You need to roughly know desktop security (especially memory corruption, C/C++ insecurities), web application security, mobile application and networking security. Those are (again, roughly) the domains.
If you want cybersecurity with web application testing (with overlap to mobile application testing), begin with The Web Application Hacker's Handbook. Best single treatise on the subject.
I also highly recommend the OSCP (Penetration Testing with Kali Linux) course and Cody Brocious' (daeken's) course called Breaker101, at breaker101.com.
Whether this is due to pressure or force from some authority or the author simply changing his mind remains to be seen. Like another commenter said, I have a sneaking suspicion that there will not be a long-lived "more to come" section if it's down in the first 4 hours.
Looks like they fixed that fast after your comment. [domain]/../../../../../../../../etc/passwd is still possible though, which then makes getwifi.io/etc/passwd.
Really, they should obfuscate the user-submitted URL entirely instead of blacklisting or whitelisting.
Thanks for mentioning about the company. I've never heard about it until now. Surprisingly enough I had to look at Wikipedia to know what they do and further details. Their website currently gives no clue about anything they do but a new product called "Stories", which for newcomers like me means zilch.
It's not as much effort as it sounds. My home laptop has had Ubuntu, Mint, Mageia, Suse, Fedora, Arch, Windows 7, 8, OS X 10.7, 10.8, and just today, 10.9 on it in about a month (it's a mac).
I have an external hard drive with all my documents, projects, music, movies, etc. on it. What's absolutely essential is recopied to my hard drive each time. It's kind of addictive to dive into a new operating system and learn it every so often. That's why there's a term for it - distro hopping.
It's good for some things. It gets you very good at doing rote computer tasks because you do them over and over in slightly different environments each time - install homebrew, update ruby, install rvm, configure common programs, tweak preferences and small aspects of the OS, etc.
As a result, I can wipe my entire hard drive and bring it back up to my workflow speed in less than 3 hours on a linux distro I roll myself via Arch.
All that said, I like OS X, so I'll be sticking with Mavericks for a while now.
I'd be interested to see your thoughts on each distro, even if it's just a sentence or two. Switching quickly, while obviously making some types of perspective difficult to develop in such a short timeframe, probably makes it easier for you to notice some things most people wouldn't through more typical usage habits.
The two of you are doing two things at the same time.
First, you're having an intellectually legitimate debate that's probably revealing some good counter points and offering valid, alternative perspectives on the broader issue.
Second, you're continuing a cold argument devoid of any (productive) empathy in lieu of passionate, scientific rigor.
This is not what this post needs. Let it go, guys. Neither of you is going to convince anyone meaningfully. The issue is polarizing enough as it is. This is a situation that calls for empathy and support, and the interchange of ideas that won't put other people off of listening to each other in an open way.
I don't mean to be self-righteous, but this is a community somewhat known for entering into page-length tangential debates -- that would be detrimental to the subject at hand.
* This is a situation that calls for empathy and support, and the interchange of ideas that won't put other people off of listening to each other in an open way.*
Let's keep some perspective. A second ship in one week carrying desperate, impoverished African migrants sunk of the coast of Italy yesterday. Many drowned. That is a tragedy.
You wrote this under a throwaway account, so I think you understand my point before I make it, but I'll say it anyway.
A situation like this doesn't call for debates or intellectual analysis. Winning debate points when the subject is sexual assault doesn't move the topic forward, it just makes you look insensitive and begs a flame war to begin.
I wrote a top-level comment stating this point already on this thread, but it's very important this is understood. It's not your place to judge what another human being's tragedy is. I'm not trying to white-knight you, it's just something that really needs to sink in. You cannot minimize another individual's experiences just because some distant collective suffers more according to a standard of utilitarian rigor.
If you want to help, don't debate the point. This subject is too close to heart for that to do anything but alienate people. Empathize and show support instead. Send Justine a kind email if you find that agreeable.
This is just one of those bad things that happens in life that one has to move on from. While I agree in helping others, people need to help themselves. Everything you wrote about the community needs to be done by the individual, too. Also, one must not let their life go entirely off the rails in the face of an adverse event.
I don't know your personal history, but looking back on the most painful experience in your life, would you say this in regards to yourself? No human exists as an island. What you are saying is tantamount to blaming someone for being inert when they're depressed, instead of treating it is something that is out of their control to begin with.
I wrote a longer response, but I can pare it down to this:
This is just one side to a situation that I have no first person knowledge of.
Even taking everything she wrote at face value, I think she has made decisions that will make her own recovery more difficult than necessary.
Bad things happen to everyone. Often much worse than this. It is the nature of life, and underscores just how little we all really control. What we do control is how we handle ourselves in the face this adversity.
Language is always important. It is crystallized thought, and bad language creates bad thinking.
> A situation like this doesn't call for debates or intellectual analysis.
I would wholeheartedly agree with you, except that with the way attention is focused on the web and on the news in general I feel like there is no other time this topic is debated except after such personal tragedy. So when is the time for intellectual analysis?
I emailed the author, Justine. I encourage everyone to do the same thing, with a heartfelt note about what you feel. It might make her day.
I want to remind the more intellectually-inclined of this community that this does not need to be analyzed and defragmented. Let the story stand on its own and hold its own weight.
Basically, what I am saying is this - if you have a point that would be really good in a debate, but won't win you any points at a party, don't make it here, and don't make it right now. In a situation like this, it's more important for the community to be supportive or not say anything at all, than to descend into a maelstrom of arguments about who's judgement is clouded by bias or who's sexist/insensitive and "doesn't get it."
We don't need to win debates at the cost of empathy right now. We need to show support in positive, affirming ways.
Why, I wonder, did you choose to completely mischaracterize the content of the article?
That's a little unfair. The article's title frames the story in reference to the glass ceiling. That the grandparent comment used the word "immediately" does not change the fact that this entire article is about sexism; even if it was only explicitly mentioned at the end, it is the author's point that sexism caused these events. It's not as though she wrote an article detailing these events and then threw in what her coach said because it's thought-provoking -- she actually believes it, factual or not.
Backing out of an accepted job offer is a bit different from 'turning down a job'.
While this sentence is true, it doesn't answer what the grandparent said. You can turn down a job, back out of a job, quit a job - whatever, for whatever reasons you want, and they don't have to remotely involve the glass ceiling.
Nobody forced the candidate to accept the job offer before backing out of it on a rather flimsy pretext. He hadn't even started work yet, so I wonder what basis you think he had for deciding that his then-future boss was 'an asshole.'
Similar to how rejection letters from a company are almost always form letters and not personal details about your interview performance, I don't see why you'd expect anything other than a flimsy excuse from a candidate turning down the job.
And the grandparent wasn't saying the author is an asshole, just that it is an equally plausible explanation to her being a woman, young, gay, a dominatrix, diseased, whatever.
I get what you're saying, anigbrowl, but I have to disagree. I fully believe sexism exists in tech, and most of the stories on HN about it are probably the real deal. But this doesn't have enough evidence to give me that impression. If anything, I'd say it's more that he didn't want to be the subordinate of an unassertive young person (ageism), not a female.
I have my doubts about how much sexism was in play, but I also accept that the writer of the article necessarily has more first hand experience of the situation than can be adequately laid out in a short column (which may in turn have been edited for length by a copy editor). Note as well that she is going out of her way to be circumspect about the identity of the person in question; I am perfectly willing to believe that there's more to the story but that she is choosing to exercise some discretion to avoid impinging on the person as an individual and also to avoid the possibility of a libel accusation. I don't think ageism is a big issue here since the star hire was apparently happy to end up reporting to the author's (then) 32 year old cofounder, and the author appears to be of a similar age.
The point I'm making above is that the grandparent poster seems to have some need to make up facts that are not present in the original story in order to justify his angry tone. In short, I think he has a giant chip on his shoulder.
What I think you and a lot of other posters are missing is the import of her paragraph about how diversity costs; when they were a freewheeling write-the-r-own-rules startup they could afford to blow off or ignore anyone who tried to leverage personal biases such as sexism, ageism, or anything really. Once they were funded and had investors whose expectations they had to satisfy, they were also obliged to deal with suppliers (of skills in this case) whose economic apparent economic benefit outweighed the ancillary costs in terms of team cohesion and founder status. She's pointing this out as an example of systematic discrimination - not in the casual but incorrect sense that most people use the term, involving some villainous type whose primary goal is to disenfranchise others, but as an unfortunate consequence of the laws of supply and demand.
If you need to hire a hotshot in some specialized field and the expected value of that person's economic contribution is greater than the cost of buying out a cofounder, then said cofounder is at the mercy of any personal biases that the hotshot might have. And being a hotshot is absolutely not correlated with any kind of superior moral development. I have met plenty of highly skilled people who were leaders in their field but who were markedly undeveloped in other respects, and indeed I could say the same of myself in some respects.
What I think you and a lot of other posters are missing is the import of her paragraph about how diversity costs; when they were a freewheeling write-the-r-own-rules startup they could afford to blow off or ignore anyone who tried to leverage personal biases such as sexism, ageism, or anything really.
I had missed this, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
She's pointing this out as an example of systematic discrimination - not in the casual but incorrect sense that most people use the term, involving some villainous type whose primary goal is to disenfranchise others, but as an unfortunate consequence of the laws of supply and demand.
I can see how this makes sense, okay, fair point. In other words, a far more subtle type of discrimination based on the circumstances. I probably missed this because the title seemed a bit more straightforward.
As for everything you said about "hotshots", yeah, I agree.
If you want cybersecurity with web application testing (with overlap to mobile application testing), begin with The Web Application Hacker's Handbook. Best single treatise on the subject.
You should look through this entire thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/wiki/start
I also highly recommend the OSCP (Penetration Testing with Kali Linux) course and Cody Brocious' (daeken's) course called Breaker101, at breaker101.com.
Good luck.