ping00

I enjoyed this little exchange :)

don't forget Sirens of Titan!

as a pentester at a Fortune 500: I think you're on the mark with this assessment. Most of our findings (internally) are "best practices"-tier stuff (make sure to use TLS 1.2, cloud config findings from Wiz, occasionally the odd IDOR vuln in an API set, etc.) -- in a purely timeboxed scenario, I'd feel much more confident in an agent's ability to look at a complex system and identify all the 'best practices' kind of stuff vs a human being.

Security teams are expensive and deal with huge streams of data and events on the blue side: seems like human-in-the-loop AI systems are going to be much more effective, especially with the reasoning advances we've seen over the past year or so.

Respectfully (not trying to be pedantic but helpful): it's "cease" not "seize" in this context :)

Please count me in if these ever gets going -- I'm a relatively recent transplant (moved here 2 years ago) but found it very easy to plug into the local security scene (Black Lodge Research, Harry's on Thursdays, HushCon, etc.) and while they're fun to hang out and meet other folks in the space, I've been looking for a more hands-on tinkering meetup with clearly defined goals (we are going to learn about XYZ today).

P.S. if you're a hardware nerd, you might like https://dma.space/ (just had their grand opening this weekend) over in Capitol Hill.

RIP.

If I may share a memory: I still remember visiting Jungfrau Park with my parents on a vacation to Switzerland back in 2005; as a scifi-leaning kid even back then (4th/5th grade), I had a ton of fun in all the different exhibits. IIRC, different wings of the park were dedicated to different mysteries/monuments, so you'd have the Aztec and Egyptian pyramids, Peruvian (Nazca, and my favorite one) desert drawings, ancient Indian flying chariots, etc. A great time, and I'm honestly quite surprised (in retrospect) that my dad chose to go there, given our time-limited schedule. It was also my first time trying Weisswurst in the JP cafetaria (being a Hindu kid growing up in the UAE, I seized every opportunity to try beef and pork when I could lol) -- I'm sure it was fairly mid, but I thought it was fantastic!

If nothing else, it helped me establish some pop cultural 'throughlines' in that I was able to digest (so to speak) other "aliens were here first and they taught us a bunch of things" trope that cropped up later in my life (like Aliens vs. Predators, Prometheus). I can't say for sure, but it might have been my earliest encounter with the Big Question: "Why are we here? Is there a plan?" -- even though I discounted the alien theory pretty young, it was still an exciting way to get started on the subject (and is still fun to me to this day). I suppose a portion of credit for ongoing interest in science fiction is directly attributable to my time at Jungfrau Park :)

Weirdly enough, I was just in Switzerland a couple of months back and we happened to drive by Jungfrau on our way to Lauterbrunnen -- JP is still there, which stirred up the ^ memory, but I learned on the trip that it had been shut down sadly.

Thanks for being a part of such a surreal memory Mr. Daniken.

Added all of these to my Goodreads -- as an Indian, I had no idea that these books existed. Great article (with some really cool UI choices); I'm looking forward to reading more from this magazine! Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for sharing! I always love looking at the hand-painted advertisements when I'm back in India. I almost never see it in the cities these days (billboards have taken over), but back in my parents' villages, a lot of older painted advertisements (like Maha Cement) are still there on the walls that run past the main street.

On a side note, I have an HTTP200 license plate and I want to get some nice Indian truck style lettering saying HORN <HTTP200> PLEASE around it :)

This is a very tangential comment, but I read the short story (https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/8eh2woz05ndfxinbf9vdh/Goldfis...) and loved it (took me around 15 minutes to read).

Went down a bit of a rabbit hole on the original author, Kir Bulychev, and saw that he wrote many short stories set in Veliky Guslar (which explained the name Greater Bard). The overall tone is very very similar to R.K. Narayan's Malgudi Days (albeit without the fantastical elements of talking goldfish), which is a favorite of mine. If anyone wants to get into reading some easily approachable Indian English literature, I always point them to Narayan and Adiga (who wrote The White Tiger).

On that note, does anyone else have any recommendations on authors who make use of this device (small/mid-sized city which serves as a backdrop for an anthology of short stories from a variety of characters' perspectives)?

Good luck Vivek, this looks really nice! I was in Bangalore for the first time this Feb and had a great time. You should check out Mecca cafe, it's thoda grimy but a total vibe.

huh...til that Raya exists

I genuinely can’t remember having laughed at well written prose in a long time, thanks for sharing [0]. OP is gold too.

Takes me back to my high school days when I would have to choke down my laughter as I surreptitiously read Cracked.com articles in class

Come to Harry's on 15th on Thursdays (8:30 pm + ). It's where the local hackers (2600 and DEFCON crowd) usually hang out and socialize. Ask Will (the bartender, who's great) for the hacker crowd and he'll point you in the right direction.

I moved up here 6 months ago, and it's been a great group of people to hang out with. The conversations are tech/tech-adjacent for the most part, but I've also spent hours chatting about Magic The Gathering, Seattle Public Transit, and Neal Stephenson. I got my HushCon invite just from showing up regularly enough that people recognized me.

I actually found out about this because of another meetup on Thursdays: Black Lodge Research up in Redmond has an open night from 7:00 pm onwards. Great little makerspace, and a welcoming community. But it's definitely a schlep up there, especially after a workday so I haven't been back in a couple of months.

I'm not a big drinker, but it's nice to have a constant event on Thursday evenings that I can look forward to having a beer or two at (I actually have a custom drink that I came up with Will called "Pondwater" -- building up some lore like that is fun and is a sign of setting down some roots). I'd say Harry's is my "local bar" since I live about a 15 minute walk away. On the note of social drinking, there's a few sober people who come as well, and there's no compulsion at all to drink alcohol to be a part of the in-group. Hope I see you there sometime and I'd be happy to introduce you to the crowd; look for the Indian guy :)

https://gwern.net/ is my standard for a great blog experience. Their design philosophy (https://gwern.net/about) is right up my alley.

I think that's too granular and is dependent on the apps offering Face ID as a secondary-layer authentication flow -- I think OP is suggesting an entirely different user profile that doesn't even have the same applications that the original (save for the default iPadOS apps, and even those should be logged out from your Apple ID). The cognitive overhead of "did I make sure to enable Face ID on x,y,z apps so that I can pass around my iPad without worrying about any personal data being accessible" is too high for spontaneous + casual device sharing.

Example: "Hey uncle ping00, can I use your iPad real quick to watch something?" "Sure nephew, <switches profile to Guest ,and hands it over> go nuts"

I just wanted to add that your writing style is wonderful and that this was a pleasure to read.

Incidentally, I work in pentesting, and one of my colleagues has Type 1 Diabetes; your overview of it and its resultant complexities really made me empathize with what challenges he has to surmount daily while still being one of the nicest, most approachable people in our team.

Hi, I took some time to use Caido. I really like it, especially the ability to switch between projects. I also thought the UX that introduces users to the application was well-done. Tbf, I have years of experience with Burp, but I think anyone would have been able to follow along. Nice, clean UI and installation was breezy. Great job! Looking forward to seeing how this project develops, and I wish you success in your competition with the incumbent.

This may be a really broad question, but would you mind touching on why you developed this in Rust? Is that the reason why this application feels snappier than Burp (JVM), or is it just less taxing on system resources? Please feel free to tl;dr it if that's easier :)

Also, the coolest looking feature is the AI assistant undoubtedly -- is there any chance that customers can BYOT in the future and supply a personal OpenAI API token for example?

this actually feels like a lightweight feature-rich wrapper, unlike Burp (which I really love btw, not hating on it) which can cause my computer to slow down noticeably with extensions loaded. This is an unfair comparison though, because I derive a lot of value from Burp's BApps and choose to have quite a few of them loaded. The performance hit is worth it to me in this case, but I think it's fantastic to see more lightweight, WYSIWYG (dare I say frugal) alternatives to what's grown into a bulkier tool (Burp). Kind of like XFCE vs GNOME.

Hi, just wanted to say that I walked through this and it's really neat. I'm running it all through WSL on a reasonably powerful laptop (ASUS G14) and performance has been buttery so far. I especially want to commend you on the clear, simple-to-use UX and UI. This will definitely fill a niche for me at work if I have to use an underpowered jumpbox to test internal web applications.

One UX point: I may have missed this, but when I start an injection attack, it would be nice to see a real-time table of the output so that I can see which injections have been tried (kind of like how you can see it in Burp Suite with Logger++ or the sub-window that opens up when you start an Intruder attack). Totally respect a conscious choice to not go down this (potentially) resource-intensive 'view', but curious if that's on the roadmap. Right now I just get a spinning animation after I hit Run, and I don't see any output in the sidebar where it says "Scans will be shown here once they have started".

In all honesty, I probably will stick with Burp Suite for my bread-and-butter web app testing flow (also helps that my org pays for a Pro license), but I want to thank you for the effort put into this and the courage to explore a new modality (web app testing without a resource-heavy proxy tool like Burp).

Interesting, wasn't aware that there were Burp alternatives being worked on. I'm going to play with both of these to see how they compare. Thanks to both you and OP for sharing!

"viva" in India

great point

This is exactly how I feel, and you put it very well. The one nice thing (to be fair, there's probably others but I haven't used it very long) about Win 11 is that your external monitor remembers your exact window configuration at the time of disconnection, so when you plug your laptop back in, you're good to go.

But the broader issue of spaced out information, wasted space, and a lack of *density* is what really drives me nuts. Cyberpunk promised me pic related (https://i.redd.it/dqipakmui3161.jpg) but we got tiling into preset (aka rigidly defined) configs instead. Note that I'm talking about the by-default experience.

AVP 1 is actually one of my guiltiest pleasures :) -- it scratches a lot of my scifi-horror itches (mysterious originator civilization that was seeded with ideas like architecture and religion by aliens, big group of humans with weapons being hunted down one by one, weird maze-like house of horrors, isolated setting)

I first watched it when it came out and I was in the fourth grade, so I definitely have a lot of nostalgic value attached to it. I try and watch it at least once a year!

I remember reading this piece a while ago; excellently written. Thanks for sharing it again and stimulating my nostalgia!

One of my favorite movies not just because it's scifi horror, but because of the excellent worldbuilding. Nothing is really spoonfed to us as an audience; everything just takes place in a universe, where we have to put together the world from the clues we see in the movie (logos, symbols, tech, etc.).

As an example of what I mean, this was a pretty good blog post that touches on the semiotic standards aboard the Nostromo: https://crewsproject.wordpress.com/2017/05/12/aliens-standar...

The audience never directly interacts with this standard in any way, but it adds so much depth to the world and makes for a much richer experience.

It feels like this approach would constrain you from planting in an organic/spontaneous manner; you'd have to plant stuff to make sure it lines up with the cables above right?

Following the other comment re: power being king, what if we used a hub-and-spoke model where small drones with cameras (for sensing) and simple arms w/ clampers (for manipulating) perform 'bursts' of energy intensive activity and aggregate their sensory inputs into one composite report on the health of the plants? They do their thing (maybe for 10 - 15 mins or however long their battery lasts) and then fly back to the hub to charge. The hub itself could rely on a hybrid combo of guaranteed external power and solar panels.

Ofc, it'd be cool to see a cost analysis of how expensive this solution is (from both technical and financial standpoints) versus simpler, more energy-efficient human inputs (aka walk around your garden and prune trees that need it and pick berries that are ripe).

I think this is a kneejerk take -- the study of literature generally encompasses an intersection of the study of the society, culture, economy, history that produced that literature. In other words, if you study Medieval English Literature, you also study the historical context that surrounds that subject. My opinion: I would consider his friend well-educated and curious enough about the world that she got a Masters degree in a specialized field.

Well said.

Sorry, not sure why you expanded on this particular event. Could you explain if I missed something? :)