Colorful Black: Recalling a Learning Experience and a Competition

Preface

When it comes to hackers, I think of The History of Chinese Hackers that I read before As someone who has thoroughly read n well-known hacker novels What I yearn for most is that “Golden Age of Chinese Hackers” at the turn of the century That era when the hacker spirit was above all else That colorful era.

Cybersecurity

This was my first time participating in a network information security competition. Although I used to think hacking techniques were really cool, I never had much chance to learn, so to me, all those dazzling hacker operations were truly mysterious. But once I actually started learning and getting hands-on, I discovered that the cybersecurity field really depends on experience. All kinds of weird and unusual problems—when you first get them you have no clue at all, and you might stew over them for a long time without being able to solve them, but looking at the WriteUp you’ll suddenly see the light. It turns out that because of insufficient experience, many problems were just one kick away from the goal.

Among those also attending the training and the competition, some were veterans who had been battling for years. They knew how to solve any problem at a glance. Every time we did practice problems you could see the score leaderboard; before long their scores ranked very high. A newbie would fight tooth and nail to finish just one problem, only to find they’d already done 10 = =…

The learning time this time was quite short; I can only say I got a first glimpse through the door. The field of network information security is huge; every piece of it, taken out on its own, could be researched for a long time. Just looking at the competition content: encryption and decryption, Web penetration, reverse engineering, network attack and defense… there’s so much, plenty to learn…

Every time I go out for training or the like, I bring along this Matebook that usually gathers dust at home, and that kicks off my tinkering time. This time I installed Kali inside WSL2—this can run a full Linux desktop on Windows, you know, which compared to WSL1 is quite something~

The desktop has already been beautified. Xfce can also be configured to look really nice, but I feel there are little pitfalls in many places, plus the laptop’s performance is a bit worrying, so right now it’s basically a vase. I’ll wait and try installing it on my desktop.

I also wrote an article about the installation process; those who need it can grab it themselves:

Food

As for food… the boxed lunches every day were pretty average, so after two days we slipped away. The boxed meals looked like this:

Later we went to headquarters. Tsk tsk tsk, what a difference…

After that we ate at Wanda, so I won’t go into detail. Anyway, when you’re away from home, being able to eat is all that matters.

Another thing: I really think food safety should get everyone’s attention now. I’ve found that many times my stomachaches were caused by eating out, especially eating fried noodles, fried rice and the like (probably leftover rice), which has me pretty anxious now. But luckily what I ate this time was all quite hygienic.

To keep us from getting too tired in class, the thoughtful staff prepared a pile of snacks every day—all kinds of latiao, little cakes, cookies and so on. One afternoon tea even had milk tea~

In the first few days I ate a large amount of snacks like latiao, green peas and so on, and stayed up late at night too. Before long I was GG—my mouth hurt like crazy, my head hurt too, and drinking granules didn’t even help TAT... Luckily my thoughtful girlfriend asked a doctor and bought me medicine. With the blessing of love I recovered extra fast ^_^

Photography

I don’t want to write too much about technical things in this post, otherwise it would go against the original intent of me opening this account separately. When I have time later I’ll update it separately on the blog. There’s quite a lot involved; this post is mainly just chatting casually (showing photos)

This time I finally brought my camera. Last time I went to Xiamen I didn’t bring it—huge loss~ But I didn’t take many photos…

The same place, different times

These days it was always raining when I took photos. It’s almost autumn and still this much rain…?

And also… this one, you all know

The Competition

The competition was really tough. Everyone else competing was badass; I was the noob, and then I got instantly wrecked in the competition… Can’t help it, this contest really depends on experience.

Afterword

Although this thing called the hacker spirit basically doesn’t exist anymore, and people studying cybersecurity are basically just trying to make a living (of course there are also plenty in the gray industry making a fortune), still, with the deterioration of China-US relations in recent years and changes in the world situation, the country’s cybersecurity also faces many tests. Being able to research some security-related (actually anything is fine) technology powered by passion, open-source it, and contribute a bit to the domestic open-source community is pretty great too. All I can say is we still need to keep working hard~