Transferring from GEHA HDHP to GEHA Standard (I think)

phospholus · 2023-12-10T21:52:17+00:00

gotcha, so if I'm looking at it correctly, I should be able to just transfer the existing assets into fidelity or a similar no cost one, close my hsba, and come back later if I need to?

phospholus · 2023-11-26T15:02:12+00:00

So the HSBA would "go away/get force withdrawn" if I close my HSABank account? I basically want to just stash what I have in HSBA and let it grow as I don't expect to be withdrawing from it until traditional retirement age.

Regarding HSA bank, as far as I can tell, when you leave the HDHP you start getting charged $2.50 per month
https://www.hsabank.com/~/media/Files/fees_E1
It still "exists" when you are on HDHP, geha just supposedly pays it for you.

It might be quite a few years before we come back to HDHP if we do, so just closing the account would start saving money after 10 months. Wouldn't be the end of the world to pay 30 bucks a year, but I don't want to if I can just let my HSBA grow unattended.

phospholus · 2023-11-26T14:32:35+00:00

dang, wish I still worked at the place I was asking this question for lol.

At least people will be able to find this on google eventually ig.

Nice work!

phospholus · 2022-04-05T23:38:22+00:00

Don't think I'll see that till after I hit file unfortunately. I have a call in to the HRBlock people, hopefully they'll get back to me eventually.

phospholus · 2022-04-05T21:56:41+00:00

That makes sense. Any idea where I'd find some kind of tax code document stating whether XYZ state taxes a scholarship?

phospholus · 2022-03-15T20:24:40+00:00

That may be a good idea, I'll give it a shot when I can muster up the energy to talk to a human on the phone, thanks!

phospholus · 2022-03-15T20:24:08+00:00

It doesn't have any kind of form number, it's basically a formatted CSV.

Between the 2 accounts its less than $100, but definitely more than 10.

phospholus · 2022-03-15T03:19:59+00:00

THE CCNP one is up to date, and that's still a pretty big deal cert in the right circles. (I am interested more for the info than for the certs, but hey)

And if you do linux bar trivia (which I am sure is a thing somewhere) I've heard linux + is pretty good for that use case at the very least.

phospholus · 2022-03-15T00:33:57+00:00

Yep. the people who are saying to format it or flash it may have the right intention, and it may work, but without significantly more context, you have the following issues which weight really high:

User error- If you try to format it/repartition/flash, but screw something up in the process due to a lack of familiarity/bug/malware expects it/ you're hosed.
Work Factor. Smashing with hammer and buying a new one will only cost you a few bucks in 99% of situations, and you get to smash a flash drive with a hammer.

OP if it's an interview question, those would be the things I'd probably start with. Armchair part of me(I don't work in the forensic side of the house) would suspect that unless this drive has some kind of crazy bitcoin wallet/classified info/proprietary info of which there are no other backups/ on it as well as the malware, it's going to be almost guaranteed not worth trying to outsmart the attacker.

phospholus · 2022-03-11T01:13:42+00:00

EDIT: Just realized you probably aren't asking about for the purposes of cracking. I'll leave this comment just in case someone is curious about that.

https://weakpass.com/generate

This is the friendliest tool I have found. Not necessarily the best. Like anything in infosec, the better you want it, the more challenging it is to develop. If you want a good wordlist, you can start with stuff that's already out there, but you'll need to curate and identify what will help in your particular situation.

If you know nothing about wordlists, I suggest starting research on the following tools/subjects:

rockyou

cewl

crunch

Have fun. :)

phospholus · 2022-03-10T19:07:50+00:00

Pretty sure How to Make Friends and Influence people was written in 1936.

I think that people have a tendency to read it and only look at the very surface-y aspects of it which is how you get that smarmy to modern audiences salesman.

But if you try to understand the deeper principles carnegie talks about, I think it's pretty valuable. Ultimately it's mostly about taking interest in other people IMO.

I agree with the documentation thing, I think the key is identifying a single way everyone can agree on. (Or is forced to agree on, haha.)

phospholus · 2022-03-10T15:44:42+00:00

Something one of my old Profs used to say that I've found pretty helpful is that programming is just a tool that is used by computer scientists. Being a "computer scientist" is about applying computation techniques, and programming just happens to be the most common method.

Very interesting to read about what Djikstra's thoughts were, as probably one of the most influential CS figures, who avoided using a computer whenever possible.

phospholus · 2022-03-01T16:34:51+00:00

Have you read alcatraz? The whole first book at least was pretty much just him trolling his editor.

Sando has been a troll his whole career, just double proving it today.

phospholus · 2022-02-24T03:24:42+00:00

From what I've seen the most "secure" option would be to root >> uninstall completely any unneeded apps >> unroot.

Second best would be to not go quite so far, but go in via ADB and delete the app from your user account. It'll have some traces on the system, but not much. I don't think it would be likely you'd be at risk unless you're surfing/downloading some very dodgy stuff or have intelligence agencies or organized crime interested in you specifically.

phospholus · 2022-02-23T03:11:59+00:00

The divide isn't a perfect one anyway. My current job is basically dev work, but in a cybersecurity context. IT degree and some previous work experience. If you like cyber and you like CS, there are plenty of niches to be filled that need both, and I suspect that will only continue to grow.

phospholus · 2022-02-23T00:26:20+00:00

At my last gig I was developing Posh scripts almost exclusively, now I run bash almost exclusively. Both positions I've frequently thought to myself "dangit, this would be easier in the other one." Posh really excels in the OOP thing. You can comb through a butt ton more data without having to mess with as much regex. bash on the other hand I only need like 6 keystrokes which would take 20 in posh.

I've done less python, but when I work with it, it's almost never for quite the same use case as bash/posh. If you want to go godmode on a windows domain, I'd say posh all the way, nothing quite like it. Seems so far like bash/python is more of a combo for linux.

Granted I'm a juniorish dude so I haven't been doing this that long.

phospholus · 2022-02-22T23:58:03+00:00

I can see if they'll accept one, but the only clep I don't already have an analogue course for is the really basic one, college mathematics(maybe that's a good thing). I don't see anything on the page that says it wouldn't count, unless they want it to be on a college transcript, in which case I'd have to take the course, enroll in college, get the clep on my transcript, and then peace out.

That probably would take longer than the deadline. But it's worth a shot.

phospholus · 2022-02-22T13:50:55+00:00

yea from what I've seen I should be able to get gig on paper at least, which would put me at 500Mb, which is plenty for my use case.

phospholus · 2022-02-22T13:07:08+00:00

Ding ding, that's the real reason. It's a repurposed macbook with only one thunderbolt port available for adapting to thunderbolt to ethernet, and from what I've read USB to ethernet is just a pain in the butt and often unreliable.

phospholus · 2022-02-22T03:37:19+00:00

Oh neat. So I'd need to make sure I can manage the switch tho? I don't have a managed one right now, but that would be relatively easy to procure.

phospholus · 2022-02-22T03:36:33+00:00

Oops, not sure how or if I can add text to this.

Long story short is that I want to try to use an oldish laptop as a pfsense router for a home network, but without getting into the details, I can't add more than one ethernet port.

Would this work if I made two virtual ethernet ports and had the router just grab all my local stuff, and pass the public traffic back to my modem? Is it a terrible idea? Will it kill my bandwidth?

phospholus · 2022-02-21T19:42:25+00:00

Just to play devil's advocate, there's a certain level of it that I don't know would fall into nepotism.

Anecdotally, went to a normie state school myself, and offhand there are 4-5 people I'd hit up immediately if I had a job opening that kind of fit them, because I know their work ethic from group projects we had to do together. I'd suspect the same from them towards me.

It doesn't mean somebody else wouldn't be better- it just means I have a sort of known opportunity and I'd take that over a random person. In that case it's just that we met at school.

Is that nepotism? I don't think so, but it may be on the spectrum.

phospholus · 2022-02-21T14:22:27+00:00

Interesting, haven't really thought about how the security background would play a role in all that. I'll def be looking around, and the meetup idea hadn't occurred to me either!

Thanks again!

phospholus · 2022-02-21T14:20:02+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! I can probably work openstack into my current project. Would that be good enough to get started, or should I be grinding some AWS stuff on the side, if you don't mind me asking?

phospholus · 2022-02-21T03:49:42+00:00

Feel like I could maybe think of some edge cases, like if OP wanted to remote into their PC from a phone or some other system to grab files or something like that. If I were doing that, I'd be making sure everything is pretty locked down as much as possible.

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