occasional writings on computer witchery, hyperfocus topics, and CTF
i’m getting a bit allergic to the way Chat Box Generated Prose always overuses headings so i might just not put any headings at all in this post. we’ll see. make a terrible comic day might have been last week, but make a terrible blog post day is every day~ nearly an entire month ago i once again got to play defcon qualifiers with team Shellphish, and we once again pulled it together to make the…
these days i spend a lot of time opening up github projects and seeing the dreaded A user you’ve blocked has previously contributed to this repository sigh. another one bites the dust 1 there’s currently no easy way to tell whether it’s just some drive-by PR where some skill-atrophied genius prompter couldn’t figure out how to write 3 lines of correcting typos by hand (i’ll call this “type 1”) or…
in case you missed it, last week saw one of the funniest things ever to happen to linux kernel development, in which Kent Overstreet, developer of now-disowned Linux filesystem bcachefs, had his LLM girlfriend stolen by a trans lesbian on IRC no, really, i’m not kidding apparently, Kent was running a Claude-based LLM bot which was hooked up to the bcachefs codebase, IRC, and even had a website. it…
i have a nixpkgs overlay with some custom packages, patched versions of packages, and even some complete rewrites of upstream packaging to suit my needs. it also contains some NixOS modules to support the packages and some common utilities. one persistent issue with the growing size of this overlay is that i have absolutely no idea the full extent of everything it changes. when a nixpkgs overlay…
last week i had the opportunity to travel to NYC and play CSAW CTF finals . for those teams who qualify in the top 10, CSAW provides funding to travel to finals, and it was fun to ride Amtrak and get spend some time with my teammates in New York. but the CTF itself unfortunately left a lot to be desired. CSAW (formerly Cyber Security Awareness Week, now Cyber Security Awareness Worldwide) is an…
NixOS provides native systemd-nspawn containers which share /nix/store with the host, reducing their disk footprint. NixOS also provides a build-vm option to nixos-rebuild to create a qemu VM capable of running the whole system with a /nix/store shared with the host, which is similarly very disk-space-efficient. today we’re going to make steps towards combining these two workflows to create…
editor’s note : as you may have noticed already, this is a guest post that my friend triss wrote up and asked to be able to have published in my blog. i’m very grateful for the content to fill the void of me never posting anything, even after saying i will , (despite the fact that i actually had to refactor the website’s code to support having an author field that isn’t me). enjoy the infodump :3…
over the past weekend i once again joined shellphish to play CSAW quals and in the tradition i’m providing a writeup of some of the challenges. i got flown out to the phoenix area to play with the team irl, though actual CTF time was very short lived as we finished saturday morning (in second place!). it was very hot most of the day, but i had a good time hanging out and seeing my friends (if this…
update 2024-09-30 : this post got featured on hackaday dot com. hi hackaday! given the counter badge on my ublock origin when i visit the hackaday page featuring this post, they’re presumably serving a bunch of ads on the page. on the other hand, i don’t make money from this site – i don’t have ads, or charge for subscriptions. it’s kind of just me talking about whatever interesting things i’m…
new laptop i recently finally got my framework 16 laptop in hand, and i’m pretty excited to finally migrate from the dell machine i’ve been using since literally 2016 both because, with a pretty long service life (in the scheme of design-for-landfill consumer electronics) despite several fully replaced components, the dell is now physically disintegrating in ways i can’t reasonably fix; and also…
earlier this month i got to play defcon quals with shellphish. it was overall a good time, but we unfortunately (likely) didn’t qualify for finals, which ends a 20 year long streak of shellphish qualifying. this is very sad, but on the upside i get another year to cook my tooling (that i have not worked on for like months at this point) and won’t have to make the tough choice of whether to spend…
recently i’ve embarked upon an adventure to migrate this blog from its old home on writefreely to my own server, using a purpose-built static site generator, and i’m officially calling the migration complete this is not the first time i’ve tried to make a static site generator, but it is the first time i’ve finished one. i guess the inherent scope limitation of only strictly needing to replicate…
i, for one, am not afraid to seek answers to life’s toughest questions like “how well can a team of 2 people do in a 24 hour ctf when they start almost 12 hours late” a screenshot of all the challenges, we solved 8/14 not counting “welcome” this is like, not bad actually??? anyway, let’s talk about jails misc: PPP misc: terminal pursuit PPP (there was no flavor text for this one, it was just a…
happy 2024 – the internet is getting fucked over look at this an amazon product listing that was obviously generated by ChatGPT because the name contains an “as an AI language model” type error message, also the product image is just a random cat in a fisheye lens my best guess for what’s going on here is that amazon has synthesized a fake brand (if you look at the page for “FOPEAS” it redirects…
satisfactory comes with a dedicated server . i don’t really have any experience doing nixos packaging. so it’s time to do one that’s really hard, just for fun nix derivations there’s two fundamental types of derivations in nix, ones that actually build something, and ones that are fixed output . fixed output derivations are important because they’re the only kind that gets access to the internet.…
what IS UP chat we’re back at it again with another writeup post last weekend i played MapleCTF 2023 with my team BLÅHAJ (raised from the dead, i don’t remember when the last time i played as/with BLÅHAJ was but it’s been like. a hot second) there were a couple of interesting challenges in this CTF. BLÅHAJ ended up placing 5th, with a team of like just a handful of people, which i thought was…
i played CSAW quals this past weekend there were some good parts and some bad parts. overall i think CSAW has needed a lot more QC in the 2 years that i’ve been playing it anyway, given that there are official writeups (looking at them, the quality varies greatly by challenge author, but y’know whatever) i’m going to limit this to two of the challenges i thought were actually good and we can solve…
i like north . it’s incredibly simple and it does the job of managing database migrations in a straightforward way recently, because making unhinged technical decisions is my hobby, i decided to make a database migration tool in pure zero-dependency ( technically ) python in order to optimize for ease of “production” deployment. the migration tool should Just Work in any environment without…
suppose you have a VPN link, and additionally some private DNS server accessible through the VPN that resolves hosts on the VPN. you want to have DNS queries for VPN hosts, which are subdomains of a common domain, to go to the special VPN DNS server, but all other queries to use the normal system DNS turns out this is 🦐 quite shrimple 🦐 with systemd-resolved , which your system is probably…
we’re going to write a basic packet capture program for linux from scratch, in python, using the direct kernel interface instead of a library like libpcap. also, it’s going to attach to asyncio allowing for async packet capture that can be integrated into other I/O without blocking (for the sake of simplicity, the file I/O is not going to be asyncio -based, but you can use aiofiles instead of the…
Here we have quite a hidden gem. This large conservatory complex used to be a bustling research facility for flora-computer interface. However after losing funding, the complex fell into disarray. After we got a hold of it, we were unable to get the main computing system working again. During the process of exploring the complex, we have located a backup mechanism which allows us to provide a new…
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