I was tier one help desk, overnight, in a children’s hospital.

I had a doctor call me, who expressly made it clear he didn’t want a run around, while manually palpating a child’s heart to keep it in rhythm and thus, the child alive.

I told him there are back ups upon back ups that can be implemented, and I am happy to talk about his computer problem when the patient is SAFE. Not a little, “we got this,” safe, but SAFE.

Tier one help desk, overnight, no support, and I had to tell a person who turned out to be a board member that he could go fuck himself on his computer problem until the child patient was safe.

My first job was customer service, and I’ve been in IT for a dozen years. Its still customer service. You just have to realize who the customer is - in the case of a children’s hospital, it is always the child.

Oh fuck me, I’m still studying to red team basic computing.

I take it you’ve never had to log into a printer with an AD account before?

Yeah, I went out to 32 characters once. Until I needed to work on a printer.

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.

Until people learn the definition of fascism, which… well, I’m in a southern state. Most dipshits support fascism as long as it oppresses the people they don’t like.

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.

I have an analog clock in my man cave. Its very steam punk in design. It is NOT accurate and is ONLY a decoration piece that gets corrected when I can spare the attention. It runs fast, if anyone cares.

Ultimately, my wife liked it, bought it for me, and put it up. Not gonna upset her over something I really don’t care about.

I have not, thankfully, worked with too many Lawyers in my adult life.

That being said, I was a child of a government agent. They had a courthouse to fuck put people on trial in house to keep it all quiet.

Lawyers are their for THEM. No one else. I’ve had them spell it out to me as a child because it just seemed evil. For the most part, they are.

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.

Languages grow and evolve with time.

Not all forms of evolution make sense or provide any real value.

Like Trump.

I assume the office attracts plenty of dicks.

Generally, people who seek power should NOT have it.

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.

I didn’t expect the revolution to be led by tween pop fans, but I remember middle school.

Vicious.

The (French? I think?) foreign legion, or is there another legion out there these days?