We live in troubled times, the planet is overheating at a rate that it might affect my life more than being more uncomfortable in the summer. And that’s Texas summers at that.

There is an island of plastic refuse in the ocean bigger than some countries.

I saw the home computer come to the living room and the internet be birthed.

If you were to ask if I was jaded as a kid, already? Yeah. Around 7 years old.

It isn’t getting better. Corporations claw for more and more at the expense of the people and the planet.

I hope the younger generations can lead the charge of change, but for me… I don’t have the time or energy to play games most days, let alone change the planet.

And for those who will say, “Aren’t you just part of the problem then?” Sadly yes, I am. I try to make changes when I can, but I fear changing the small environment of my home will not be enough.

Work has been difficult, mostly due to coworkers lately.

If I’m blaring Rage, like I have all week, I’m ready to walk or to burn the place down. But I’m a lazy man.

Or I mean, Shodan exists. I’m sure the gov has better.

A theoretical botnet I was looking at on github used shodan to identify possible targets to infect.

I need a slightly less secure walkthrough to allow, essentially, android auto and google maps to operate.

I did without for a while, and it wasn’t pretty.

Lets just say I went from a sketchy hospital district to a very sketchy dead end in a neighborhood that had lookouts. Working nights, this was not a great time to drop in unannounced.

Kali is still around, I last did an install ~6 months ago, I think?

That got put on the back burner though, not because of the flipper, just life.

I have one.

Its fun.

But on the subject of rolling codes, I was able to get through a security gate that relies on, essentially, a garage door opener.

The exploit relied on the ridiculously low amount of rolling codes it cycled through.

Capture one, and try it a few times to get through.

Cars are more robust. Despite tinkering with it for about 8 hours, I wasn’t successful with defeating it. That being said, I picked up the device, in part, to start messing around with various signals as an educational tool.

Time enjoyed is not wasted.

Of course, Tik Tok isn’t my jam, so it would be a waste of time for me.

I’ve often wondered how the world would cope without 24 hour IT support.

All I know is I would love to see the chaos unfold, sadly, I think more than a few lives would end as a result so I can’t condone that for all fields.

Me too.

In high school, there was a kid who was always trying to make money. Like even then, he wanted his own business. In fact he had a couple small ones back then.

One of his endeavours was massive LAN parties. He had the capital to rent spaces, hardware, and was even able to get sponsorships.

He did not have the tech chops to do it though.

Myself, and one circle of friends were THE computer nerds of the school, but it wasn’t really seen as a negative for us - then again we did orchestrate a “free day” and got away with it by taking down the schools network from inside and one person had a loud fucking mouth, but we covered our tracks.

Anyways, we got in free to these LAN parties as long as we set up and maintained shit. Surprisingly very few problems, about once a LAN party we had to fix something. And it was useful experience.

That shit was fucking amazing. I loved it.

I got home from work. Wife works from home. She has had an ongoing tech issue I can’t really touch because it’s that companies property. But I just don’t want to hear it. At all. I’m dead inside in that regard.

It’s gotten so bad that I had an issue with my gaming rig.

I needed to reseat the RAM. Not hard, except the case is mounted on the wall as a display piece that would require moving a bunch of shit before getting a ladder and yada yada.

I just didn’t game for three days. Just could not muster the energy to care about that. I hate it.

Bounties are a bit nebulous.

Actual pen testing companies have red teams (attackers) that have a scope of what they are allowed to target, and how they go about it.

For example, just because a red teamer can get into the data center to do stuff locally doesn’t meet the scope requirement of testing their web page externally. They would be prosecuted most likely.

Pen testing companies also have lawyers, at least they should, who help negotiate scope and what is legally allowed and in what context.

Due to the secrecy needed for some tests, the security staff may not be aware a test is in place. From what I understand, generally people have some sort of paperwork on their person, or at least the contact information of someone at the company with the authority to authorize this red team pen test.

That being said, cops may still get called, you may still get arrested, and have to deal with the courts.

Or worse, some trigger happy security guard shoots you.

I’m just studying that stuff though at the moment, so take what I said with a grain of salt.

Oh, well that’s totally affordable and won’t affect the consumer market at all.

Get to vantage point.

Explore actionable map points.

Go to next area.

Repeat.

Which game am I talking about? Doesn’t matter, it’s the Ubisoft formula these days and has been for a long time.

Wake me up when Ubisoft metaphorically burns to the ground, or they do something innovative.

Makes one want to sail the high seas out of principle.

I have a relative who did it.

But they are super into genealogy.

At this point, to go deeper, they would need to learn a new language and travel half way across the world.

I was not consulted before this was done. I would have cautioned against it.

This makes me miss a bar I used to go to, and was the favored watering hole for most of the staff at a previous job.

It had had several owners, and it’s name changed on official paperwork every time. Locals still called it Big Tree.

Why?

It was built around a big tree that went out of the roof lol.

It was bought and demolished, the tree removed.

Nothing has been done with the lot since, and it’s been a couple years.

Damn shame.

The only code I fuck with is my own. I’m not a Dev, but I write things for my convenience.

Sometimes it gets the attention of those above me, and I get some sweet sweet time off the phones, blasting whatever music I’m in the mood for through noise canceling ear buds while I add a little form to the function, so to speak.

So mostly, its a challenge to myself while working night shift, also part of why I enjoy night shift.

That’s a symptom of capitalism as a whole.

The whole perpetual growth, and being legally bound to try to provide that to shareholders, means only “safe” ideas are given any traction.

The only time any “innovative” comes out is when billionaires have a pipe dream.

However, they lack the skills or expertise (or even common sense) to execute them.

Musk had ideas, bought his way into leadership, and essentially had to be corralled by handlers while other people did the actual hard work.

Then, at the platform formally known as Twitter, with no handlers… Well, the world has seen how an unleashed Musk handles that. Spoiler: not well.

I nearly killed a group of people one night.

Full on slamming of brakes and trying to not have another sort of accident.

Roughly 3am, a major major highway, and a group of people decides to dash across.

Dark clothing. Crossed between where any lights were.

Everyone involved was very lucky in that moment.

To be fair, Tesla is owned by a South African who immigrated to Canada, then the US - and had apartheid slaves do the hard part of precious stone mining.

Much like the former cheetoh in chief, completely removed from the realities others face, and never had to deal with consequences.

It isn’t a solely American thing, though we may be the world champs at it.

Performance isn’t key. But I like performance, lol. I also wasn’t aware of their more recent practices. So thank you.

I’ll have to check out the HP mini. As I said, just barely scratched the surface on researching this, and its more of a thought than a project at the moment, lol.

I just can’t afford (and cool) enterprise level stuff at home. It was free (to me) so no big loss other than buying a better CPU used ~50 bucks. I’ve spent more on worse ideas lol.