./Slay that Board

Computer Security, Academia, Machine Learning, Opinions.

[boardslayer]

The Death Cycle

When I was younger, I had this feeling of waking up as someone new, a new construct if you will, during most of the university it was after a graduating another year. Until Grey pointed it out on the latest Cortex, I had never linked to significant life changes. The construct of you has died many times and will die at least a few more times.

Just take a minute and think, if you were to meet one of your past constructs, say back from your freshman year, would you get along? Do you think the person reflected in that time portal is the same person as you are today? Or has that construct died you have taken a new form?

Though no longer religious (that construct died somewhere during the tenth to eleventh-grade transition), I have these theological concepts of reincarnation from eight or ten years of classroom studies. If I recall correctly, in Hinduism based on your karmic score at the end of your life, you either get sent to heaven, hell or get reincarnated as an animal or human until the balance sheet settles and you reach nirvana. So why can’t the same analogy be extended to a single life but with different constructs?  

If you talk to me IRL or on IM you’ll notice a lot of times I refer back to childhood or to a more juvenile time and if you probe a little further you might notice what I meant was not adolescence, preadolescent or young adult phases but time much closer to few months. I call the past construct from a few months juvenile because it’s true. Six months ago if you had asked me anything about where I would stand right now, most of the predictions would have been wrong. We are continually learning and modifying ourselves to create newer better constructs.

Maybe a better explanation could be taken from the Ship of Theseus thought experiment. Over time your memories fade, you learn more and replace old information. Slowly you have a new core within the same skull.

Think back to those questions, what do you have common with your pre-adolescent self? Yes, you share some basic features but is there a deeper connection? If this 11-year-old you or just a remnant of you, a corpse of a past construct?

We change rapidly and perceive time in different ways, and maybe therein lies the solution to this problem. Given enough presence, these changes can be controlled and steered. As Grey said in his post “Murder yourself to make room for yourself.”

I am grateful to the past me’s, the bygone constructs, the forgotten corpses, for the decisions they made and the time they represent without them this current construct could not exist.

Let’s see how this soul fares. ;)  

PS. If you are curious about my yearly theme,

- The year of proactive serendipity

[boardslayer]

I had some problems installing Flare-VM

I recently saw a tweet from FireEye that they have updated the flare VM system and now it comes with a method for installing and uninstalling reverse engineering tools and many updates to the old tools along with numerous new ones, especially for malicious document analysis. More information about the update can be found here.

I have tried installing the VM once before but quickly gave up as my university proxy was constantly swatting all the download requests down from the chocolatey and BoxStarter interfaces. Seeing this blog post, I finally decided I should give this a chance and try and figure out why my machine is not responding the way I would like it to.

The problem lies in at the proxy server level. The way our sysadmin has set up the proxy, for every request or connection, there is a need for authentication form the service. Weirdly enough setting up or trying to update the connection setting already loaded in the Powershell does not work OR at least I could not find a way for it to update and reflect my credentials.

Sidebar: I did not realise until recently Microsoft provides Windows licenses for 90 days at no cost for testing the IE and Edge I found some references to this while I was looking for some guide of setting up my lab. You can revert the checkpoint before you registered the copy to get another 90 days. If someone knows a similar trick for MS Office, please do tell me.

Back to the topic, so after a day of googling and testing I gave up and decided, I might have to some work around this bull, and I decided to dig into PowerShell scripting. I cloned the flare VM files and made some changes to the install.ps1 file you can find these on my GitHub. Essentially I added the following code:

$proxy = new-object System.Net.WebProxy("http://Your_ProxyServer:Your_proxyport") $Username = "Your_username" $Password = ConvertTo-SecureString "Your_password" -AsPlainText -Force $cred = New-Object System.Management.Automation.PSCredential $Username, $Password $proxy.credentials = $cred $WebClient = new-object System.Net.WebClient $WebClient.proxy = $proxy

Since I failed to update the credentials for my PowerShell, I needed to make sure I could do this for every System.WebClient API calls the shell scripting makes. I have defined a few global environment variables which feed to the WebClient calls every time. Flare setup uses BoxStarter services and Chocolatey. I sincerely suggest to look up this guide on Chocolatey proxy setup and define global variables in your shell before execution using the following. If you fail to install chocolatey using this method, you could try installing it offline setting up the proxy and then run the BoxStarter script.

$env:chocolateyProxyLocation = 'https://local/proxy/server' $env:chocolateyProxyUser = 'username' $env:chocolateyProxyPassword = 'password'

[boardslayer]

Postmortem on the podcast

I’ve always had a hard time relating with people around and the gap increased as time went on. Podcasts and talk radio before that were ways, I could interact without leaving my comfort zone. And if you spend more than 30 hours a week listening to other people and their ideas, it is bound to happen that you start fantasising about hosting one.

Three years later, I find myself wanting more than just the not so challenging coursework of my master’s degree. I have plenty of time which in which I’m loitering around, and I think it’s probably time to look for something bigger. I ask my friends Hanniyah, Rishabh, and Sarvashreshth if they’d like to join me. There is a massive community of people who still listen to the radio even today, but sadly that doesn’t translate into a podcast audience. I pitched my idea to these three along with with the Fatreons, Orla Gartland’s online community. Sidebar: Orla is fantastic, and you should support her patreon. A podcast mashup of Do By Friday and the RoosterTeeth podcast. A lighthearted conversation show where we have fun intelligent discussions, have long conversations about our interests at the same time challenge each other to do one thing that was out of the ordinary for a week.

First posted sometime in February 2018.

The turn around time from the first mention to first recording session two months. I don’t have any formal training in production, and I was making things up as we went along. So, coming out of this, I can see some apparent faults on my part.

The cast I had assembled barely knew each other, I was the common link. This meant what I hoped was an instant gel and hilarious times turned into a stiff back and forth. 

Apart from Hanniyah and I, no one was motivated enough to put in the effort for the preparation. Which meant the starting 15 - 30 mins of each recording was spent in a meeting about the podcast. 

I read somewhere, you should have at least three test episodes before going into full release and promotion. This meant we had to record for three weeks straight and not get any visible results. 

We recorded using the double-ender method. Given the state of Indian internet, meant all recordings on all four ends veered off sync at different times.

I have no clue about editing, I asked help from my friend Alan of the OGNetworks and a fellow Fatreon for tutorials. Editing and finding our first episode took me over 20 hours over three days.

I had hoped that the first few challenges would be enough to nudge us over the initial bump, but it quite did the opposite. We had a democratic process of selecting our problems, but since this crew didn’t feel comfortable with one another, it quite did the opposite which made for weirder episodes that lacked enthusiasm.

There was this critical advice Alan gave me at the beginning, which I ignored. He asked me to rethink the idea and make this podcast about some common topic instead of just the personality. I thought was our strength, the variety coming from varied backgrounds acted to our deterrent. We never could record a podcast without all four of us present and work made us bounce the recording sessions. The editing took me a lot longer than anyone would have thought, and since this was a fun side project for all eventually, it went on the backburner and burnt up.

Would I do it again? Hell Yes! But I wouldn’t take up juggling so many hats balls and knives together. I might be working on something as you read this.

PS: Here are the challenges we recorded but never published.

Visit an old age home near you 

Watch Netflix's Queer Eye 

Don't use any plastic for a week 

Play an impossible game from hell 

Treat yourself with your favourite meal

[boardslayer]

Lying and Spotting Lies

Lying comes as second nature to all of us. All of us are liars. And we often tell lies to slip out of a difficult situation or get into one. Some of us are compulsive liars whatever we say is a lie, and we need to check whether or not we are lying. On the other hand, there are people like me who have a fascination with how people function, display emotions and obviously LIE.

Allison Kornet writes the following in the article “The truth about lying.”

Leonard Saxe, professor of psychology at Brandeis University, points out that most of us receive conflicting messages about lying. Although we're socialized from the time we can speak to believe that it's always better, to tell the truth, in reality, society often encourages and even rewards deception. Show up late for an early morning meeting at work and its best not to admit that you overslept. "You're punished far more than you would be if you lie and say you were stuck in traffic," Saxe notes. Moreover, lying is integral to many occupations. Think about how often we see lawyers constructing far-fetched theories on behalf of their clients or reporters misrepresenting themselves in order to gain access to good stories.

Let’s get something’s straight about lying:

Lying is a Co-operative process: Both the person who is deceiving and the person who is being deceived are equally responsible for the outcome of the situation.

Not all Lies are harmful: Some lies like meaningless pleasantries “I’m Fine” or “No trouble at all” are not harmful. A real lie tries to mislead, and convey a tautologically false impression.

We are against lying but we are covertly for it: It is part of our culture. It has been woven into our culture over centuries. It comes as easy as breathing to us. Think Dante, Shakespeare, News, Mahabharat.

Studies show on a given day you may be lied to between 10 to 200 times. Strangers lie three times within the 10 minutes of meeting each other. We start at an early age, and we never stop. We have created for ourselves a world full of spam, fake digital friends, ingenious identity thieves, and world-class Ponzi schemers. It has become impossible to navigate through this cluttered world. So how do you do it?

“Everyone is willing to give you something for whatever they are hungry for. And if you don’t want to be deceived, you need to know what it is that you are hungry for” ~ Henry Oberlander

LIE SPOTING

Paul Ekman is an American psychologist who is best known as “the best human lie detector in the world.” He is a pioneer in the study of emotions and has created the fundamentals for lie detection. He created an ‘atlas of emotions.’

Verbal Dodging: A person who maybe over-determined in their denial will resort to formal than informal language. They also use distancing language like “That Person,” trying to distance themselves from their subject. Also sometimes they use qualifying language or spicing up with details, hoping to force their lie over the subject. If you suspect someone is lying or making up a story, just ask them to repeat the sequence of statements in reverse order. A person telling the truth will have no problem recounting the details whereas a person who is lying has to put to remember.

Body Language: If someone is quiet and not providing any verbal cues then they start giving some non-verbal cues. Liars are known to freeze their upper body while lying. They tend to look you in the eyes a little too much to compensate for the myth that liars do not. Our body slips up whenever we are lying consciously. Some people say no while they are nodding yes. People leak a shoulder shrug, or maybe a masking smile also called as “Duping Delight.” It is a smile that one slips up when he or she has gotten away with the lie. Sometimes they might be giving you the finger while showing that they are cleaning their eye. More often these slips or leaks happen when people try to hide a feeling, and they crack through, these are technically known as micro-expressions. Murderers are known to show a glimpse of sadness. There are thousands of these signs, and alone they mean nothing. It is the cluster that makes it the fact that the other person is lying. The proposed Facial Action Coding System recognises the presence of micro-expressions in real time as they appear as human and classifies them as necessary. It divides the face and facial muscles into Action Units and Action descriptors which can later be decoded to see the meaning.

"When you combine the science of reorganising deception with the art of looking, listening to you except yourself from collaborating in a lie.” ~ Pamela Meyer

Sources: Pamala Meyer ted talk, The Truth About Lying by Allison Kornet, FACS, Paul Ekman