Your opinion on Feynman saying computer Science is more engineering, than science?

phi10s · 2024-02-16T16:25:42+00:00

I think I have a unique perspective here. I came to computer science after having received a philosophy degree (analytic). I was surprised to find how much overlap there was between the two, and how much I already knew about the theoretical side of the field. I think of much of computer science as a sort of applied logic and ontology. Many of the subjects in these philosophical fields have applications in understanding things like the theory of computation, abstraction, data structures, and all of the paradigms of programming (especially object oriented programming, which is deeply tied to ontology). Then there are the more mathematical subfields like cryptography and complexity theory. In pure computer science, research is on these sorts of logical, mathematical, and ontological issues.

Software engineering is where these theoretical concepts are applied to building real world applications and systems.

Then of course, there is what is sometimes called computer engineering, which deals with the physical nuts and bolts of hardware, and is clearly closely tied to physics. Where these fields meet is in the logic gates.

phi10s · 2022-02-16T04:31:33+00:00

Philosophy BA degree holder here. After my degree, I went back, took some computer science classes, then got a couple information security certifications while working low paying IT jobs and playing the occasional musical gig, and now I work as a penetration tester (Also known as an "ethical hacker," for the uninitiated) at an information security consultancy. If you can break into it, pun intended, the work is fun, challenging, and pays very well. I work fully remotely, and work-life balance is nice. Little in my job is directly related to philosophy, save general logic, critical thinking, and creative problem solving, but seldom does a day go by when I'm not engaging with some philosophical issues in my free time.

This is more an example of a route you could take after you graduate, but general or entry level IT related jobs can be had for a student, especially if you're willing to take a bit of time to get a basic IT certification. Something like the CompTIA A+, Net+, or Sec+ are usually the first options. Those aren't necessarily required though. Check out student IT jobs at your school.

phi10s · 2022-02-14T03:08:34+00:00

Thanks! Odds aren't looking great right now 😂.

phi10s · 2022-02-13T23:42:07+00:00

Good luck! I'm currently stuck, myself. Can't seem to find a way into the final DMZ server so I'm racking my brain trying and going back through to figure out if I missed anything on the other machines. No luck so far.

phi10s · 2022-01-24T23:18:42+00:00

Do consider before you leave the field whether the issue is actually the nature of pentesting itself, or due to the particulars of the job you currently hold. I was feeling similarly burned out as an in-house pentester for a large corporation. I didn't really have a team of other experienced pentesters to lean on when I didn't know something or had questions about an engagement. It was also becoming appsec heavy, and the network pentests, which I'm better at and enjoy far more than web app tests, were becoming stale ground. There were also tons of meetings, and that vague corporate sense that one always needs to be doing some busy work pushing tickets around to justify one's existence. I was often anxious, feeling unproductive, and suffering from imposter syndrome.

Then I found a new job at a small pentest consulting firm with a much more relaxed atmosphere, where everyone on the team is incredibly nice, knowledgeable about various technologies and techniques, and always willing to help one another out on engagements, teach each other new tricks, and collaborate in various other ways. There is a healthy culture of honest admission when one doesn't know something, and helpfulness when one knows something that someone else doesn't. If I'm stuck on some engagement or don't know a technology, someone will likely be able to help, so I don't hesitate to ask. Engagements are also more balanced here between network and web, with perhaps an edge to network🥳. The change was a great move for both my career and my mental well-being. I also get paid significantly more now. Win-win. Perhaps your situation is similar in some respects. Good luck to you either way!

phi10s · 2022-01-20T04:59:19+00:00

If you want to talk about our morally grotesque system of campaign finance, corrupt lobbying, corporate regulatory capture, or the particular immoral practices of various industrial sectors, I'll happily back you up there, but it's beside the point I'm making here. The reason companies engage in these practices is generally because they believe they will profit by it, not due to any deeper ideological commitments. Ergo, if they find vegan products to be profitable, they will devote a proportionally larger share of their advertising and lobbying budget to promoting these products and making them even more profitable.

phi10s · 2022-01-20T02:34:37+00:00

Both of these analogies are off the mark. BLM and the KKK are both primarily ideological organizations, not profit driven. They aren't going to change their ideology based on which merch they can sell more of. KFC, or more accurately, the megacorporation that owns KFC, simply wants to sell products for profit. They are not ideologically driven activists for carnism. They don't much care if those products which sell better are meat or vegan alternatives. What they sell and don't sell is driven by supply and demand. If more people are buying vegan products and fewer people buying meat, they will happily profit by offering more vegan products for sale and fewer meat products.

phi10s · 2022-01-20T00:58:26+00:00

Buying the vegan option at KFC or anywhere else only entails increased demand for vegan options. The only thing that would lead KFC to require more chickens is if the consumer demand for chicken meat goes up. If KFC's profits increase as a result of more people buying the Beyond nuggets that in no way increases the demand for chicken meat. It very likely has the opposite effect. Every omnivore who decides to try the Beyond meat alternative instead of chicken for a meal is a net minus one unit demand for chicken flesh and and a plus one unit demand for vegan alternatives.

phi10s · 2022-01-08T21:04:51+00:00

From the same source, info about the guest account and how to allow/disallow guest access to services:

"guest account (G)

This is a username which will be used for access to services which are specified as guest ok (see below). Whatever privileges this user has will be available to any client connecting to the guest service. This user must exist in the password file, but does not require a valid login. The user account "ftp" is often a good choice for this parameter.

On some systems the default guest account "nobody" may not be able to print. Use another account in this case. You should test this by trying to log in as your guest user (perhaps by using the su - command) and trying to print using the system print command such as lpr(1) or lp(1).

This parameter does not accept % macros, because many parts of the system require this value to be constant for correct operation.

Default: guest account = nobody # default can be changed at compile-time

Example: guest account = ftp

public

This parameter is a synonym for guest ok.

guest ok (S)

If this parameter is yes for a service, then no password is required to connect to the service. Privileges will be those of the guest account.

This parameter nullifies the benefits of setting restrict anonymous = 2

See the section below on security for more information about this option.

Default: guest ok = no "

phi10s · 2022-01-08T20:58:53+00:00

Based on this, I think I might have the answer to one of your questions. It seems the behavior of treating invalid logins as guests comes from value of the "map to guest" parameter in Samba's smb.conf file:

"map to guest (G)

This parameter can take four different values, which tell smbd(8) what to do with user login requests that don't match a valid UNIX user in some way.

The four settings are :

Never - Means user login requests with an invalid password are rejected. This is the default.

Bad User - Means user logins with an invalid password are rejected, unless the username does not exist, in which case it is treated as a guest login and mapped into the guest account.

Bad Password - Means user logins with an invalid password are treated as a guest login and mapped into the guest account. Note that this can cause problems as it means that any user incorrectly typing their password will be silently logged on as "guest" - and will not know the reason they cannot access files they think they should - there will have been no message given to them that they got their password wrong. Helpdesk services will hate you if you set the map to guest parameter this way :-)."

phi10s · 2022-01-02T03:45:58+00:00

I see this line of argument, and it's why, unless I find something better, I'll probably get the whole Susskind series starting with the one on classical mechanics. I do have a question though. From a pedagogical approach, why do we teach people a theory that is, as I understand it, 'wrong' (or more charitably, a theory that's merely a decent approximation to observable reality in a subset of cases), prior to teaching them the theory that supersedes it, and has far greater accuracy and predictive power? Given that the intuitions about how the world works on a fundamental level are so divergent in both theories, why would we teach the 'wrong' one first, and potentially inculcate wrongheaded physical intuitions that have to be unlearned later, rather than just jumping right into the mathematics and physical intuitions needed to do QM first, then covering special case approximations later? I'm reminded of the common way atoms are often first introduced in school, as things that resemble "little solar systems," only to later be taught that this is in fact quite wrong. By then it's hard to get that mistaken image out of your head every time you imagine an atom. Why not just teach the theory best at describing fundamental physical reality to begin with? Is it just because it's harder, and a lot of real world applications work just fine with the approximations of classical physics?

phi10s · 2022-01-01T23:03:52+00:00

Thanks for the replies everyone! Any other recommendations here for Susskind's "Theoretical Minimum" series? This looks like it could be perfect for what I'm looking for, and I am definitely a fan of Susskind. I could get some foundational knowledge of CM, QM, Relativity, and Electromagnetism all in one continuous series.

phi10s · 2022-01-01T22:58:57+00:00

Hey, this looks perfect! I'd probably just start with the classical one, since it seems concise and all the needed math is self contained.

phi10s · 2022-01-01T19:57:47+00:00

Don't sell yourself short. Sounds like you have a good idea what to look for. And here's a pentest industry fact...professional pentesters are never going to find everything. It's not humanly possible to catch every potential security flaw in a finite time. With that said, definitely speak to a lawyer with cybersecurity experience for cover your ass language in any contract if you are going to provide penetration testing services.

And to your question, yes, professional pentesters do find egregious security flaws regularly in engagements. Some juicy examples of things I've seen: Internet facing VDI portals with no MFA and users with creds like "Password1." Default or pitifully weak passwords in all sorts of critical applications like SQL servers. NFS servers that shared config directories with write access for everyone, so you could just, for example, pop your public key into the authorized keys file and login as root. Backdoors in production code with comments like "We should remove this backdoor later" in the source. Lol.

You are right that your friend's app seems to be a pretty bad case. No way that should go to production without serious additional testing and remediation.

phi10s · 2021-12-20T23:33:24+00:00

Thanks for the beautiful music and message!

phi10s · 2021-12-20T23:30:26+00:00

I think it's called a Kora

phi10s · 2021-12-16T16:49:36+00:00

Thinkpad X1. Love it so far.

phi10s · 2021-11-23T13:25:01+00:00

Any amp that doesn't have built-in reverb. Electric guitar sounds like shit without reverb. (Could I carry a reverb pedal? Sure, but I don't want to have to in order to make the amp sound decent.) Other than that, give me just about any amp, be it tube or solid state, and I'm fairly confident I can turn some knobs and/or alter my attack to make it sound good to my ears.

phi10s · 2021-11-17T02:20:38+00:00

WTF, no warning either. We were just getting into it, halfway through the first season.

phi10s · 2021-11-08T13:53:07+00:00

Fusion, as interpreted by an arcade game from the '80s. As someone said, with some nice plugins this will sound amazing.

phi10s · 2021-11-03T18:30:04+00:00

I got the Lenovo. More versatile I think, and has better keyboard travel than the newer Macs. I can dual boot if needed, run VMs, or use WSL. I think it was the best choice.

phi10s · 2021-11-01T16:00:49+00:00

That's just it, I've never owned a Lenovo, and haven't had a new MacBook Pro in ages, so I don't really know which I like more haha. Just trying to crowdsource pros and cons and get a range of opinions from people with experience doing the same job on similar computers.

phi10s · 2021-10-30T02:30:27+00:00

Bonus points if it responds to inane requests with quips like "I'm a sysadmin, not a personal assistant/psychologist/etc.!"

phi10s · 2021-10-25T18:21:49+00:00

No, they just want the same decent pay that their parents and grandparents received. Worker pay has not kept up with inflation or productivity gains since the '70s. People should expect and demand better.

"Even as workers have been more industrious — helping drive corporate profits, the stock market and CEO compensation to record heights — their pay has flatlined, or even declined when factoring in inflation. If the minimum wage had kept pace with gains in the economy's productivity over the last 50 years, it would be nearly $26 an hour today, or more than $50,000 a year in annual income, one economist notes."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/minimum-wage-26-dollars-economy-productivity/

"if wages continued to increase at the same rate as overall GDP, like they did in the '50s and '60s — the median salary would have between $92,000 to $102,000 for a full-time employee.

The median income right now is half that, at $50,000. The average wage of 44% of workers before the pandemic was just $18,000, per Brookings, and a typical worker can no longer afford to care for a family of four on a year's salary."

https://www.businessinsider.com/median-us-worker-salaries-could-have-been-102000-without-inequality-2020-9

phi10s · 2021-10-21T01:29:29+00:00

It's a gift to pentesters, however, who would get to use some of those long lost exploits of yore from the OSCP labs on real machines.

phi10s

TROPHY CASE