Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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Certified in The Art of Hacking - Day 5

· 1 comment · 650 words


Logo for QA's certified in the art of hacking course.

This is a diary of what I've learned. Hopefully it will let other learners know what the course is like, and if it is worthwhile. Oh, and it might just help me remember what I'm learning! Verdicts Some of the lab tasks were impossible without looking at the cheat sheet. I got stuck on one because the question told me to go to one URl, but I had to guess the one which was vulnerable. Felt like a …

Certified in The Art of Hacking - Day 4

· 1,100 words


Logo for QA's certified in the art of hacking course.

This is a diary of what I've learned. Hopefully it will let other learners know what the course is like, and if it is worthwhile. Oh, and it might just help me remember what I'm learning! The penultimate day. Try not to worry about the upcoming exam! Today was lots of HTTP, TLS, and other low-ish level stuff like that. But mostly focussed on common website attacks. Verdict Bit of a repeat of…

Certified in The Art of Hacking - Day 3

· 1,850 words


Logo for QA's certified in the art of hacking course.

This is a diary of what I've learned. Hopefully it will let other learners know what the course is like, and if it is worthwhile. Oh, and it might just help me remember what I'm learning! Day 3 - the day I was dreading most of all… Windows! I've been avoiding M$ WinDoze (LOL!!!) since long before it was fashionable. Even at my earliest jobs, I'd find a way to convince the IT department to let m…

Certified in The Art of Hacking - Day 2

· 1 comment · 1,650 words


Logo for QA's certified in the art of hacking course.

This is a diary of what I've learned. Hopefully it will let other learners know what the course is like, and if it is worthwhile. Oh, and it might just help me remember what I'm learning! Day 1 was all about password cracking and metasploit. Today? Linux Hacking! Sadly, we aren't learning anything to do with distributing 1337 cracks for warez (so 1998!). One point to note is that the questions…

Certified in The Art of Hacking - Day 1

· 1,250 words · Viewed ~286 times


Logo for QA's certified in the art of hacking course.

As part of my MSc, I have to take three "Professional Practice" courses. The course provider, QA.com, let me choose anything from their online catalogue. The first I'm doing is Certified in The Art of Hacking. As regular readers will know, I'm pretty reasonable at hacking. I have received bug bounties from Google, Twitter, Samsung, and a bunch of others. I don't claim to be an expert - and I…

What is "Social Media"?

· 3 comments · 750 words


Rows of icons - each one has the size printed next to it.

All humans can be divided in two groups - those that love categorising things, and those that like criticising other people's categorisations. It seems that humans have an in-built desire to put things in firm categories. This causes a great deal of arguments. Let's have an argument today! Here's an excerpt from a recent IOPC press release: Misconduct proceedings to follow social media…

Book Review: Girl, Woman, Other - Bernardine Evaristo

· 1 comment · 250 words


Book cover featuring a Black woman wearing a colourful headscarf.

This is Britain as you've never read it. This is Britain as it has never been told. From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through this country and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a…

No, you can't save £30 per year by switching off your "standby" devices

· 21 comments · 950 words · Viewed ~21,971 times


Chart from the report showing various bits of IT equipment and their power use.

Every few years, a dodgy stat does the rounds claiming you can save £££ if you switch off all your gadgets at the wall. The standby mode of your TV is bleeding you dry!!! Energy Saving Trust@EnergySvgTrustA quick way to #saveenergy at home is to turn off tablets, laptops and consoles as soon as you stop using them, and ideally unplug them.This is a big potential #energy saver and could save you u…

Book Review: After Meat - The Case for an Amazing, Meat-Free World by Karthik Sekar

· 600 words


Book cover of a bioreactor painted to look like a cow.

This self-published book is a bit of a mixed bag. There has been a lot of thought put into it but, in the process of explaining the author's theories, they've forgotten that brevity makes a book like this readable and enjoyable. It could really have done with a strong editor to tighten things up. The first two chapters are filler. There's a mini introduction to evolution and the basics of the…

Book Review: Professional Practice in Engineering and Computing: Preparing for Future Careers by Riadh Habash

· 5 comments · 500 words · Viewed ~268 times


Book cover showing the ascent of man.

Unreadable. Full of grammatical errors and run on sentences. Just incredibly difficult to read. There may be some useful information in here, but I'll be damned if I can find it. Seriously needs to be edited down by someone with a strong grasp of the English language. Here's a typical sentence: "One of the key workplace trends of the future would be the downfall of the corporate ladder, dating…

Review: A Cheap Microphone Arm

· 5 comments · 250 words


A microphone arm connected to my desk.

I am so easily influenced. After 18 months of watching streamers using nifty microphone arms, I cracked and purchased one. Oh, I could claim that I needed to free up space on my new desk. Or that I need the mic closer to my mouth to pick up the delicate sounds of my voice. Or perhaps that a spring-loaded arm would reduce vibration noise. But I just wanted to look cool on video calls. So sue me! …

EBCDIC is incompatible with GDPR

· 33 comments · 800 words · Viewed ~43,885 times


Dutch text and a diagram.

Welcome to acronym city! The Court of Appeal of Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer's name incorrectly. The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc. Those accents are common in many languages. So it was a little surprising that the bank didn't support them. The bank refused to spell their c…