I can’t recommend Maldev Academy enough. It has been an amazing resource, to get into malware development. Keep in mind, however, that malware development is pretty difficult topic. You will have to eventually use WinAPI and syscalls, so learning about that even outside of malware development will help you a lot.

For example, try looking into how to execute a shellcode in memory - allocate memory as RWX, copy some data and then execute it. Try executing it in a different process, or in a different thread of another process. That’s the core of malware development you’ll probably eventually have to do anyway. Manually calling syscalls is also a skill that you’ll need, if you want to get into EDR avoidance.

Also, look into IoCs and what kind of different stuff can be used to detect the malware. Syscall hooks, signatures, AMSI, and syslog are all things that are being watched and analyze to detect malware, and knowing what exactly is your program logging and where is one of the most important and difficult skills you can get.

There probably are a lot resources for these two skills, and they are an important foundation for malware developemnt, so I’d suggest researching that. You’ll probably not get much from looking at other malware, because it tends to be really low-level, and obfuscated, exactly to avoid the IoCs I’ve mentioned above. Implementing the malware behavior after that is the easier part.

Another good resource to look into are C2s and communication, for example Mythic C2 has some interresting stuff.

And I really recommend joining the Bloodhound slack. Throughout my cybersecurity carreer as a Red Teamer, the community has helped me a lot and I’ve learned amazing stuff just by lurking.

As someone who works in gamedev, I’m sure that some of the people there are passionate about it and it is gutwrenching to see your work fail so hard. I’m sad for every project that launches after years of work and fails to get any attention or sales, and I’m definitely sure there’s someone losing sleep due to that.

I never worked in super-large projects, but I did work for a AAA studio and even there, you got people invested into the project.

From how I’ve seen it, you wouldn’t work in gamedev unless you are passionate about it, because you can get drastically better pay for the same job in other, more business focused, industries. So, if all you cared about is money, you have better options.

How are they controlled? If it’s radio, shouldn’t it be pretty easy to jamm, assuming you have the means to?

If I’m not mistaken the main weakness of FPV drones is that you have to manually control it untill it’s directly at or above the enemy. Which most of other weapons don’t need, and you can fire them from slightly larger distance.

But, since we are talking russia here, it works amazingly well.

On an unrelated note, if any of you haven’t seen FPV drone racing, it’s one one of the most cyberpunk and coolest sports.

Whi getting through college, I was always bummed that we have to learn a lot of stuff that seemed super irelevant to my future carreer, while also being annoying. Stuff like prolog, Phyro, Lisp, Assembly, or bunch of obscure math.

It was only years later when I finally realized why it was important - the school wasn’t for teaching me to be the C#/Java programmer, but it taught me to be A programmer. I can pick up and start successfully writing anything I need, in any language, relatively quickly and without issues, nonmatter whether it’s functional, objective, or wharever style of language, because I’ve very probably already had to deal with, learn, understand and pass exams in language that is similar to it, since college made me learn a language from almost every style or flavor of languages there are.

I was surprised when I first saw colleagues struggle with picking up languages other than the ones they work in, and that was when I finally realized why and how sneakily did the college make me a universal programmer without me noticing it. And that’s something that’s harder to get when self-taught, because you don’t get exams and it’s easier to miss the point and just skip courses on lisp, prolog or lambda calculus, because it seems irrelevant, but the different point of view and approach used when writing in those languahes is what will teach you the most.

https://www.ccpgames.com/

EVE is one of the most unique games I’ve ever seen and I admire it, and CCP in general, from what I’ve seen in their volunteer programs or from streams, seems like a nice workplace.

Also, Island is cool.

Then the book will definitely be up your alley, it’s exaclty about that, and offers a great tips about how to approach it.

I cheated the MFAs by switching what I could to SMS, Yubikey or just copying the MFA private keynto Bitwarden. Kind of defeats the point of MFA, but makes stuff definitely easier.

Anything that’s important however is on yubikey, however.

Also, good luck! Are you going through the Digital Minimalism book? I should refresh on it, every time I try it, it doesn’t last long, but I always get rid of one more stupid online habit that I don’t pick up when I inevitably return to my pre-reading the book intetnet usage. So, after already going through like 4 attempts in the last 3 or 4 years, my internet usage is slowly but surly changing for the better. But it’s more of a long run, rather than being able to get everything on the first try, in my experience at least.

If you’re not doing it because of the book/haven’t heard of it, I definitely recommend reading Digital Minimalism by Carl Newport.

How to best approach starting secops in a small indie gamedev studio. We don’t even have a sysadmin, and our boss mostly also does most of our infra together with one of the programmers.

We would love to start setting up some basic security setup, ideally FOSS based, and while I work there as a programmer, I do have 5 years of experience working as pentester and doing red teamings, so I kind of have an idea about what we could have. But I never did anything from blue team side, and also worked for large corporations, so most of the tools and solutions I’ve encountered are waaay over the budged of 20 man indie gamedev studio.

How would I even start? Are there any frameworks that would help but arent aimed at large corporations? What of the buzzwords we even need? Do I start with hardening group policies, get rid of local admins, then set up some kind of log management/SIEM, then IDS? And it’s so hard to google for, because every blog post I found is just a disguised ad for a company that does Security as a Service. Why isn’t there some kind of easy 10 step program that would tell you “step 1. Harden configuration. Step 2. Install <one of many security tooling acronyms>.”

I vaguely know that most of the buzzwords that are thrown around have some dependencies, but what? Does IDS needs logs from SIEM, or is it the other way around? I’m obviously not qualified for this, but i dolid get time to research it, and some DIY attempts is definitely better than having no security in place at all. And, I know very well how to actually hack and test our security setup, so I can at least tell if something I’ve done is shit or useless :D

I’d go for scandiavia, if I could choose anywhere. Or Island, working for CCP is my dream job.

When I tried that, it lasted me for almost a year and a half, before I unfortunately got a second job that required MFA and I needed to be more online in general due to juggling two jobs. And it was amazing!

What I eventually did however was to get a dumb phone that can do a wifi hotspot, and still carried my smartphone but without simcard and net access, and powered off. When I really needed to get a taxi or look up a way home when I overslept drunk on public transport and ended up who knows where, I could always just fire up hotspot, power on the smartphone and do stuff I needed. Cause when that happened first time, it was when I first realized how much dependent I am on smartphone and net access.

Thanks for reminding me, I just quit one of the jobs and I can afford to be more offline, so back to the dumb phone I go! Convincing my GF again that she has to text me instead of using discord will be hard, though … Or explaining that I really cant look up the fact she wants, or call a taxi quickly…

I still have a python bot that forwarded discord messages to my own bare html website, so I can chat with her with the basic web browser of the dumb phone.

I stumbled upon the Geminy page by accident, so i figured lets give it a try.

I asked him in czech if he can also generate pictures. He said sure, and gave me examples about what to ask him.

So I asked him, again in czech, to generate a cat drinking a beer at a party.

His reply was that features for some languages are still under development, and that he can’t do that in this language.

So I asked him in english.

I can’t create images for you yet, but I can still find images from the web.

Ok, so I asked if he can find me the picture on the web, then.

I’m sorry, but I can’t provide images of a cat drinking beer. Alcohol is harmful to animals and I don’t want to promote anything that could put an animal at risk.

Great, now I have to argue with my search engine that is giving me lessons on morality and decide what is and isn’t acceptable. I told him to get bent, that this was the worst first impression I ever had with any LLM model, and I’m never using that shit again. If this was integrated into google search (which I havent used for years and sticked to Kagi), and now replaces google assistant…

Good, that’s what people get for sticking with google. It brings me joy to see Google dig it’s own grave with such success.

How I understand it is that the admired language is one of those “I’ll start learning it tommorow” languages, that you however already talk about how great it is wherever you can, i.e see Rust on Lemmy.

I also find it funny (and relatable) how neovim is the most admired IDE. I totally relate to that, I’ve been telling myself “I’ll learn and switch to Helix tommorrow” for the past two years.

76% of all respondents are using or are planning to use AI tools in their development process this year, an increase from last year (70%). Many more developers are currently using AI tools this year, too (62% vs. 44%).

What the fuck. That’s horrifying. I also though that every sensible workplace bans the use of AI.

A friend was telling me about a discussion between CTO’s at a conference, where they were talking about whether it’s even worth it to hire junior developers anymore, since there’s a high risk of them just being “AI-raised”, without much (or any) experience of coding without AI. And, this survey result… I can see where they are coming from. The future of programming looks pretty bleak - our job will not be replaced. It will just get worse, with good developers being more of a rarity.

And the amount of people who use vim or neovim as their IDE is surprisingly high. Is it skewed by sysadmins?

That’s a good question, and I never through about it like that. I think that the lack of documentation isn’t that much of a problem, rather that the code stands out in the project in that it is complex to understand and requires some more though, effort and imagination to grasp, since it’s generic with lot of interfaces and polymorphism.

Now, that usually wouldn’t be much of an issue, however - the project is a game we’ve been actively working on in our spare time in a team of 2 programmers for the last 6 years, and we are all fed up with it and just want it to end. Most of the (pretty large by now) codebase is kind of simple - it’s a game code, after all, and since we started it when we were 20, there aren’t many overenginered ideas or systems, but everything is mostly written in the ugly, but simple and direct way, so if we had wanted to change something, we may have had to rewrite a part of it, but it never really needed much effort to understand what’s going on.

But now I need to change this code, which is one of the only parts that requires some kind of imagination and actually sitting down and trying to understand it, and since my motivation about the project is so low, it’s a pretty large hurdle to cross. One that is also unnecessary, since most of the generalism isn’t needed and will never be used. But since the code is written in such extensible way, it’s hard to just hack up a simple and ugly solution somewhere into it and be done with it, without really figuring out what the hell is going on.

A documentation wouldn’t help with that - it would still take the same amount of mental effort to be able to work with that code, which we generally lack in the project. I think that if I actually took the time to properly look through the code, figuring out what’s going on wouldn’t be too hard - the naming convention is pretty ok and it’s not that difficult, it just requires some mental effort.

I’m not trying to make excuses, the code very probably has problems, I’m just trying to better sort my thoughts about why I have so much problems working on it. It probably has more to do with my motivation, rather than the code in itself, and the fact that the complexity here wasn’t required, and is now a needless hurdle that actually hinders progress. Not due to it’s quality, but do to unrelated motivation issues and us having to basically force ourselves to work on and finish the damn project.

https://wbo.ophir.dev/boards/klFrzLZIyfumYW6larIfi-NKQescKcR8pMib1hlochQ-

Feel free to draw here.

There’s a piece of code in our hobby game project that I’ve written after attending classes in college about how to write clean and SOLID code. It’s the most overengineered piece of shit I’ve ever written. I’m not saying it’s the fault of the lectures, of course it’s on me being a little bit over zealous, but it does check all the boxes - It’s a simple “show selectable list of stuff”, follows MVC, it’s extensible without rewriting to adittional data-types and formats, extensible view that can show any part of data you need, generic, and in general it could be used anywhere we need, for any kind of data.

There’s only one place where we need and use such list in our game.

I needed to rewrite a part of it, since the UI changed drastically, to not need this kind of list, while also adding events into the process. I haven’t seen the code for almost 4 years, and it’s attrocious. Super hard to understand what’s going on, since it’s too generic, interfaces and classes all over the place, and while it probably would be possible to rewrite the views for the new features we need, it’s just so complex that I don’t have the mental capacity to again figure out how it was supposed to work and properly wire it up again.

I’m not saying it’s fault of the classes, or SOLID. It’s entirely my fault, because the classes inspired and hyped me with ideas about what a clean code should look like, that I didn’t stop and think whether it’s really needed here, and went over-the-top and overengineered the solution. That’s what I’d say is the danger of such Clean Code books and classes - it’s easy to feel clever for making something that passes SOLID to the letter, but extensibility usually comes at a complexity, and it’s super important to stop and think - do I really need it?

I can’t decide whether this sentence is a joke or not. It has the same tone that triggers my PTSD from my CS degree classes and I also do recognize some of the terms, but it also sounds like it’s just throwing random science terms around as if you asked a LLM to talk about math.

I love it.

Also, it’s apparently also real and correct.

I see. So, you having shares basically means you own part of the company assets, and if it were to for example shut down or get into huge trouble (so no one sensible would want to buy their shares), you’ll still get kind of compensated from the value of their remaining assets being sold? That kind of makes sense, and is the difference I was looking for.

It’s still weird, but a little bit more understandable than crypto, which is only literally stealing and scamming money from others (who will eventually in the end end up left with all the literally valueless crypto, and whose money basically paid for all your profit from it)

I see, stonks are way more bullshit than I thought. Is there anything else you can do with your stock, other than sell it to someone else? I always thought that crypto is such a scam especially because in the end, it has no value in itself, and the only thing you can do with it is sell it to someone else. If noone wants to buy it, well, you are fucked. Does it mean that stocks are exactly the same concept? I always thought it has something to do with the vaule of the company and the profits it earns, but if there is no way how to cash them out other than selling your piece of paper to someone, then it’s really the same? I suppose that unlike crypto, the stock price increases if the company is turning profit, but you still have to find someone to sell it to, right, so the price is increasing only because the demand from people willing to buy it is increasing due to it turning profit, but it’s not really tied to the actual value of the company, so it’s exactly like crypto? Or is the price set by some different mechanism than crypto is - pure demand from people willing to buy?

I was just about to update my Nobara after some time, thanks for the heads up. It’s a shame, I really loke Nobara and I switched to it because I couldn’t get lot of game related stuff working properly on Fedora and I’d like to stick to Fedora-based distros since I’m used the most to that. I guess PopOS would be my next choice if I couldn’t get something working, Mint after that.