24.12.16

the winter feast


it will probably be christmas day by the time most of you read this, or later. i hope you have or had a good day wherever you were or whatever you were doing. may 2017 be less shit than 2016 was.

if you sent me email in the last year, i'm really sorry for not replying to you. i do read most of what arrives but there's a high volume of spam plus a similarly high volume of legit emails, so it's hard to reply to them all when you have no motivation to do ordinary day to day tasks and even less to interact with people.

my partner is looking after me - he's doing a good job. i have not been very well this last year, and it didn't help that i spent about six months trying to do a networking qualification that was too advanced for me and not actually relevant to my eventual CEH qualification since i already know basic networking (it turns out that the one i was trying to do, the CompTIA Network+, is actually quite high level and involves a LOT of background reading for someone who has been on the programming or security side of things rather than the network engineering side. it's probably a fantastic exam to take if you want to be able to understand the logistics of every network everywhere and be able to engineer the perfect network for the situation your clients are in, every time, but it is way too in depth for a hacker to learn from scratch.) i've contacted the training provider about this & luckily they were really understanding - they apologised for having suggested the Network+ to me on the phone, and reset the time i had paid for so that i didn't pay for six months of wasted training and stress that got me nowhere. i'm currently working on the CompTIA Security+ & should be going back to that after christmas. i haven't done lots and lots of it but it seems like it's a lot closer to what i've been teaching myself for all this time than the Network+ was.

i am trying to be more accessible this coming year. my immediate plans are to attempt to restart my haptic compass project, and to complete my magnetic implant array. this will eventually also involve removing the failed experimental debris left in my right small finger (this debris is what you could see in the short BBC3 documentary, for those that asked - it is the encapsulated remains of a node whose experimental covering i was testing. it no longer works and will have to be removed before i can use the space to install a new node but this would be a long and involved surgery with a lot of pain and for this reason i have been avoiding it.)

merry christmas to you all, and many happy winters to come

cc

L

10 comments:

Usul said...

Glad to hear from you, sib. You know where to find me :-)

- Usul

Dan Campbell said...

"if you sent me email in the last year, i'm really sorry for not replying to you."

I'm really glad you mentioned this. A friend of mine tried to convince me some time ago, to donate less, for this reason. She used language that I won't repeat here.


"my partner is looking after me"

Fucking great news. THIS is what I was worried about. Probably your other fans were worried about it, too. I was imagining you were back home again, struggling with poverty, because you broke up, and you had no one.



"it no longer works and will have to be removed before i can use the space to "

You don't realize how weird that sounds. "Yeah, I gotta go into my finger dere, and uh, make some space for da next ding, dere."


Lepht, it's wonderful to hear that you're still around, and that you have a support system.

If you need anything, let me know - I'll see if I can find someone to help. No seriously, just let us know.


Unknown said...

Damn good to hear that you are still kickin,Lepht.I do hope the coming year treats all of us better.

Unknown said...

I feel your pain on the network+ exam, they made recent changes to it that have been it a pain for even someone that has been dealing with networking for awhile... so I have pushed it back several times myself on my own grind towards a CEH as well. best wishes for the holidays and new year, seek the spark!

Brian McEvoy said...

This year we both have to get debris removed from our fingers and haptic compasses which need work. If I recall, your compass was going to be electronic, which is where it differs from mine.
Glad to see you posting again.

Anonymous said...

And a happy new year

rimma rai said...


I wanted to thank you for this great read.

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Anonymous said...

You can acquire an extremely good background in Internet Network Protocols by reading TCP/IP Illustrated published by Addison-Wesley which is a 3-volume set: The Protocols, The Implementation, and TCP for Transactions, etc. TCP/IP Illustrated has many statements by the renowned Rhodesian (and late) computer scientist W. Richard Stevens. It comes packaged with a poster which diagrams the data structures for BSD sockets in kernel space. Unfortunately, the main disadvantage for TCP/IP Illustrated is simply the fact that it's quite dated, and therefore only covers IPv4 networks. It makes up for this loss by including fairly esoteric subject matter and banter phrases along the lines of "barely standard at-the-time-of-writing."

The TCP/IP Guide produced by No Starch Press and authored by Charles M. Kozierok is most likely the best purchase choice when compared to the Addison-Wesley volumes. In TCP/IP Guide, both IPv4 and IPv6 are covered plus there's more comprehensive and up-to-date coverage overall. In a playbook sense, it's much less complex than TCP/IP Illustrated. Hence, giving it a more academic textbook as opposed to archaic manual feel.

The Hacker's Handbook: The Strategy Behind Breaking Into And Defending Networks is an excellent title insofar as network vulnerability assessment and external network penetration testing. The co-authors are Susan Young and Dave Aitel (of ImmunitySec). It contains outlines of case studies where attacks are carried out against UNIX and Windows NT/2000 machines (according to the back cover), so apparently it's rather dated since the UNIX and NT wars were still in full swing. Nevertheless, it's still a treasure trove of some very valuable offensive network penetration education preparation, regardless of whether you plan on pursuing any certifications or not.

The only certification I have is my General Class FCC Amateur Radio License. Symantec Corpoation wanted me to take the CISSP when I started working there (i.e. immediately after @stake got acquired.) Needless to say, that never happened and I don't regret it. ;-)

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