I love that it's possible to boot a raw Linux kernel this way; I only learned about it very recently when working on a university project. It makes me want to fiddle around with it more and really understand the nuts and bolts of a modern Linux system and work out what actually is responsible for what and, crucially, when it happens.
Readit Newsakpa1 commented on Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure rosalux.de/en/news/id/539... · Posted by u/robtherobber
Indeed. Although I suspect Wine or proton could be an option - not checked.
Older versions historically haven’t worked very well, but I’ve not tried with newer copies.
"The stored data amounts to 858TB (terabytes), equivalent to 449.5 billion A4 sheets"
Just so we can all visualise this in an understandable way, if laid end-to-end how many times round the world would the A4 sheets go?
And what is their total area in football fields?
190,813,414 and a bit times round the equator if you place them long edge to long edge
akpa1 commented on Breaking My Security Assignments akpain.net/blog/breaking-... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
Great post and great attitude. Little bit of a mixed message from this:
> Within the aims of the module this is fine - this is an introuction to security module so if you can exploit it like this, you're not really the target audience and you've already achieved the aims of the module.
> This isn't going to save me any time - I still need to do the assignments because they're assignments for a University module, which is supposed to teach me things. If I don't do the assignments and effectively cheat by submitting tokens I recover this way, I personally will suffer and not know what I'm doing in enough detail when it comes to the final exam and just generally will lack this knowledge that might be useful in future.
Which is it? This introduction to security module couldn't possibly have anything to teach someone who already has this level of ability, or it could?
I see the contradiction there!
The bit about the "aims of the module" comes from its aims to get people thinking in a certain way about security, something I definitely already had. But that doesn't mean it had nothing to teach me - it was quite a while ago that I took it, but one exercise about the nuances of the setuid bit and how misconfigurations could be exploited stands out as something I doubt I'd have come across otherwise. There was also plenty of content on cryptography and basic binary reverse engineering/attacks that I'd not seen before.
My level of ability and knowledge isn't consistent - some places I'd dug into more, and some less. With tech, there's always a more detail to be explored and more learning to be done, even in areas I'm familiar with.
(I wrote the article)
akpa1 commented on Breaking My Security Assignments akpain.net/blog/breaking-... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
It's important that he's hacking a system developed by (presumably) his lecturer or professor, not by the university's IT department.
The professor hopefully has an interest in actual security research and some level of intellectual curiosity in general. The IT department is more likely to run on security by checklist and certification, and much more likely to throw the student under the bus of some Academic Misconduct Committee.
The professor did take this very well, as it happened - he asked me to come along to one of his office hours to discuss how I did it and what I might do to prevent it, among other things. The quote "if you can exploit it like this, you're not really the target audience and you've already achieved the aims of the module" from the article is basically something he said to me word-for-word in that chat - in the end, it almost seemed like he was hoping someone would go after the implementation itself!
(I wrote this article)
akpa1 commented on The international standard for identifying postal items akpain.net/blog/s10-upu/... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
akpa1 commented on The international standard for identifying postal items akpain.net/blog/s10-upu/... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
Isn't 8 digits closer to 100 million unique numbers than to 10?
Author here - yep! It is, that was a typo in the article.
When I went to Japan, it felt like all kinds of people were doing all kinds of jobs many hours into the day, whether it is managing an arcade, selling tickets at the station, working at a konbini or whatever small job. Maybe we need to not give such lofty ideas to the new generation and represent blue collar jobs as "foreigner" or "failure" jobs.