I saw a microbiologist today.

Much bigger than I expected.

There is no meme. Explain why your preferred distro is the best.

#linux #linuxfan #linuxuser #ubuntu #debian #dev #devops #webdevelopment #programmingmemes #linuxmemes #memes #coding #developer #tech #ethicalhacking #computerscience #coder #security #infosec #cyber

Someone asked me tonight what text I normally use in console.log when just putting a marker in the code.

I told them 'xyzzy', which necessitated explaining where that came from. Which turns out to be my hacker origin story...

1983, at the start of 8 bit home computing. I had (and still have) a Commodore 64, and I was into text adventure games (I was into D&D roleplaying too at the time so this wasn't exactly a stretch).

Level 9 software released "Colossal Adventure" which was a remake of Colossal Cave Adventure, one of the first games written for computers. I didn't know that at the time, to me it was just a great adventure game.

I played it for a while, eventually getting to a point where to progress further, you have to use the "magic word"...

I ran back through the game hundreds of times looking for clues, and weeks passed with no progress.

I got a hold of a disassembler and started on a bigger adventure.

I dug into the code looking for the magic word. And thus started the adventure of learning assembly. The magic word wasn't stored as plain text...

For its time the game was massively advanced. It ran what amounted to a virtual machine using compressed bytecode.

It took me about four weeks to reverse engineer that, and then start wading through the gamecode to find the magic word.

In the end, the magic word (XYZZY in case you haven't guessed by now) became the first flag I captured as a hacker...

#hacking #originstory #ctf

So, if I'm reading this correctly Microsoft's privacy and data-handling options around the use of browsing history are all opt-out buy default, and also when you install Edge it silently imports your Firefox browser history right away without asking you.

So I unless I'm reading this chain of events incorrectly, just installing Edge at all silently feeds your Firefox history into Microsoft's ML models, which is definitely cool and not a problem at all.