ZephyrP · HackerTrans

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

A long-forgotten machine on a DoD network sounds like the kind of host that could serve for idle scanning or any other technique using a forged source address and a predictable dummy host; I imagine that arpwatch takes a view of network security focused on classifying frames and less on connection behavior.

ZephyrP

vor 4 Monatendiscuss

It's certainly not an "elitist initiation ordeal" to ask a potential crewmate to sketch a library function they've selected, what abstraction or ideas it implicitly contains, and what bearing those have on their overall approach. GP's use of `bisect_left` is instructive here:

  In [2]: Solution().findMin([1, 0, 1, 1])
  Out[2]: 4

However, requesting a bug-free implementation of `bsearch()` (to say nothing of the actual problem being solved) during a timed, in-person interview is less a structured rehearsal of an individual's unique capacities, and more of a jumping-in ritual proving only a willingness to die for their cybergang.

ZephyrP

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

As a (very) young person, I hope that all of you who have the opportunity to (and feel it is appropriate) to instill programming into your children at a young age do so. The beauty of adopting a craft paradigm like programming lies in how it fails - All problems in programming are ultimately problems in dealing with our own intuitions about the mechanics of the world and our rationality, and the problematic interplay between those two agencies.

The very semantics of how we describe language advantages and disadvantages reflect this.

"Everything you manipulate is an object, and the results of those manipulations are themselves objects. However, many languages make the same claim, and their users often have a different interpretation of what object-oriented means and a different terminology for the concepts they employ."

Was that Jacques Lacan? Actually that's the pitch of the hit OOP dynamic language Ruby.

I think this is endlessly valuable to young people -- as so many programmers can attest, the key to solving errors seems to be in radical reassessments of your frame and mode of thinking: the nature of the solution to problems in programming isn't about abandoning rationality, as much as it is expanding the nature of rationality into solution sets such that the problem can be solved adequately. I don't think it's at all unscientific to say that when theres billions of hidden local variables at play in a machine, in some way, you have to put yourself at the mercy of a higher power (whatever that designation may imply).

Despite this, you still are the one in control. This is why I think software has something very important to offer kids for this dawning century. As a culture we're losing the real virtues of thinking passionately, of having a sense of responsibility for who you are, making something of your work and feeling good about your work and life in general.

Software, hacking, or whatever you'd like to call it gives you the undeniable feeling that your life is yours to create. Although it's a art mired in abstractions, it's incredibly concrete -- It's you reading this right now, making decisions, it lets you know that although it's true that theres about 7 billion people in the world, WHAT YOU DO MATTERS, not abstractly, but in material terms. A recurring message I see here in this thread is that software allows us to stop writing ourselves off and to stop seeing ourselves as the victim of a confluence of forces, despite us ultimately having no control of the machine beyond our own thoughts, no matter how aged, wizened or jaded with the craft we become.

ZephyrP

vor 14 Jahrendiscuss

I just turned 20 and I've been programming for 8 years. The biggest thing I learned is that Gates was wrong -- skill continues to increase well after your first 3 years.

Outside of that, programming has proven to be one of the most rewarding skills I've ever learned.

12 - "Learned" Java. Didn't understand any of the concepts;

13 - Learned C, Understood a lot more. Read 'Hacking, Art of Exploitation';

14 - "Learned" x86, Wrote first WEP cracking utility for Win32 (distributed as binary at least :) when FMS was new;

15 - Got down to brass tacks and learned deep x86. Wrote first non-trivial exploit for use-after-free condition in Adobe Reader;

16 - Learned Ruby. Wrote first utility to repack the SSDT in Windows rootkits and hook accesses to the first memory page of the service descriptor. (Lots of people do this now);

17 - Learned a lot of Math. Wrote transfer control protocol on top of IP and wrote a lot of Cisco IOS utilities;

18 - "Learned" networking (A wildly complex and massively underestimated field, I'm not sure anyone really knows networking anymore) Reimplemented all of dsniff w/ STP & 802.1q utilities;

19 - Learned Erlang. Wrote my own NoSQL database (zv.github.com/artifact);

20 - Now :)

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