Random CPU

What is OverTheWire? OverTheWire is a website with two games. One is “Wargames”, which is a level based game, the other game is “Warzone”, which is more of a free-for-all hacking game. In this series of articles, I’m going to give a walkthrough of how to complete the “Bandit” series of levels on their website. … Continue reading OverTheWire Bandit Part 1

Hack The Box Hack The Box is a website that gives people a great place to test their penetration testing (hacking) skills. They have a selection of different machines available that are vulnerable to different types of attacks. This site uses the capture the flag scoring mechanism, where you hack machines, get a “flag” from … Continue reading Hack The Box Intro

The Idea We all know the basic idea of file compression. We see ZIP files regularly, and know how to extract and compress them. Although most everyone knows how to use these compressed files, and understand that compressing files makes them smaller, most people have no idea how it works technically. Though this may seem … Continue reading Demystifying Lossless File Compression

What’s all the frenzy around “neural networks”? I keep seeing news about something awesome that a computer has been “trained” to do with “deep learning”. These news spiels refer to something called “Q Learning”, “Deep Learning Neural Networks”, or “Hierarchical Learning”. Although these are huge terms, it’s a pretty simple idea as to how they … Continue reading Deep Learning Neural Networks

Random Numbers Pseudo Random Number Generators, or PRNGs, are extremely important, as randomness is needed by computers for many purposes. As computers are “deterministic” machines, meaning they follow a specific procedure for everything, they are terrible at making randomness. Because of this, there has been an enormous amount of studying on how to simulate randomness … Continue reading About Pseudo Random Number Generators

What is a certificate authority? A “Certificate Authority” (CA), is a idea of “Public Key Infrastructure” (PKI), in which a special type of certificate is able to essentially co-sign other certificates to verify them as valid and trustworthy to certain levels. Although CAs are generally trusted, there are non-trusted CAs. These CAs typically exist in … Continue reading All About Certificate Authorities

What is a Root CA? A root CA is a certificate authority (CA) that doesn’t have any parent CAs. The root CAs are pretty interesting, because root CAs are CAs that are typically ultimately trusted, with the ability to sign intermediate CAs. For example, this website uses Cloudflare to handle certificate related stuff. This is … Continue reading Root CA Thoughts