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Pwn.college

pwn.college

330 pointstripdout54 comments

Not sure if the devs are here, but please don't justify your text! It makes the lines all have huge spaces in the middle. It's much harder to read as a result.

Honestly I've just set up a user CSS sheet that forces left justify. It makes the internet more comfortable, and has practically no downsides / bad interactions, unlike many such overrides.

rivers, contextual word splits, compound noun splits, awkward pauses, there is so many downsides to mindless text justification. Only editorialised and hand crafted justified text is nice. Everything else ends up forceful and ugly.

Strange that online it fell out of favor, because text justification was the default for centuries. It's still around in most PDFs though, e.g. in research papers.

When there was a person physically typesetting every line, the justification wasn't generally "mindless"

I suspect the print typesetting has largely been automatized for several decades.

Is there a difference between the rules TeX uses and HTML renderers?

AIUI, yes, most browsers use greedy line breaking by default. E.g., FF does not do Knuth style[1].

This led to the CSS `text-wrap` property, and `text-wrap: pretty`[2], but pretty is not supported in FF yet, and the value `pretty` doesn't mandate Knuth's algorithm.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=630181

[2]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/P...

Don't listen to this. Justified text is much much easier to read.

When done properly (i.e. in LaTeX with microtype, with good line breaking algorithm and character expansion) justified text is easier to read. The web is not that.

The text justification would look a lot better with CSS "hyphens: auto".

Man I said this years ago and was overruled. Many your comment will help convince them!

I was doing this on the side for fun and learned a lot.

I believe the professors that helped originate this idea were a group of hacker PhD students from UC Santa Barbara that moved over to Arizona State. Adam Doupe was my professor his first year and an absolutely stellar academic and teacher.

Wow thank you for the kind words!

Yep I think this list is pretty up to date on the folks involved: https://pwn.college/sensei

And you’re right very good memory! Zardus and I were first PhD students at UCSB then became professors at ASU, and at ASU kanak’s PhD dissertation was on pwn.college

+1 on this. The courses I took with Adam Doupe were phenomenal and have molded me into the engineer I am today. Many thanks to the team behind pwn.college and pushing us students to think outside the box!

reminds me of high school trying to beat hackthissite.org, OverTheWire, SmashTheStack

simpler times

Used to use OverTheWire as assignments in class, it was a big inspiration for pwn.college

I was gonna say, at a glance it reminds me of Microcorruption CTF

Why so deferential about posting write-ups? I'd just have a rule that says don't post write-ups and posting a write-up will get you banned from future editions or something.

Because giving a good reason is usually enough for most people to follow something. Not everything has to be a stick (which you can wield anyway).

Almost any kind of reason actually.

It's a science-backed result that doing so massively improves compliance, it's a trick usually taught in soft skills training (negotiation, etc).

"The Mindlessness of Ostensibly Thoughtful Action: The Role of “Placebic” Information in Interpersonal Interaction." https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1979-23568-001

I first read this in Robert Cialdini's "Influence: Science and Practice" which is both entertaining and interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence:_Science_and_Practic...

Because in almost every other case that involves security challenges you are generally encouraged to post a writeup, and this one is different.

We had this as a part of our reverse engineering and exploitation minor, amazing experience.

Cool, but needing to register via discord is going to be a no for some people.

I don’t believe you have to unless you are talking about getting help from other users.

It's not required. I finished the main white belt tasks and just skipped it, moved onto the core material/

It looks very comprehensive, and I love the fact that they will actually send you a belt if you do all the levels.

It is very comprehensive, and the classes are amazing. I really miss having time to watch the 2h classes and do the challenges.

pwn.college is the most fun I've had in cybersecurity probably ever. The community in discord is also very friendly and helpful.

I learned a ton through similar exercises on cyberarmy.com back in like 2002. Looks like it is still online: https://www.ca-zeb.com

Amazing project. Having lot of fun and learning! Thanks

Hugged to death.

The site is still up try a deeper link https://pwn.college/welcome/welcome/

Very cool project, reminds me of days playing with owasp webgoat

yes, I know it for years, play with it when I have time. really cool.

this and telehack.com is nice entertainment

Cool idea.

Neat concept, but utterly disgusting that Discord is still used as a social platform. Matrix is much less odious.

What's wrong with Discord?

Discord is the ultimate gatekeeper of information these days, and the company behind it cannot be trusted with its user data.

"ultimate gatekeeper" seems a bit strong for a niche group chat program.

200,000,000+ monthly active users is not niche at all, it is among the most widely used communications platforms on the planet. That userbase is comparable in size to Uber or Steam.

Besides being a centralized, proprietary data harvesting operation that has slowly started selectively enforcing mandatory identity verification requirements, despite their previous identity verification provider already getting hacked and leaking 70,000 people's PII?

Nothing says "hacker culture" like voluntarily submitting your photo ID and a real-time facial scan to big brother so your de-anonymized communications can be permanently logged and used against you by the state as soon as a future administration decides you're a disfavored person.

Too bad nobody actually uses Matrix. Less odious, bit you're gonna be talking to yourself.

> you're gonna be talking to yourself.

IMO, Matrix is definitely the best protocol for sending oneself messages in a running thread across all of one's devices. That is one excellent use case, and it's a real one.

It is also great for the same thing, but with other users, too. I have no idea why its current uptake is so slow among small groups. Is it the apps? The fact that you need to find or join a host (or self host)? Merely being "one more app" and "unknown"?

I wonder what the Matrix team is doing to smooth out whatever adoption issues it has. I think it is worthy of more adoption.

The adoption issues are basically that the team who created Matrix (led by me) have ended up burning a lot of energy making the core protocol and implementations work well, and then chasing govtech revenue as a way to fund development: https://element.io/blog/digital-sovereignty-is-built-on-an-o... etc. As a result consumer uptake doesn’t have the focus it should have. We will return to it as soon as we can, however; meanwhile there’s nothing stopping others doing it too.

Thank you for all of your work.

Thanks for the insight, and, as the sibling wrote, all the work.

“ You have entered the pwn.college DOJO, an education platform for learners to develop and practice core cybersecurity skills in a hands-on fashion. Entering, you receive your "white belt" , signifying the beginning of your hacker life.”

And yet, the highest scores on the scoreboard are 10, which happens to be the score you get by completing the tutorials for using pwn.college.

each module has it's own scoreboard, so yes, the scoreboard for the tutorial module maxes out at the maximum score for the tutorial module.

> the scoreboard for the tutorial module maxes out at the maximum score for the tutorial module

This is not a very hacker-like mindset!

"The first rule of tautology club is hack the planet"?

I would claim that if you can set a higher score, my statement would still stand, as you have modified the maximum limit!

It's maybe should be called something else if this is the case, but don't they show the latest "high scores" or complete finishes of the latest users to complete the module? Might not be high score or at least overall, but do remember noticing that yet seeing my username when I went through this a little while back so felt like more of a misnomer rather than an oversight.

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