot be bothered to do anything security right now. I just want to sleep.

Anonymous

Hahahah, CEH :d

Anonymous

11:04

Yeah, I missed that concert. It got cancelled of course.

Anonymous

And my girlfriend is stuck in Palestine with her family which is great.

Anonymous

So I am just spending all my money on worthless shit to keep myself entertained lol. Built a new computer :D

MechMK1

Yeah, CEH was...it was a shitshow

@J.J I hope she'll be able to return soon :(

Anonymous

Is it actually as bad as the pictures of like the question where it calls Netcat a virus or whatever? :D

MechMK1

@J.J Same. I bought a VR headset in march

@J.J The exam itself was surprizingly better

A ton of questions were about specific flags of tools

Like "If you want to perform an nmap scan, but want to skip ports A through B and C through D, which flag would you use?"

Anonymous

11:07

Yeah... Me too. At least I've got my sisha pipe to remember her by, oh and there is a Palestinian restaurant still open near me so I still can have that just not her cooking :(

Anonymous

I was considering getting a VR headset too, but last time I used one I felt really sick afterwards so could be a giant waste of money.

Anonymous

Ugh, that sounds like hell.

MechMK1

@J.J I really hope the best for yo utwo

Anonymous

I never remember flags at all.

MechMK1

@J.J Really depends on the game. Games in which you canonically sit still and pilot something "feel" better to play

Anonymous

11:09

Thanks. It'll be fine it just sucks. She went to visit Palestine and then got stuck.

MechMK1

@J.J I do, luckily. But I'm sad the exam didn't have more substance

@J.J Yeah, it really sucks

Anonymous

I mean, I am not surprised the exam didn't have substance. That cert is notoriously bad.

Anonymous

Speaking of certs, I should have finished my OSCE by now but I literally gave up.

Anonymous

A month into lockdown in the UK my whole attitude just went to "fuck it".

Anonymous

I'll pick that up again in a few months, I suppose.

MechMK1

11:13

@J.J Yeah. I give it a 2 out of 5

And I'm sure you can do your OSCE when all of this shit is over

MechMK1

11:48

security.stackexchange.com/a/231466/163495

> I do not understand any of this, you clearly havent worded this for EVERYONE 2 understand eg people like me who didn't attend school on a regular basis, I can understand some of it but then I get to the parts where theres numbers and words I've never heard of this is unacceptable!!!

Yes, I too often struggle at the parts with the words

Conor Mancone

12:44

@MechMK1 lol, that's gotta be someone trolling, right?

MechMK1

Man, I wish. Either that or they're...well...mentally challenged

MechMK1

13:02

34

Q: How to get boss to stop using an anecdote during pitches that makes us look incompetent?

I work for a startup where we have to frequently pitch to customers and investors. I'm the most senior developer in experience, but I did not want the lead role so I could avoid most client meetings as I hate dealing with insane requests. My boss still brings me along anyway. During pitches, th...

management

AAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaあああああああああああああああああぁぁぁぁぁぁぁぁぁぁぁぁ

en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/AAAAAAAAA!

Conor Mancone

@MechMK1 Response to future bug report: The SQLi here is a feature, not a bug

MechMK1

@ConorMancone You may laugh, but I had this exact situation once

Conor Mancone

@MechMK1 That page is much more hilarious than it should be

MechMK1

@ConorMancone Absolutely!

This just made me go AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Conor Mancone

I'm not on the team responsible for handling bug reports, but I get to see all them anyway. It's fun!

We had one person who submitted 3 in a row which were all super low priority - stuff that is automatically excluded on must public bug bounty programs (we work with security researchers when they come by, but don't have a public bug bounty program). A few days later they emailed again and were like, "How much are you going to pay me for the first ones, because I've got some more critical ones I won't share until you deal with these first"

One of those times you want to respond with an email that smacks the person upside the head. "If you had actual high impact bugs you would have lead with them - not this garbage"

MechMK1

13:12

@ConorMancone Damn! S A V A G E

Conor Mancone

:) To be clear though, that wasn't actually the response

That's just what I wanted to say to them

MechMK1

Yeah, you have to be all polite and professional in business. You have to say "It's possible I didn't communicate this clearly" instead of "Jesus Christ, if your savannah ancestors would have been this fucking retarded, I would have this conversation with someone with an IQ above room temperature instead"

Conor Mancone

Staying polite and professional is something that (I think) I'm very good at, but there are times when I really didn't want to be...

Then again I'm sure we all have those stories

MechMK1

The least polite I have ever been was when a customer shit all over us, constantly missed deadlines, never knew what they wanted, and then had the fucking AUDACITY to demand more work for free

So I wrote them back and said "Dear Ms. Whatnot. I'm sorry to hear that you are not pleased with the report you have received. In the initial meeting you were informed that this project would be performed under severe time constraints, and due to multiple delays in the process of receiving documents necessary to perform the project, this time constraint was further amplified. As such, I consider the report delivered to you more than adequate.

Furthermore, as you are surely aware, the budget for this report was already overexhausted by a significant margin - a margin which your company has …

What I actually wanted to write is: "Are you fucking serious?"

Conor Mancone

13:31

My worst was very similar actually - a client who never paid their bill. We ran their server, but they had an "internal" mobile developer building their apps. The mobile dev was constantly demanding changes that the client wasn't going to pay for, so we just refused. Eventually the mobile dev asked for a meeting to come to an agreement so we could move forward and scheduled it for 10pm on a Sunday night.

I hopped on and they literally muted me and started a long tirade about how they needed me to stop saying no and just do what they wanted me to do. I managed to get through the meeting without cursing at anyone, but in the morning I told my boss that I would not be having anymore meetings or discussions with that engineer again

Then I let my boss handle all further communications, since in the morning I was even more angry than I was when the meeting ended.

MechMK1

Holy shit. If they had muted me and started berating me, I would have disconnected on the spot

Who the fuck do they think they are?

Conor Mancone

I honestly don't know why I didn't think of that at the time

MechMK1

I once did that with a doctor

Did I ever tell you that story?

ThoriumBR

@ConorMancone my 1yo likes to bash things on the floor to make noise... my wife put her chromebook on the floor because she only have 2 hands and had to grab something that was falling because of the 3yo... the 1yo seized the opportunity and I never saw a toddler going that fast towards anything. he grabbed the chromebook, lifted it high above his head, and I could grab it before he bashed it down...

MechMK1

@ThoriumBR I'm imagining a 1-year-old in a completely over-the-top montage teleporting to the chromebook

ThoriumBR

13:40

ever played Dishonored? It kinda blinked towards it...

MechMK1

Toddler: Omae wa mou shindeiru!
Thorium: Nani!?

ThoriumBR

I bought a blackview phone to my wife... it

it is heavy, looks like a transformer, but survived 2 years and counting without a scratch

I HEAVILY recommend it to anyone that have issues with broken phones. it's not the fastest, lightest and with the best screen, but a pristine mid-range beats a top android with a shattered screen and scratched camera lens

MechMK1

@ThoriumBR Fun fact: The only time I ever cracked a screen was on a Nokia 3350

And none of my phone have cases

ThoriumBR

I never cracked my phones, they are all kept out of reach... but she had 3 phones broken in 6 months

she usually leaves them on the couch, on the table, even on the floor. and kids love to grab phones and throw them away

MechMK1

@ThoriumBR To be fair, I was like 8 at the time and it cracked because a kid literally stomped it into the ground while the others were kicking the shit out of me

Man, I was not popular back then :D

ThoriumBR

13:51

this blackview fell a lot, fell on the water more than twice, got stepped over... still mint condition

MechMK1

Damn, good phone then!

ThoriumBR

@MechMK1 me neither... but I didn't had a phone back in school

MechMK1

@ThoriumBR I got my first phone at 7. Mostly so I was able to call my friends and my family. I vividly remember how everyone had a pre-paid sim and I was the only one with a regular contract

All the parents though that my parents were insane, but in the end we saved a ton of money with that

ThoriumBR

today's phones are going to all-screen, borderless screens... this one have 5mm rubber border around everything, and 18 screws holding the case together.

MechMK1

If you're not completely satisfied with the phone after 30 days, we will return you to your home at no cost.

ThoriumBR

13:54

I got my first phone at 24, when I got to college... tech moves slowly down here... and it costed a lot. even with a cell phone I would walk to the corner to the payphone to call my girlfriend because it was way cheaper

MechMK1

> Instead of being on surface only, screen goes all the way through

@ThoriumBR My nokia was comparatively cheap. It was just around the time where mobile phones became common enough for everyone to have one

A lot of companies tried a "Switch to us and you get a new phone for free" style of contract

ThoriumBR

my pre-paid sim was used to send sms, and we used CapitalsToTellTheWordChanged because using spaces would mean less words. sims were paid, and not cheap...

MechMK1

>tfw not using huffman coding to compress the messages

It's like you didn't even try

ThoriumBR

until I got a nokia with j2me, and wrote a program to use the operator API to send sms... traffic was still paid, but I paid 3 cents per message instead of 35...

so my credits would allow me to send 100 messages per day during the month, instead of 10...

MechMK1

@ThoriumBR Wait, what!?

Please elaborate

ThoriumBR

13:58

I had $30/month credits, and at 35 cents per message, I could send 100 messages per month

Conor Mancone

Reminds me of this, but may not be a true story

futilitycloset.com/2005/10/13/the-worlds-shortest-telegram

ThoriumBR

using the API, I used 3 cents worth of WAP traffic, so I could send 1000 messages per month

Conor Mancone

sounds like the old "whistle to get free long distance" trick

MechMK1

@ConorMancone Phreaking was SOOOO DOPE

I am so mad you can't do that anymore

Conor Mancone

@MechMK1 They got smart and moved to out-of-band authentication. Missed out on so many great things as a result...

MechMK1

14:01

@ConorMancone It was seriously so cool though. I want to believe that this is why they used phones to escape the matrix

Conor Mancone

lol, that's a great addition to my mental canon

ThoriumBR

my java teacher on 1st semester always looked mad at me because I arrived always 30 minutes late at the class... it could be helped, I worked far from the college, the bus crossed the whole city, and I had to buy something to eat. on the end of the semester, he told us to write a java program do to anything we wanted, and ask for help if needed.
I asked for help because when my j2me program tried to download the captcha, it sometimes timed out and the exception would not let me retry...

MechMK1

Also completely random fun fact: Remilia Scarlet, the antagonist and titular character of Touhou 6 - Embodiment of Scarlet Devil - is a vampire and regularly boasts with the fact that she is related to Vlad Țepeș, better known as Count Dracula. Even the theme song leading up to her boss fight is called "The Young Descendant of Țepeș". However, she is actually lying about being related to him so seem more interesting.

@ConorMancone You know my mental canon, don't you?

ThoriumBR

when he came with that face "of course you have a problem, you missed half of all the classes", and saw my code and what I was doing, he treated me way better for the rest of the college... and he couldn't help me...

MechMK1

@ThoriumBR Did you ever figure out what the problem was?

ThoriumBR

14:06

it was the way Java treats exceptions...
try {
code
} catch (Exception e}
// there's no retry
}

so I had to put a function to connect and download, return false if failed, and the previous function would retry if the download returned false...

MechMK1

Why not do it externally? Set a flag in the exception, check it later. If the flag is set, increment a counter and try again. If the counter is > a threshold, quit and say too many exceptions

Conor Mancone

@MechMK1 Don't think so...

MechMK1

@ConorMancone I believe that the movie never leaves the Matrix. The Architect explains that early versions of the matrix were intended as a perfect world, but humanity rejected it, because it required a struggle to thrive. The next version of the matrix included a "struggle", and was accepted by the vast majority, save for a handful of resistant ones.

Since version 3, the Matrix is actually layered. There is an "inner" matrix, which reflects what we commonly see as "The Matrix" in the movie. And an outer one, which is referred to as "the real world".

Those who resisted spend their time mostly in the outer matrix, pretending to fight the machines. Thus they finally have their struggle and they can spend their time blissfully, thinking they do something purposeful

Further revisions to the matrix just tweak things in small ways. A "version" ends when the chosen one defeats Agent Smith and the war against the machines is won. A new version then begins, which starts with everyone in the inner matrix and learning how to leave

ThoriumBR

@MechMK1 I ended up doing something like that...

@MechMK1 I never thought of that... it would explain why Neo killed the sentinels on the end of Matrix 2 even if it was the "real" world and Neo was Thomas Anderson, powerless on that place...

Conor Mancone

That actually makes way more sense than the "official" explanation (the whole, "The chosen one must return to the source to stabilize the matrix" thing just makes no sense, even in-universe)

MechMK1

14:25

Exactly. It's all a big play. An elaborate interactive occupation therapy

Also: Humans aren't a battery, they're processing power

Conor Mancone

That whole "battery power" thing was especially silly. Second law of thermodynamics anyone?

ThoriumBR

it would make sense on the first generation... you just enslaved a lifeform that can convert organic matter into heat, and you can easily convert heat into power

the first option is to use them to generate power WHILE you create your own way to process biomass into power

MechMK1

Yeah, it would make more sense to use the brains as processors

ThoriumBR

14:41

kinda reminds me of Clustermind: insecure.org/stf/clustermind.pdf

MechMK1

14:53

@ThoriumBR The style is like quick blender scene with a filter ontop

Conor Mancone

19:51

I made a joke in a company slack chat about how we should leave AWS to our own infrastructure and build our own CPUs because everyone knows that it's all built in China and they install backdoors... I forgot that the CSO used to be high up in AWS and was personally involved in the validation of the hardware - including CPU design and manufacturing - of the components in their servers... Yes he saw my message and responded. Whoops! lol!

Fire Quacker

21:05

I hope he took it well!

Having to work with people like that isn't something that you'd normally think about

I did once trash somebody's product on an industry-specific forum and then got roundly refuted by their CTO

ThoriumBR

22:22

I once complained about a "proprietary email client written in Java" and a manager not related to me scalded me...

now that we sold that piece of junk everyone trashes it...

Conor Mancone

22:55

I don't know him well enough to know how he took it. We moved on with the conversation so I'll go with "could have been worse"

@ThoriumBR "proprietary email client written in Java" sounds like something worth complaining about...

ThoriumBR

23:48

back to my failed thinkpad hard drive... I let it "rest" during the night, so maybe tonight it would run again and maybe I would be able to recover something... "Primary master detection failed. Press F1 to resume, F12 to enter setup"

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