MonkeHacks #68

Queenstown, Caido Plugins, Taiwan

Author

Monke
June 20, 2025

MonkeHacks #68

Late issue again - sorry - travel messes up my routines. I’m in Taipei, Taiwan right now. It’s stiflingly humid here (32°C / 90°F). Taiwan is a very interesting place. It’s quite polluted here, but the people are very friendly. I can understand some of the Hanzi (Chinese characters) here when I read them because they share a character set with Japanese, but I can’t pronounce any of them in Chinese - I can only grasp the meaning. The food is really good here, and they also have the same convenience stores here as the ones in Japan, so it’s nothing too different for me thankfully.

I visited the National Palace Museum, which had a lot of interesting artefacts from Chinese royal history, and I’m going to see the Taipei 101 building today (the building is 508m/1600ft tall!). It’s too hot to do much outside, so I’d like to come back here in a nicer season.

Prior to this, I flew 11 hours from Auckland. I was in Queenstown, New Zealand for the past few days, and it quickly became one of my favourite places in the world. The hostel I stayed in was quite small - only 50 beds - so everyone knew everyone, and the hostel culture was amazing. There’s a lot of activities to do in Queenstown - I saw the Kiwi bird in a bird sanctuary, had a BBQ buffet by the lake, and I took snowboarding lessons and went snowboarding. It’s the beginning of the ski season in Queenstown, so almost everyone I met in the hostel was there on a working holiday visa, looking for somewhere to rent in Queenstown for the season. Due to the Kiwi winters, it’s about 5°C there most days. A far cry from the 32°C in Taiwan - I’m surprised my health held up in Taipei so far! As with Taipei, I’d like to stay in Queenstown for a bit longer when the weather is a bit better. The Scottish winters are miserable and New Zealand summers are in November/December, so it works out quite nicely.

Interestingly, Queenstown is a strange fusion of a lot of Irish, and a lot of Japanese people. Many Irish people go to Australia, due to historical ties, and naturally some of them leak down to NZ and Queenstown. Similarly, because the timezone isn’t too different, a lot of Japanese people fly down to Australia and New Zealand as well. So the end result is this town where both sides of my heritage are present in unusually large numbers. It’s awesome.

I leave Taipei on Sunday, and I’m flying 14 hours back to Europe. I’ll have a day in Amsterdam to visit a friend (landing 6am, departing 6pm) and then flying back to Europe to see my family for a bit before returning to Edinburgh.

Queenstown, New Zealand.

A cool street I passed in Taipei, Taiwan

Weekly Ideas / Notes 

  • These days I’m finding myself to be a bit frustrated with my lack of competence in some fields, such as reverse engineering or mobile. I think I’ll spend some time improving myself in a variety of other fields to balance out my skillset as much as possible.

  • I’ve been spending my time working on Caido plugins - I’m writing a plugin for personal use right now, to gain familiarity with the SDK. It’s not too difficult, and the SDK is quite extensive, so I’ve been enjoying the experience. I’ll be working on porting SAMLRaider soon. I don’t want my first attempt with the new SDK to be something I’ll be releasing publicly, hence my practice.

  • I purchased a copy of From Day Zero to Zero Day by SpaceRaccoon - once I read it, I’ll write a review here.

  • YesWeHack built a Caido integration. I really like this idea, and I hope HackerOne, Bugcrowd and Intigriti follow suit.

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