Graphics programming, demoscene and book reviews
On November 8, the University of Delaware, in partnership with BSides Delaware, hosted a 36-hour CTF competition. Open to all-levels teams, the event challenged participants across categories like cryptography, reverse engineering and web exploitation. In this write-up, we’ll explore one of the standout challenges from the competition: The Immortal Game. This 500-point forensics challenge saw only three successful solves.
In this CTF challenge, man’s best friend becomes a CTF player’s best asset! Tasked with breaking into an encrypted archive hiding a valuable flag, we’ll see how a dog, armed with some clever forensics skills, can fetch us just the right tool for the job.
This challenge turned out to be quite frustrating for some contestands. Many were not familiar with handling 3D objects, which isn’t a standard CTF task. It’s one of those situations where either you know how to do it or you won’t be able to learn it quickly. While some people managed to read the flag using just an online 3D object viewer, here’s my take that may be closer to the intended solution.
Sometimes you have to replace your old PC with a better one. Nowadays, you can find models that are not only fast but also much smaller and more energy-efficient. This is a review of such a tiny but quite a powerful PC.
One of the nicest things added in the recent Windows 10 feature updates is the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Thanks to WSL, you can run Linux Bash commands inside a Command Prompt window. This requires fewer resources than a full virtual machine and has a built-in integration with Windows file system. It’s not enabled by default, but if you would like to try it, just follow this guide.
For many years web developers have used various substitutes for a real grid layout in CSS. Floats, clears or tables provided ways to emulate it, but they were never meant to be used for this purpose. Even grid systems like 960.gs or Skeleton were just workarounds for a lack of real solutions. We were waiting for a dedicated grid layout in CSS for 20 years. The wait is now over.
The main theme of the 9th edition of Riverwash party was the Wild West. At the beginning of September, about 150 cowboys and cowgirls travelled on their horses to Katowice in Poland. Some brought valuable goods with them. Let’s see if they left some gold nuggets there.
