Notices by Hal Pomeranz (hal_pomeranz@infosec.exchange)

My thought process this morning:

“I hate that so many people who bring joy to my timeline are scared right now.”

(corrected: it’s not about me)
“I hate that so many people who bring joy are scared right now.”

(corrected: it’s not limited to one group)
“I hate that so many people are scared right now.”

(corrected: crap, maybe it is about me)
“I hate being scared.”

The LibreWolf browser with the udm=14 extension added is really a very nice browsing experience. Everything Firefox should have been before they went to the dark side.

The only negative is manually adding cookie exceptions for sites where you want to stay logged in—infosec.exchange for example.

@feld @cult Bind to ports below 1024 and then drop privileges. Unix/Linux daemons have been doing this for decades. See BIND for example.

@feld It definitely hit their professional services team

Damn, the layoffs at Cisco Talos and Duo hit close to home. To all my friends and colleagues who are affected, I see you and I am so sorry this is happening. Somebody could move mountains with all the talent that is currently in the market for a new role. May you find a new spot quickly and never look back.

“I am Lucy the dog and I approve this message.”

#HarrisWalz

The lovely Danielle designed and printed the sign herself since the “official” signs are on back-order. She printed a bunch, so if you’re in Seminole/Orange county Florida and would like one, the price is $25 with all profit going back to the Harris/Walz campaign.

Flip Florida blue? Stranger things have happened.

Piss off your MAGA neighbors? Oh yes!

We live in Florida, a state which is in the “likely GOP” column. Our daughter attends college in Pennsylvania, which is shaping up to be an important state for Democratic victory in this election. So our daughter has changed her voter registration to PA.

If you have college age children in battleground states, you might want to have a conversation with them about this idea. Just sayin’.

In the year 2000, Randy Marchany and I were invited by representatives of King Saud University to visit Riyadh and give several days of training. It was a wonderful trip and our hosts were more than gracious.

But the parts that I remember most fondly were just having dinner with them in the evenings, talking about our families, and discussing their plans for the future. Just being people really.

Nearly 25 years later, the Middle East is torn by division as much or more than ever. Destruction and genocide run rampant. People are suffering, families are being destroyed while outside governments wage proxy wars in the region.

The USA has decades of blood on its hands in the region. We must do better.

I feel like I’ve been giving this advice a lot lately, so I’m just going to put it on blast.

I’m sorry to say that this is an absolutely terrible time to be looking for work in tech here in the USA. We’ve had a lot of layoffs which flooded the market with job seekers. And employers are all holding their collective breath waiting for the results of the November elections. I’m talking to employers and some are explicitly saying, “No hiring until 2025.”

So it’s not just you. And it’s not an indictment of your skills and what you bring to the table. It’s about the environment you find yourself in right now. I know it feels personal and rejection feels like shit. I see you, I see your worth.

Here’s to better days.

The trite life advice about “being your authentic self” comes from a place of incredible privilege.

It presumes your “authentic self” is not too neurodivergent, queer, kinky, sad, angry, disabled, ethnic, sick, poor, unhoused, phobic, self-medicating, or any of a million other things that can send unwanted signals when interacting with people in a largely homogenous society in the real world. Either that or you are wealthy enough that you can simply not GAF.

So quit giving out this life advice and recognize that many people have to hide who they are just to get themselves through life. And they have to deal with the constant stream of negative feelings that result from that. Have empathy, because people really are fighting hard battles out there.

And if people feel safe enough around you to reveal even a small fraction of their authentic selves to you, take it as a high honor. Embrace them and show love. Strive to make the world a safer place for all.

I’ve been in the Computer Science field long enough to have seen multiple rounds of the AI hype machine. It’s always snake oil, smoke and mirrors. It never even approaches what a reasonable person would consider to be a thinking machine.

What it really turns out to be is an elaborate “pump and dump” scheme where early investors push the hype, knowing it’s all BS. Once a sufficient number of rubes jump on the bandwagon, the early investors cash out at a profit and leave the gullible behind to absorb the losses when people eventually realize that there is no value anywhere in the AI companies.

Oopsie! There went your retirement plans!

Do not be fooled by this chicanery.

@feld Not a bad playlist except there's no Dollyrots on there.

Write a Linux command line to traverse a directory of files and summarize the number of instances of each file extension found (e.g., .docx, .jpg, .pdf, etc). Fold all file extensions to lower case-- ".JPG" and ".jpg" should be reported together. Files that have no extension should be reported as "other". List the extensions found in descending numeric order by the number of occurrences of each extension.

#Linux #DFIR #CommandLine #Trivia

Write a Linux command line to give the names of the sub-directories in just the current working directory (no recursion).

Also, I've decided to reclaim my weekends, so these daily Linux challenges will henceforth be a Mon-Fri affair. I'll check in with the answer to this question on Monday. Everybody enjoy your weekends!

#Linux #DFIR #CommandLine #Trivia

The admin wants to prevent users from creating their own authorized_keys files. How could this be accomplished?

#Linux #DFIR #CommandLine #Trivia

@silverwizard @chiasm And it was most excellent ?

Create an empty directory structure that exactly duplicates an existing set of directories, but without any of the files from the original directory structure.

#Linux #DFIR #CommandLine #Trivia

You have access to the vim text editor via sudo, but shell escapes are blocked. How do you escalate privileges to get an unfettered root shell without sudo?

#Linux #DFIR #CommandLine #Trivia