The Pihole is a device built on a single board computer (sbc). The device acts as an ad-blocker for your network. There are also blacklists that can be applied or you can build your own.
I good deal for people build these with a raspberry pi, but I found 2 orange pi zeroes for cheap and decided to build on out of this.
So, while at Black Hat and DefCon people were messing around with the Flipper Zero and I was like that’s kinda awesome. It got me thinking about other gamiefied ways to tinker and learn. Enter Pwnagotchi:
I got one (the pi scarcity is real) and have been fooling around with it. Toss it in a cargo pocket when I go out to let the lil guy learn.
The device essentially learns from wifi handshakes. The more environments it’s in, the more it’s learning. I like the novelty and with the pi zero the small size.
I’m still messing around with it, honestly, but the above video and the below link should help anyone interested:
Again, had a post planned and instead news caused a different post.
Even before the Supreme Court officially struck down the Roe v. Wade decision and sent reproductive health issues back to the states there were stirrings questioning how incoming changes might effect health apps and data collection.
Living in today’s world people might not worry about how much of their information is readily collected or available. Perhaps, they’ve resigned themselves to the fact that they can’t stop their data being collected. There has been very little headway made in crafting some type of national privacy law, so it makes one feel like this is just inevitable, online privacy is your own concern.
For months before today reading through Twitter brought calls for women to remove period tracking apps and be more cognizant of how their data might be collected and in the future possibly subpoenaed as proof of some ‘reproductive crime’..
“Democrat lawmakers along with privacy advocates are now growing worried prosecutors in these anti-abortion states will use subpoenas to demand tech companies help them identify which users have visited an abortion provider.” -Michael Kan, PCMag.
I would definitely consider myself a privacy advocate. I think the majority of infosec people are concerned about privacy to some degree. It’s concerning that it really took something so dramatic to bring this conversation about data collection back to the foreground.
It can be proposed that perhaps we all just became too complacent in many ways…
I’m. A very big advocate of first using the free stuff. If there are free offerings when learning by all means access them. When I first started to explore my interests in information technology I started with web page design. One of the biggest contributors to my learning was definitely FreeCodeCamp.
FreeCideCamp assisted in me teaching myself HTML, CSS, and Javascript. I also began to code Python with the community’s assistance. I did 100 days of code twice with some influence from their curriculum.
This is also where I first found out about BlackGirlsCode, but I digress…
Once my career in infosec and graduate school really started rolling I really strayed away from FreeCodeCamp–though I still kept and eye on the community/site. I still advise people to check them out when they’re starting to learn coding, especially since their offering have really grown.
So, now years and two degrees later I find myself back on FreeCodeCamp working through their Data curriculum because data is fun. To be in infotech and infosec is to commit yourself to lifelong learning and discovering things that interest you and maybe how those interests might inform your work. That’s really what made me stroll on back to freecodecamp, because like I said use the free resources before you open your wallet so you can discern between what might be a mild interesting topic or an avenue for career pivot.
Build A Security Ninja 