hacker.org

There's a lot of wireless networking around the place so I suspect I should be able to have some fun, even though they have departments that are aware of security I think they are more concerned with high throughput so there should be a few things to play with like faking things on wireless and collecting stats.

Good to see you're getting on with the book, you can use codepad to quickly run your C code but I'd recommend Code::Blocks which can come bundled with MinGW if you wanted to try anything with file operations or more advanced/time consuming programs (and GUI/Windows endeavours).

baha'a wrote:

CodeX wrote:I'll be going to Royal Holloway, Univery of London (confirmed) as I'm on the other side of the Atlantic so I am closer to York than New York it also happens to be a 20 minute drive away from where I live plus it also has the Information Security Group there which could be interesting.

lucky you man

really good luck

I mean I wish you a good luck

but it went out like that

Thanks

I missed your first post as I must have been tying my response to the previous post when you submitted yours

does Code::Blocks work for linux. i use linux for programming and word and every day use. ( use windows 7 for gaming) as hard as they tried to make windows 7 very secure. making it user friendly like destroyed alot of it.

Code::Blocks is cross-platform and on works the same on Linux & Windows (apart from the OS functions in things like sys/socket.h and winsock2.h), Linux has the bonus of being good for making some utilities and services but then again Windows isn't all that bad for it really. Nowadays I do everything back on Vista though as I haven't made any web/network utilities in a while which is what I prefer *nix for and I like to be able to play good games on whim and I prefer the appearance of Windows and how it tries to do most things for you - I don't find security an issue on it. All of that waffling aside, what I mean is don't be afraid to program on windows, especially as you're starting out.

The thing about windows 7, is that even if you have any tools to hack it, you can go in and pretty much like total peoples internet, you go to like a friends house, you can find there internet password (what they usually use for there login for there router, and fuck that up. that's with out any kind of third party programs.

That's just the problem with crap passwords and default settings on router's which has nothing to do with the OS, you could do the same if they were on a Linux machine as it's just playing with settings over HTTP, with people like that you can leave them stranded without internet just by taking out their ethernet cable or unscrewing their aerials and they won't know what's gone wrong for a month until they drop something under the desk then look under and wonder what the pulled out things are doing

there is actually a button to "view password" so it changes * back to letters in windows 7. while i like windows 7 (it grew on me since I've used it) I just easily found holes that are easy to manipulate

thanks Codex

any way I really like linux much better

I know there are lots of discussions on the net about what's better

and I'm really amazed that someone special like you thinks like this about windows

but any way maybe when I used to use windows I never tried to learn it
so that's why I didn't like it (((((at all)))))

Doesn't the "view password" only work when you're entering the password then later when you come back it only shows asterisks? Even if it does show you it's not the worst thing on earth as it's got to be on the computer in some form, whether its an unhashed password or the hash of it that is actually used and how often does or would your average home user have a problem with it? Sure it could be quite an issue but that's of real concern to very few people, if someone can get to your computer they can do just about anything anyway

@baha's I'm happy to leave the OSs people use down to them as it is generally a very close call that's down to circumstances and whim, but I have to say windows is certainly good for games and as long as you don't use a bleeding edge OS (such as Vista when it first came out) then you probably won't have a bad experience (such as no drivers or old software incompatibilities). As far as learning Windows goes I've been on some form or another since I was 4-5 (nearly 15 years) and so I'm quite familiar with them

CodeX wrote:Doesn't the "view password" only work when you're entering the password then later when you come back it only shows asterisks? Even if it does show you it's not the worst thing on earth as it's got to be on the computer in some form, whether its an unhashed password or the hash of it that is actually used and how often does or would your average home user have a problem with it? Sure it could be quite an issue but that's of real concern to very few people, if someone can get to your computer they can do just about anything anyway

@baha's I'm happy to leave the OSs people use down to them as it is generally a very close call that's down to circumstances and whim, but I have to say windows is certainly good for games and as long as you don't use a bleeding edge OS (such as Vista when it first came out) then you probably won't have a bad experience (such as no drivers or old software incompatibilities). As far as learning Windows goes I've been on some form or another since I was 4-5 (nearly 15 years) and so I'm quite familiar with them

I'm sure it's good for games (BTW I used it for about 10 years and I'm using linux only from 6 months now) that's not because it's a good OS (my opinion) but because good games are made for it.
about bad experiences: I had much because there is always an error message (I said maybe I didn't try to learn to use it).

and when I say learn I don't mean as an end user (I'm planning to learn windows after I finish learning *nix) I mean to hack windows to know every thing about it, I mean understanding it very well but I'm interested in the real toys now:D

BTW I wanted to ask you do you know this comics site:
www.geekherocomic.com

I liked it very much and spent so much time on it

It certainly can take a bit of ironing to get things all in order with windows and it can be a pain but when it's smooth, its smooth (until the next time an update decides to sabotage things). http://xkcd.com/ is a pretty good web comic, haven't seen www.geekherocomic.com before but it's not too bad

CodeX wrote:It certainly can take a bit of ironing to get things all in order with windows and it can be a pain but when it's smooth, its smooth (until the next time an update decides to sabotage things). http://xkcd.com/ is a pretty good web comic, haven't seen www.geekherocomic.com before but it's not too bad

I like that you usually respond quickly

I didn't like http://xkcd.com/ very much

I surfed it a little bit because geek hero comic refers to it sometimes

but I liked geek hero at the first place because it's about computer, geeks, open source and such things.

you know pascal right?
do you recommend me to get deep into it or just finish what I'm asked to do with it in collage and then through it away and focus on other languages(python, java, c/c++/c#,ruby,php,perl ..etc)??

xkcd has maths, physics, computing and general satire which I quite like but have wasted more than enough time going through all of them

I personally wouldn't stick with it, nowerdays it's used as nothing more than a teaching tool to get people into basic programming. Pascal was superseded by Turbo Pascal and that's now old hat because of Delphi, nowadays the main reason people use these languages is to maintain old software of because their teacher used it/thinks its easy to start with.

I think you'd be best off doing what your meant to with it then moving onto something else as modern programming is usually done in C++ for commercial applications, C for small tools and where rapid application development is needed (which aren't necessarily fast or pretty, they just need to get the job done and be made in a short time) usually things like C#, VC++ and VB.NET are used to make programs to act as an interface between non/less-technical users such as level designers & scripters at during game development.

Scripting is also good to know, some are good for getting a quick task done like solving a lot of the challenges on this site (Python is a good example of that) and some are more suited to being embedded into applications such as Lua which is used by Lionhead Studios to make it simple for scripters to set up events in games such as Fable. Garry's Mod is a brilliant example of what you can do with an embedded scripting language such as Lua.

I suggest that you learn C++ or at least C as it's a staple in programming and is commonly considered the lingua franca for programming as it incorporates both high and low level programming concepts. Python or Ruby are good choices for scripting languages for you to learn and think you should look at the two and see which you prefer (test them out on codepad some time). Once you've got C++ or C JAVA would be a good secondary programming language as it's used a lot early on in university and being experienced with it before you get there will certainly help you. That's it for the main things I think you should try but if you see a programming/scripting language that you like the look of it don't hesitate to try it out, play around with it as you might find you prefer to use it for certain situations where the other languages you know are not as well suited - this is why I'm familiar with a fair few things

thanks Codex this is really a great rich reply

(when you see my rank here close to 100 -it's close to 1800 now- then you'd know I had followed your advices )

note:
when I said pascal I meant Turbo and free pascal
but after I read your post I don't think I'm that interested even in delphi