One week from now, I will be sweating in a lab. The OSCP, you know the one, 24 hours of ball-wrenching AD and other machines, made just for me. It will be purgatory, and I still feel woefully unready, but I’ll go for it. It’s a hill I wanted to climb for close to ten years now, so it’s only fair that I experience it and don’t chicken out. The failure is imminent, but every day in the labs, I am feeling a little more confident. Every box, every successful pwn is a thing I’m sure to remember.

I am almost through my OSCP lab time. I do not expect to pass on my first try. Why? Simple.

Last week, I found out a fun thing. My country has not one credit bureau, but four.

Well, I feel like I need to let off a bit of steam and vent about things I learned in the past week, month, in the regular, stream-of-consciousness fashion.

Intro: A serving of humble pie

First of all, I must admit I have messed up this week. It started small, with an issue in my parents’ PiHole. The fix was not that complicated, but I had to upgrade the Raspberry pi zero to Raspbian Bullseye. After the update, I performed several updates. Autossh, VPN, I set all of that up no problem. During the update, I was pivoting through one of my private servers in the cloud.

Finally bought a Flipper zero! If you’ve seen me on twitter (how else would you find this post), you may have seen me posting some Flipper shenanigans. Now I will try to explain why I bought it and what it has done for me so far.

Unplugged Phone pre-review

This is going to be fun. I have no stake in this, I am going to just yell at the clouds in this one. But I will also try to share what is available about the UP Phone (UnPlugged Phone) and the services underneath it.

What the hell happened?

In short, Roe v Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court.

I know I am late for the show (World Password Day was yesterday), but I had no access to the machine I usually write on, so I’ll get this off my chest now. I will illustrate my complaints about the proposed system, as well as potential solutions.

UPDATE

I moved to the “prepaid” card, and now every month, I get about $13 per month taken from my debit card. Sure, it’s still botnet, but it’s less of a botnet, since a virtual card number won’t lead attackers to everything I am.