#Web Tools Script

[cypheroxide]

The Hacker's Guidebook:

Aspiring hackers! I’ve created a guide covering core cybersecurity concepts new hackers should master before tools. I break down networking, OS internals, & hacking tactics. Recognize hacking as lifelong journey—arm yourself with the basics!

Core Concepts for Budding Cybersecurity Enthusiasts The Building Blocks of Ethical Hacking So you want to become an ethical hacker and enter the exciting world of cybersecurity. That’s awesome! However, before you dive headfirst into firing up Kali Linux and hacking everything in sight, it’s vital to build up your foundational knowledge across several InfoSec domains. Mastering the fundamentals…

[krourou2]

… y’know. I know it’s simply the nature of the Internet, but there’s something both oddly lovely and dreadful about how things can just… cease to be. Just stop being there. Vanish into dust, save perhaps hollowed ruins should anyone think to archive it, faint echoes of what once was.

Only ghosts remain.

[lokirme]

Bash Script: Calculate before/after 2: Calculate Harder

As an update, or an evolution of my earlier script that did some simple math for me, I’ve made one that will full-on test a URL while I’m making changes to see what the impact performance is of my updates. $ abtesturl.sh --url=https://example.com/ --count=10Press any key to run initial tests...Initial average TTFB: 3.538 secondsPress any key to re-run tests...Running second test...Second average…

[commodorez]

Why Firefox?

Firefox isn't trying to take away my ad blocking software, forcing me to wade through advertisements to traverse the web. I rarely have to stop and put up with ads in my day to day browsing experience. Google has made it very clear that they don't want you to have that power.

I'm very used to a specific UI in my browser, and I'm able to tweak Firefox to my needs. I don't use tabs when I'm at home, and being able to eliminate the tab bar can totally be done with Firefox (I won't elaborate on that here). However, there are many other things I can add to Firefox to improve my experience!

You know how sometimes you want to download an image on a webpage, but you can't right click on it, or it's hidden behind another element? I've got a Firefox tool for that called Right-click boroscope.

Don't want scripts to load in on a page, and cause havoc? Firefox has me covered again with NoScript.

I want to immediately reverse image search something I find regurgitated here on tumblr, in search of the original? There's a TinEye extension for Firefox to do that and save time.

For using tumblr more efficiently, there's XKit Rewritten. In Firefox.

Sick of Youtube's shitty search suggestions, and shorts being pushed? There's a Youtube Search Fixer add-on for Firefox for that.

I've also got the Wayback Machine integrated into Firefox.

The thing is, whatever reasons I enumerate to use Firefox, there are another hundred good reasons that other folks can add to this list no problem.

In some ways, it sucks that I should have to make so many modifications to my web browser to make it suitable for taking control within the modern webscape, but it also says alot that I have the freedom to make those modifications to my browser should I so choose. At work I'm forced to use chrome, and even though I'm only browsing ad-free internal corporate pages to get my job done, I still can't stand that experience.

We should be free to control our web browsing experiences. If a company finds a mantra like "don't be evil" too restrictive, maybe I don't want to help perpetuate their advertising machine (and don't think for a second that chrome isn't part of said machine). The web is supposed to be this free and open place, and it sure as hell isn't helped by browser monoculture. I really don't like the idea of supporting a monopolistic browsing experience that is the sea of chrome clones. Everything else seems to have turned into another chrome.

Fuck that noise.

So I will continue to use Firefox.

[river-taxbird]

Have YOU got an old Windows PC Microsoft has told you can't run Windows 11? It's time to give it a new life!

How to install Windows 11 on unsupported PC Hardware using Rufus. You can also disable some other Windows 11 bullshit like data harvesting and needing a Microsoft account.

It has been in the news a lot lately that Windows 11 isn't allowed to be installed on PCs without certain requirements, including the TPM 2.0, a chip that was only included in PCs made in 2018 or later. This means that once Windows 10 stops receiving security updates, those PCs will not be able to (officially) run a safe, updated version of Windows anymore. This has led to an estimated 240 million PCs bound for the landfill. Thanks Microsoft! I get you don't want to be seen as the insecure one, but creating this much waste can't be the solution.

(I know nerds, Linux is a thing. I love you but we are not having that conversation. If you want to use Linux on an old PC you are already doing it and you don't need to tell me about it. People need Windows for all sorts of reasons that Linux won't cut.)

So lately I have been helping some under privileged teens get set up with PCs. Their school was giving away their old lab computers, and these kids would usually have no chance to afford even a basic computer. They had their hard drives pulled so I have been setting them up with SSDs, but the question was, what to do about the operating system? So I looked into it and I found out there IS actually a way to bypass Microsoft's system requirement and put Windows 11 on PCs as old as 2010.

You will need: Rufus: An open source ISO burning tool.

A Windows 11 ISO: Available from Microsoft.

A USB Flash Drive, at least 16GB.

A working PC to make the ISO, and a PC from 2018 or older you want to install Windows 11 on.

Here is the guide I used, but I will put it in my own words as well.

Download your Windows 11 ISO, and plug in your USB drive. It will be erased, so don't have anything valuable on it. Run Rufus, select your USB drive in the Device window, and select your Windows 11 ISO with the Select button. (There is supposed to be a feature in Rufus to download your ISO but I couldn't get it to work.?

Choose standard windows installation, and follow the screenshot for your settings. Once you are done that, press Start, and then the magic happens. Another window pops up allowing you to remove the system requirements, the need for a microsoft account, and turn off data collecting. Just click the options you want, and press ok to write your iso to a drive.

From there you just need to use the USB drive to install windows. I won't go into details here, but here are some resources if you don't know how to do it.

Boot your PC from a USB Drive

Install Windows 11 from USB Drive

If you had a licensed copy of Windows 10, Windows 11 will already be licensed. If you don't, then perhaps you can use some kind of... Activation Scripts for Microsoft software, that will allow you to activate them. Of course I cannot link such tools here. So there you go, now you can save a PC made from before 2018 from the landfill, and maybe give it to a deserving teen in the process. The more we can extend the lives of technology and keep it out of the trash, the better.

Additional note: This removes the requirement for having 4GB Minimum of RAM, but I think that requirement should honestly be higher. Windows 11 will be unusable slow on any system with below 8GB of RAM. 8GB is the minimum I think you should have before trying this but it still really not enough for modern use outside of light web and office work. I wouldn't recommend trying this on anything with 4GB or less. I am honestly shocked they are still selling brand new Windows 11 PCs with 4GB of ram. If you're not sure how much RAM you have, you can find out in the performance tab of Task Manager in Windows, if you click the More Details icon on the bottom right. If you don't have enough, RAM for old systems is super cheap and widely available so it would definitely be worth upgrading if you have a ram starved machine you'd like to give a new life.

[helga-grinduil]

First reminder: MHA is written by a Japanese man for a Japanese audience, and if you can’t even for one second at least try to look at it from the perspective of Japanese cultural and spiritual beliefs instead of projecting your own western ones… good luck, I guess?

Second reminder: MHA is a meta story about the art of fiction, escapism, fantasy vs. reality, and theatre. It’s quite literally a three-act play about fantasy, reality, and the balance of both. It’s about a stage, and character masks, and actors, and the real world outside of the stage, and about fighting against the writer who is too lost in his own fantasy.

Third reminder: visual storytelling is a tool sometimes used to contradict the lines of the story, which invites readers to think about what is actually the truth here.

Fourth reminder: MHA is anti-darwinism and anti-biological essentialism.

Fifth reminder: Hero system was literally created to control quirked population in the post-apocalypse. It’s FOR quirks. Heroes exist to keep population’s quirk usage in check by being the only profession that allows you to use them, and strictly for ‘good’, while also showing off those quirks to keep population entertained and content with the lie that quirks are accepted, actually! (Aren’t heroes so cool and their quirks are so flashy? See, we like quirks! We accept and allow quirks! Only if you use them for the good of society, of course! You are still not allowed to use or express them if you’re not a hero though, sorry). So. No, you can’t be a ‘hero’ (job) without a quirk, having quirks is A REQUIREMENT for this job.

Sixth reminder: MHA is a sci-fi with fantasy elements. Some concepts in sci-fi aren’t meant to be 1:1 parallels to real life. Quirkless people aren’t a disability allegory, it’s an allegory for any minority in general. MHA is a story about a person from a minority becoming one of people in power and about what effect a person with the experience of being a part of minority can have on others in power, acting as the first falling domino that ends up completely rewriting the script of the story.

Seventh reminder: MHA is about one person’s small actions affecting the world like a chain reaction. One action affects another person, and that person also makes it’s own small action. Everyone performing their small actions together, those small actions eventually combining and creating big results. Concepts of karma and butterfly effect. That’s literally what the idea of OFA is about. Everyone thinking about everyone else even just a little, doing their parts, creating a web and changing the world little by little.

Eighth reminder: the themes, good lord, the themes. Remember the fucking themes, you dumbfucks. My god. One of those fucking themes is the real person vs. the mask, by the way. Which, by the way, circles back to the first reminder, since it’s all about the Japanese concept of honne and tatemae.

Ninth reminder: touch grass and stop projecting.

P.S. ‘Izuku doesn’t want to change the status quo’ - Izuku wanting to save Shigaraki is literally him going against the narrative of the story. Saving Shigaraki IS changing the status quo - it’s another (very big) falling domino that will have a huge effect on the world and the status quo as the result.

[an-android-in-a-tutu]

Romancing the Exit Sign

Art: @nickelkeep

Writing: @an-android-in-a-tutu

Rating: Explicit

Warnings: Graphic Depictions of Violence

Other Tags: Alternate Universe, Eldritch Horror, Cults, Gore, Suicidal Ideation, Mystery

Summary: A teenage boy is left to die in a shallow grave and something slithers into his bones. Devotees of an ancient god work to bring Her into the world, as with equivalent fanaticism, a man on a mission picks them off one by one. A lonesome drifter crosses paths with a mysterious stranger and finds himself inexorably drawn into the middle of it all.

Dean Winchester is adrift. All he has is his car, the next hunt, and a conversation he doesn't want to have waiting for him in California. Then a case involving mangled bodies washing up on shore in an idyllic lakeside community puts him on the trail of a man calling himself Castiel, and the dangerous web he's entangled in. Dean is used to living in a world of monsters, but the End of Days is a little out of his wheelhouse. Especially when his only ally is determined to keep his secrets behind his teeth, even as they draw closer together. Still, he intends to see things through, no matter how dark the path ahead gets.

It's either that, or call his brother.

Excerpt:

The smell of rot was stronger here, flies buzzing away over what looked to be the remains of animals, shunted into the corners, bones and bits of fur and unidentifiable red mush. The walls were covered with scrawls, symbols and pictures painted in something dark and shiny, and pools of wax melted around stubs of burnt out candles littered the room. The centerpiece, though, was the massive pool of blood that had soaked into the decaying floorboards, half obscuring the scrawl of a magic circle underneath, five points of a star, each adorned with a tool of the trade: an offering bowl filled with lumpy ash, an incense holder, a dull copper coloured knife, a bundle of herbs and feathers, and a black crystal.

“Guess it was a gateway drug after all,” he muttered, stepping forward and tracing the script that filled the circle with his eyes. He couldn’t identify it, but he didn’t have to be a scholar to figure whatever it was was major bad juju.

Cas stood with his back to all of it, staring at the symbols on the wall across from the door.

“Looks like we found the right place,” Dean said wryly. “Good call, Cas.”

Cas didn’t answer, stayed facing the wall. Something about the line of his back set Dean ill at ease.

“Hey-” He took another step forward.

Something whispered in his ear.

Dean whirled, staring into the empty space behind him, his hand coming up to his neck where he could have sworn he’d felt someone’s breath.

“What the hell-” He took two steps back, away from the open door, jumping when his foot collided with the offering bowl, knocking it over with a clatter that rang loud in the silence.

No, not silence. There was whispering, still. Constant, so quiet as to be indistinct, but if Dean strained his ears he could just hear it.

“Cas?” He called out, shaky. “Do you hear…”

His voice died in his throat as he turned and caught sight of the man again, silhouetted against that strange mural, a jarring gap in the twisting symbols that seemed to draw them in, they curled towards him, writhing on the wall as the room darkened, the shadows pulling in and the whispers getting louder until he could make out the shape of words-

Come home.

Dean’s pulse pounded in his ears, a drumbeat to accompany the chant. Come home, come home, come home to me. In front of the wall of writhing shadows, Cas started to turn, and something in Dean quailed, knowing he wasn’t prepared, wasn’t ready, but stuck in place all the same by his wanting.

Come home to the Mother.

Coming in October as part of the @deancashorrorfest!

[probablyasocialecologist]

Regardless of what companies and investors may say, artificial intelligence is not actually intelligent in the way most humans would understand it. To generate words and images, AI tools are trained on large databases of training data that is often scraped off the open web in unimaginably large quantities, no matter who owns it or what biases come along with it. When a user then prompts ChatGPT or DALL-E to spit out some text or visuals, the tools aren’t thinking about the best way to represent those prompts because they don’t have that ability. They’re comparing the terms they’re presented with the patterns they formed from all the data that was ingested to train their models, then trying to assemble elements from that data to reflect what the user is looking for. In short, you can think of it like a more advanced form of autocorrect on your phone’s keyboard, predicting what you might want to say next based on what you’ve already written and typed out in the past. If it’s not clear, that means these systems don’t create; they plagiarize. Unlike a human artist, they can’t develop a new artistic style or literary genre. They can only take what already exists and put elements of it together in a way that responds to the prompts they’re given. There’s good reason to be concerned about what that will mean for the art we consume, and the richness of the human experience.

[...]

AI tools will not eliminate human artists, regardless of what corporate executives might hope. But it will allow companies to churn out passable slop to serve up to audiences at a lower cost. In that way, it allows a further deskilling of art and devaluing of artists because instead of needing a human at the center of the creative process, companies can try to get computers to churn out something good enough, then bring in a human with no creative control and a lower fee to fix it up. As actor Keanu Reeves put it to Wired earlier this year, “there’s a corporatocracy behind [AI] that’s looking to control those things. … The people who are paying you for your art would rather not pay you. They’re actively seeking a way around you, because artists are tricky.” To some degree, this is already happening. Actors and writers in Hollywood are on strike together for the first time in decades. That’s happening not just because of AI, but how the movie studios and steaming companies took advantage of the shift to digital technologies to completely remake the business model so workers would be paid less and have less creative input. Companies have already been using AI tools to assess scripts, and that’s one example of how further consolidation paired with new technologies are leading companies to prioritize “content” over art. The actors and writers worry that if they don’t fight now, those trends will continue — and that won’t just be bad for them, but for the rest of us too.

[dragonmarquise]

How to Deal with Windows 10/11 Nonsense

This is more for my own reference to keep all of this on one post. But hopefully others will find this useful too! So yeah, as the title says, this is a to organize links and resources related to handling/removing nonsense from Windows 10 and Windows 11. Especially bloatware and stuff like that Copilot AI thing.

First and foremost, there's O&O Software's ShutUp10++ (an antispy tool that help give you more control over Windows settings) and App Buster (helps remove bloatware and manage applications). I've used these myself for Windows 10 and they work great, and the developers have stated that these should work with Windows 11 too!

10AppsManager is another bloatware/app management tool, though at the moment it seems to only work on Windows 10.

Winaero Tweaker, similar to ShupUp10++ in that it gives you more control over Windows to disable some of the more annoying settings, such as disabling web search from the taskbar/start menu and disabling ads/tips/suggestions in different parts of the OS. I think ShupUp10++ covers the same options as this one, but I'm not entirely sure.

OpenShell, helps simplify the Start Menu and make it look more like the classic start menu from older versions of Windows. Should work with both 10 and 11 according to the readme.

Notes on how to remove that one horrible AI spying snapshots feature that's being rolled out on Windows 11 right now.

Article on how to remove Copilot (an AI assistant) from Windows 11.

Win11Debloat, a simple script that can be used to automatically remove pretty much all of the bullshit from both 10 and 11, though a lot of its features are focused on fixing Windows 11 in particular (hence the name). Also has options you can set to pick and choose what changes you want!

Article on how to set up Windows 11 with a local account on a new computer, instead of having to log in with a Microsoft account. To me, this is especially important because I much prefer having a local account than let Microsoft have access to my stuff via a cloud account. Also note this article and this article for more or less the same process.

I will add to this as I find more resources. I'm hoping to avoid Windows 11 for as long as possible, and I've already been used the O&O apps to keep Windows 10 trimmed down and controlled. But if all else fails and I have to use Windows 11 on a new computer, then I plan to be as prepared as possible.

[ripplestitchskein]

Some of you assholes are about to make me do an entire essay on writing structure, serialized fiction and like, fucking, the basic iterative creative process as it relates to HB.

Broad strokes though:

Pilot. 👏 Episodes 👏 Are 👏 Just 👏 Concepts 👏

Concepts are the INITIAL stage of the creative process. You may start with a character looking and behaving a certain way but by the time you get a final product they are completely fucking different. Or a story starts out in one direction in your early drafts but once you’ve really sat down and fleshed it out you realize you need to change it completely. This is why we have sketches, why we do drafts, why we do concept art. Every creative endeavor involves these steps. It’s rough -> refine -> refine -> refine -> finished product (or as finished as you can get with time/money/resource constraints).

That’s how every creative endeavor goes plus or minus some refinement steps. Things like money, time, and the number of people working on a project and tools available can change this math a bit but it’s ALWAYS the same basic principle. You start with a concept, you refine it over and over until it’s as close to done as you can make it. This can take a few days, this can take a few decades, but it still happens every time. Whether you SEE it or not.

Most of the time you don’t see the pilots of television shows. In major corporate productions all the behind the scenes growing pains happen before you lay your eyes on it. Examples we do have of true pilots often differ vastly from the end product and are usually released as special bonus material. Sometimes a show will call an episode the Pilot but there were versions of that pilot that got left on the cutting room floor. Before that there were character sketches, draft scripts, set designs, story breaking sessions etc that no one but the main creators see.

Independent productions, however, like Helluva Boss, like indie games, like web comics often don’t have the resources to go through that process without some transparency, they need to generate interest and capital. So they release concept art, pilots, Alpha versions and other pre-production materials to the public to get people to buy in and help them fund the project. That’s how they get it made.

The problem is some of you can’t seem to see past that rough draft.

Helluva Boss gave audiences the basic idea of the show with the Pilot. After they had secured interest and resources they could actually afford to flesh it out. And guess what? Like all creative cycles, shit changed. Characters changed. Designs changed. Stories changed. Then they released the first episodes, the final product, and those episodes said “Hey, this is what we landed on in terms of direction and this is the story we decided to tell. Here are the setups for what you’ll see going forward. Those set ups are:

“IMP is a business is hell specializing in the assasination of humans at the request of people already in Hell. There are four employees, Millie, Moxxie, Loona and the boss Blitzø. They accomplish this through the use of a grimoire that the title character (the boss) Blitzø is in possession of. He got this book from another character Stolas, they make a consensual sexual deal for use of the book. We have some indications of personality and characterization, financial struggles, but we’ll find out more in subsequent episodes.”

That’s episode 1. The first goddamn episode for the series.

Episode 2 is “Here is what we’ll actually be exploring through the course of this show beyond the broad premise you saw in episode 1: Blitzo’s relationship with Stolas. Stolas’s relationship with his family specifically his daughter and his failing marriage. Blitzo’s relationship with Millie and Moxxie. Blitzo’s relationship with his daughter. Blitzo’s issue with the Fizzarolli bot. Moxxie and Millie’s relationship dynamic.” All these things are setup and that is what the show is about. It’s what the show remains about, it’s what we’ve slowly been revealing and exploring.

So this whole “the show BECAME about Stolitz and Stolas is all sad owl now” is only an argument if all you saw and internalized was the rough draft. Because the actual FIRST. TWO. EPISODES. OF. THE. FINAL. PRODUCT. Very Explicitly layout what the show is going to be about and THATS WHAT ITS ABOUT. Blitzo’s relationships, including and very importantly his relationship with Stolas, Stolas’s relationships, and very importantly his relationship with Blitzø. Moxxie, Millie, Loona, Octavia and Stella are part of that. IMP is part of that but the central core of the show, as setup in the first two episodes are IMP, Blitzø, Stolas and the relationships that spiral off from those core things. And they have not changed, they have been expanded upon and revealed because….its a story, and that’s what happens in stories.

[no-passaran]

I saw a post about this but it was weirdly written in a very obscuring way and the links were broken so I've looked up what it was trying to talk about and here it is:

A team at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering’s Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab made a linguistic assessment tool and analyzed 7,000 characters and over 53,000 dialogues in nearly 1,000 film scripts.

Out of the 1,000 movies studied:

Men had over 37,000 dialogues; women had just over 15,000.

Women portrayed just over 2,000 characters; men portrayed almost 4,900.

7x more male writers than female writers

Almost 12x more male directors than female directors

A little over 3x more male producers than female producers

While casting directors were the only exception to this trend (there were 2x as many female casting directors as female), the casting directors’ genders seemingly had no impact on characters’ genders.

Overall, female characters regardless of race, tended to be about 5 years younger than their male counterparts.

If female writers were in the writers’ room, female character representation on screen was on average 50 percent higher.

The dialogue of Latino and mixed-race characters had more dialogue related to sexuality. African-American characters had a greater percentage of swear words in their dialogues than other races.

Overall, researchers found that female characters tend to be more positive in valence, meaning they are more positive but this tended to be correlated with using language connecting with family values. Male dialogue contained more words related to achievement, death and more swear words than the dialogue scripted for women.

In additional to the content of a dialogue, the researchers used graph theory to determine how central characters are to the plot of a movie by analyzing the ties and relationships to the other characters within the film. The researchers would then model the network and web of relationships between the characters in a similar fashion to the way one would study a transit hub. They then segmented the dialogue, putting each character as a “node” or hub. What the researchers found is that when removing the female character nodes from most movie genres, the plot and the relationships did not need to be altered significantly. The exception was when women were in horror movies when they were most likely to be portrayed as victims. Thus, to leave female characters out did not cause much of a disruption.

I think this partially helps answer the question of why do fandom spaces so often seem to forget that the female characters of their stories exist, or focus almost exclusively on MxM shipping. Consciously or unconsciously, most of the time our society writes movies where female characters do not matter.

[favvn]

Jim Kirk / The Conscience of the King / Tarsus IV Masterpost

As someone who enjoys digging into the details of Star Trek TOS and writes meta posts so that I can better understand the characters, especially Jim Kirk at the moment, I am compiling this for easy browsing and to be a resource for anyone else who may need it. This post includes background information on Tarsus IV and the episode The Conscience of the King, the 1967 Writer's Guide, and my own posts that use Tarsus IV as a lens for viewing Jim Kirk.

This will probably continue to be updated as I make my way through my first viewing of the show. Tarsus IV is something that enables endless re-contextualization for Star Trek TOS episodes in my opinion, and it took me a whole month after first seeing The Conscience of the King to start realizing what Kirk's past means for his present.

1967 Writer's Guide: (Text in alt; link is to a pdf)

Transcript of The Conscience of the King (archived link)

Tarsus IV, a planet inhabited by colonists from Earth, originally under the leadership of Starfleet

It is estimated that Jim Kirk lived on Tarsus IV at the age of 13 and survived the upheavals of a revolution, famine, and massacre of half of the colonists. It is unclear if the famine predated the revolution or vice versa, so this is left to the audience to decide. It is also unclear if the "exotic fungus" that infected the crops and destroyed the food supply was a natural occurrence or a manmade one. What is clear is that Kodos seized power during the revolution, Tarsus IV's food supply was so limited that rations were running out, and he chose to kill 4,000 colonists that he deemed fit to die in order to allow the chosen 4,000 to live.

While it was cut from the finished script of The Conscience of the King, Jim Kirk originally lived with his father on the colony until Kodos killed George Kirk for refusing to join him in the revolution. Jim Kirk witnesses this murder according to the same early draft.

Jim Kirk was selected by Kodos to die. He remembers the exact words of the death summons 20 years later but survives along with eight others. The exact nature of how Kirk and the others survived is unclear and left to the audience to develop on their own. But he is one of “nine eyewitnesses who survived the massacre who’d actually seen Kodos with their own eyes," as stated in The Conscience of the King.

Jim Kirk: Life and Death after Tarsus IV a parallel post that compiles how Tarsus IV has impacted Kirk's sense of mortality and how he has continued living in spite of it

Tarsus IV + SINNER REPENT something of a long-belated alternative to my initial post about The Naked Time's wall writing

Jim Kirk: Victim/Survivor or Barbarian/Monster At the time I made the post, I refrained from adding a caption, but that's the gist of my thought process

The Conscience of the King + Mirror, Mirror a post that looks at the mirrored dialogue between the Tarsus IV massacre committed by Kodos that Jim Kirk survived and the Vega IX massacre committed by Mirror Jim Kirk

The Conscience of the King: A Closer Look at Tools and Humanity a meta post analyzing how Kodos and Kirk view tools and what their views reveal about their own humanity

The Terror of Violence a parallel/web weave post about how Jim Kirk can only accept violence if the one who uses it experiences pain and anguish as a result (in other words, a painless death is not the result of mercy, but a suppression of mercy and the desensitization of emotions); in a similar vein, the parallels between how Kirk rejects vengeance in both The Conscience of the King and A Taste of Armageddon

Tools and Humanity a post that combines Georges Bataille's argument that work and the tools created for work inhibits humankind's urge for violence alongside A Taste of Armageddon and The Conscience of the King

Jim Kirk and The Enterprise a post that examines what the Enterprise means for Kirk in light of Lenore Karidian telling him, "You are like your ship--powerful and not human."

Jim Kirk and Lenore Karidian's first meeting a post that looks at how the plot of Macbeth mirrors the plot to The Conscience of the King and the roles Kirk and Lenore play

[knightobreath]

Want to help in the war against youtube's anti-adblock?

Well, you can!

Below is copy pasted directly from this comment by uBlock Origin dev u/eipi1_0:

"Actually I personally have never considered the anti-adblock "game" is a winning game for uBO. Websites are always the active ones because they are the ones who deliver the contents to users. uBO is just an extension, it cannot change websites' owners anti-user behaviors.

The only ones that can/should affect the websites are the users. Everyone can let the websites know that their actions are doing harm to the users by giving feedbacks/criticisms to them.

For example, in YouTube case, everyone can write feedbacks/criticisms directly to them that they are violating severely the ethics principle written by World Wide Web Consortium:

2.12 People should be able to render web content as they want People must be able to change web pages according to their needs. For example, people should be able to install style sheets, assistive browser extensions, and blockers of unwanted content or scripts or auto-played videos. We will build features and write specifications that respect peoples' agency, and will create user agents to represent those preferences on the web user's behalf.

in which they are a member of: https://www.w3.org/membership/list/?initial=g&ecosystem=

Google's mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Criticize them how the ads affect badly to the users. Ask them if they really respect Web Standards or not, and forcing users to not able to block malicious connections is totally unethical.

More people/users unite to oppose corporations, the better. Don't just rely on a tool and let companies control what should be run on your own device.

How to send feedbacks on youtube page: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/4347644 (click on profile picture -> Send feedback)"

[cyberstudious]

Tools of the Trade for Learning Cybersecurity

I created this post for the Studyblr Masterpost Jam, check out the tag for more cool masterposts from folks in the studyblr community!

Cybersecurity professionals use a lot of different tools to get the job done. There are plenty of fancy and expensive tools that enterprise security teams use, but luckily there are also lots of brilliant people writing free and open-source software. In this post, I'm going to list some popular free tools that you can download right now to practice and learn with.

In my opinion, one of the most important tools you can learn how to use is a virtual machine. If you're not already familiar with Linux, this is a great way to learn. VMs are helpful for separating all your security tools from your everyday OS, isolating potentially malicious files, and just generally experimenting. You'll need to use something like VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation (Workstation Pro is now free for personal use, but they make you jump through hoops to download it).

Below is a list of some popular cybersecurity-focused Linux distributions that come with lots of tools pre-installed:

Kali is a popular distro that comes loaded with tools for penetration testing

REMnux is a distro built for malware analysis

honorable mention for FLARE-VM, which is not a VM on its own, but a set of scripts for setting up a malware analysis workstation & installing tools on a Windows VM.

SANS maintains several different distros that are used in their courses. You'll need to create an account to download them, but they're all free:

Slingshot is built for penetration testing

SIFT Workstation is a distro that comes with lots of tools for digital forensics

These distros can be kind of overwhelming if you don't know how to use most of the pre-installed software yet, so just starting with a regular Linux distribution and installing tools as you want to learn them is another good choice for learning.

Free Software

Wireshark: sniff packets and explore network protocols

Ghidra and the free version of IDA Pro are the top picks for reverse engineering

for digital forensics, check out Eric Zimmerman's tools - there are many different ones for exploring & analyzing different forensic artifacts

pwntools is a super useful Python library for solving binary exploitation CTF challenges

CyberChef is a tool that makes it easy to manipulate data - encryption & decryption, encoding & decoding, formatting, conversions… CyberChef gives you a lot to work with (and there's a web version - no installation required!).

Burp Suite is a handy tool for web security testing that has a free community edition

Metasploit is a popular penetration testing framework, check out Metasploitable if you want a target to practice with

SANS also has a list of free tools that's worth checking out.

Programming Languages

Knowing how to write code isn't a hard requirement for learning cybersecurity, but it's incredibly useful. Any programming language will do, especially since learning one will make it easy to pick up others, but these are some common ones that security folks use:

Python is quick to write, easy to learn, and since it's so popular, there are lots of helpful libraries out there.

PowerShell is useful for automating things in the Windows world. It's built on .NET, so you can practically dip into writing C# if you need a bit more power.

Go is a relatively new language, but it's popular and there are some security tools written in it.

Rust is another new-ish language that's designed for memory safety and it has a wonderful community. There's a bit of a steep learning curve, but learning Rust makes you understand how memory bugs work and I think that's neat.

If you want to get into reverse engineering or malware analysis, you'll want to have a good grasp of C and C++.

Other Tools for Cybersecurity

There are lots of things you'll need that aren't specific to cybersecurity, like:

a good system for taking notes, whether that's pen & paper or software-based. I recommend using something that lets you work in plain text or close to it.

general command line familiarity + basic knowledge of CLI text editors (nano is great, but what if you have to work with a system that only has vi?)

familiarity with git and docker will be helpful

There are countless scripts and programs out there, but the most important thing is understanding what your tools do and how they work. There is no magic "hack this system" or "solve this forensics case" button. Tools are great for speeding up the process, but you have to know what the process is. Definitely take some time to learn how to use them, but don't base your entire understanding of security on code that someone else wrote. That's how you end up as a "script kiddie", and your skills and knowledge will be limited.

Feel free to send me an ask if you have questions about any specific tool or something you found that I haven't listed. I have approximate knowledge of many things, and if I don't have an answer I can at least help point you in the right direction.

[simlicious]

I was debugging one of my Python projects and suddenly this random pattern emerged 😃

Patterns, hmm.... maybe the universe wants to remind me of something... 🤔

I'm on and off working on a tool that tells me what files I missed to download from a simfileshare folder. You know, when you have a folder with 100 links and somehow you notice that some files have not downloaded correctly, but you have no idea which ones!?!?!?

Well, my tool can compare the contents of a folder with the files of a web link or text file, and it reports which files are missing. I am also trying to make the tool download the missing files, but it's not working (maybe the script is considered a bot and is blocked, or there is something special you need to do to make it work that I have no clue of. But I'm happy the tool tells me anything at all, lol!

I am not ready at all to share any of my projects, they are in Alpha state at best 😆

But I can share a screenshot:

[yesterdays-xkcd]

SomethingAwful has a wonderful compilation of crazy AOL searches in their Weekend Web archives, 2006-08-13.

Search History [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

[In a slim panel at the top of the comic Randall (drawn as Cueball) stands to the left and his speech is written in the rest of the panel to his right.] Randall: In solidarity with the many AOL users whose often embarrassing web searches were released to the public, I offer a sample of my own search history:

[The long panel beneath the first panel shows a screenshot of Google's front page. The Google logo is partly cut through the top third of the logo. It is in the typical Google color code. Beneath the logo are six links for where to search, one of them is black, because it is chosen, the others blue. One has a red super script indicating there are news there. Below is the search bar. To the right of this, there are three lines with links, for what type of search preferences etc.] Google Web   Images   Video(New!)   News   Maps   more>> Advanced search Preferences Language Tools [Below the search bar is a box with a thin line around, which comes up when Randall presses the bar, it has the following 20 entries that Google suggests for autocompletion:] velociraptors site:imdb.com "jurassic park" raptors dromaeosaurids utahraptor "home depot" deadbolts security home improvement surviving a raptor attack robert bakker paleontologist robert bakker "possible raptor sympathizer" site:en.wikipedia.org surviving a raptor attack learning from mistakes in jurassic park big-game rifles tire irons treating raptor wounds do raptors fear fire how to make a molotov cocktail do raptors fear death can raptors pick locks how to tell if my neighbors are raptors