Hello, how are you?

I spent some time over the weekend just cruising Discord servers, browsing Reddit, and larping as a noob. I was curious what people who are interested in cybersecurity are doing, how they feel about things, the material they're using, etc.

I'm going to give a real hot take, so buckle up.

I strongly dislike a vast majority of information security communities. My entire career (even now) I've been a loner. I don't really feel comfortable in large communities. I don't like seeing, hearing, or reading about people BBQ's, their favorite sports team, their favorite bars, their families, blah blah blah.

People might think this is weird, but I'm not here to make friends. I like malware, and cybersecurity news, but beyond that I'm not interested in anything else. Yes, I can be friendly — I'll gladly talk to anyone. But I'm not going to attend your talk, meetup at a bar, I have absolutely zero interest in playing video games together. Maybe I'm a weirdo, but just because we have something in common (cybersecurity) it doesn't mean we're destined to be best buddies.

If you're interesting in cybersecurity, social networking can help — it can accelerate the job hunting portion, but you 100% do not need to join a community. You do not need to buy a course, you do not need to attend local events, you do not need to attend major conferences.

At the end of the day: if you want a job in cybersecurity you need to read, put in the work, and learn the damn thing. There is no other shortcuts. If you find yourself saying "but there is so many options to learn from!" — that might be you procrastinating.

Anyway, to cool off this hot take, here is a picture of a cat looking at a pile of hot dogs.

Thanks,
- smelly smellington

In reply to h4ck3r@parrot
And the complexity just grows becuz .. idk I felt to do that ..
I have ecies encryption.. with AES on the audio packet .. have FEC .. and Opus encoding on it too ..

In reply to h4ck3r@parrot
Do reinventing wheels count ? .. like right now I am coding a VoIP server from scratch.. well I technically started doing this as our Computer Networks project but now I have gone too far with ideas that I cannot show this .. (we have to run it on a Pi .. and now I am setting up personalised streaming for each client and it seems too much for that) ..

In reply to ᴘʀᴏғғᴀᴘᴛ
I don't see it as a problem if you are doing it for the sake of learning. Heck create the wheel again and again improving it every time. Logic wise or code quality wise or performance wise.

In reply to I75k1ddy
😅 + lot of pings from different internal teams, pressure from management, daily standup calls, mentainance activities, Doer checker process, update work logs, keep trackers, monitor reports, send emails here and there😂😂 and finally work on technical issues and root cause analysis

In reply to ᴘʀᴏғғᴀᴘᴛ
I got my first intern, discussing about https://GitHub.com/proffapt/gsync. It doesn't solve something new, it's not efficient, it's not ground breaking. But the journey, when presented properly, impressed the interviewer. The problems faced and the approach to solve them.

In reply to h4ck3r@parrot
Do reinventing wheels count ? .. like right now I am coding a VoIP server from scratch.. well I technically started doing this as our Computer Networks project but now I have gone too far with ideas that I cannot show this .. (we have to run it on a Pi .. and now I am setting up personalised streaming for each client and it seems too much for that) ..

In reply to wother
From... Scratch? 😶

In reply to wother
From... Scratch? 😶

In reply to ᴘʀᴏғғᴀᴘᴛ
There might still be a few layers of abstraction, while removing others. And that's what he is calling as scratch, I presume.

In reply to h4ck3r@parrot
I am using socket programming for the client and server .. should I make that lib also from scratch to call it "scratch" ?

And the rest of stuff like for encryption,encoding (Opus,ecies and AES etc) etc I am using external libs .. (can that make my project not scratch ?)