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I recently started practicing challenges on the picoCTF website. One of the challenges is to obtain a flag from a program. And the program despite its .exe name was ELF binary. Ok, so few initial steps: Can I run it? -> no, it complains about some dependencies There were some missing libgnat-7 dependencies. Hmm, how to install them? Docker containers come in handy. Especially that a binary while viewed in hex, had a Ubuntu 18 string. Thus I used Ubuntu-18 container and installed libgnat-7. 2) Can I run it now? -> Yes, but it hangs ...

I’ve recently discovered two great papers about password security. Both from Google. One is for users and one for system designers. We all use passwords so I consider the one addressed to users a must-read for (almost) everyone. I include here just best practices, to give you a snippet of what’s inside them. For users https://cloud.google.com/solutions/modern-password-security-for-users.pdf For system designers https://cloud.google.com/solutions/modern-password-security-for-system-designers.pdf There is a nice demo provided by a password manager (in this case Bitwarden) to see how password encryption works behind the scenes: https://bitwarden.com/crypto

Have you ever wondered what happens when you go to some website on the internet? For example, you search something on the “Google Search” page and it’s just always there. Many other pages work almost always as well. But sometimes something like that happens: “Early June 8, a customer pushed a valid configuration change that included the specific circumstances that triggered the bug, which caused 85% of our network to return errors.” ...

Many of us now work from home or stay at home and spend many hours online. Being online it’s almost a necessity: from ordering food through work to entertainment. I’ve been wondering how to keep myself safe online. It’s obviously not possible to not get hacked, just take a look at the richest man Jeff Bezos got hacked [1], or recently many big US corporations and government agencies [2]. So the question about being safe online is not so much about if it’s possible, but how to limit the possibility of it. ...

This year allowed many people to work from home and because of that most of the communication had to be moved online. I always wanted to try to setup some easy to use video conferencing system, but my impression was that it’s really hard thing to do and to maintain. This year I finally discovered Jitsi (https://jitsi.org/) for myself. Looked nice and simple: just send an URL and open it in a web browser, that’s it! But… can I self host it? Well, yes! I’ve been using my self-hosted version of Jitsi to chat with friends and family for last 6 months, and it works really well. Especially audio, it’s so clear and feels like real (not sure if it’s just a feeling, or a latency is very minimal or something else). Video is OK, similar to other video chat apps. And they provide apps for Android and iOS as well. ...

“An example of a really responsible system is the system the Romans used when they built an arch. The guy who created the arch stood under it as the scaffolding was removed. It’s like packing your own parachute.” ― Charles T. Munger

Internet today is not as it used to be. There is an enormous amount of data. Some people even call it Big. Big data. However, it does not mean that information, knowledge or wisdom benefit in the same way. The data still needs to be processed. More data = more processing time. Can we get more wisdom out of it?