MonkeHacks #69

I left Taiwan this week, and flew back to Ireland to visit my family after my long trip. I flew via Amsterdam, and I killed 12 hours in the city to visit my friend studying there. Finally, my long trip is over, so I can recover my energy levels again. I thoroughly enjoyed this trip - I met so many amazing people. Every time I do a long trip, I grow a little bit more as a person.

Now I’m back in Edinburgh, having flown back yesterday. It’s nice to be back in a more chill environment. I have no trips planned for July, so I’ll try to go ahead with my intention of getting a cat or two, and it’ll be a focus month for me. I’m working on some tooling for myself that I won’t be releasing publicly, so I’m aiming to wrap up those as well.

Weekly Ideas / Notes 

• I was invited to Google’s BugSWAT LHE in Las Vegas! I thought I wouldn’t be at Def Con this year, but now it seems that I will be. I’ll be around from August 5th-11th - if you want to meet up, shoot me a message. I’ll be hanging out with my close friend from university for the duration of Def Con, so you’ll get to meet him too.

• On a more personal note, I bought tickets for the Manchester United vs Burnley Premier League game on August 30. I’ve been a Manchester United fan for a long time, so finally having the opportunity to watch a game live is really exciting - it’s been a goal of mine for a while now. I always had the resources to do this, but I suppose I was missing the initiative. Take the initiative, and seize your life with your own hands. Make a list of things you’d like to do, and see how many of them are actionable today for a low cost.

• I’ve continued writing a lot of code (mostly using Cursor Pro). I highly recommend learning to write Caido plugins. It forces you to really learn about how Caido works, and I’ve found a few tucked-away features (such as the Plugin checkbox in Logger) that I didn’t know about before. Plugins are just Vue code, so it’s not too difficult to learn, especially if you vibe-code it with Cursor. The time-consuming part is debugging. Plus, the Caido team provide a hot reloading plugin in the plugin store, so that makes the testing process pretty quick.

• I had a bit of a crisis in the last week, and I suspect that I’m not alone in it so I’ll share it here. Let me preface it by saying that travel is awesome. You see cool things. You meet cool people. But what it lacks is the ability to plant roots somewhere and live a fulfilling day-to-day life. So what happens is, you meet some cool people. Amazing! You see an amazing view, and do some cool activity, woohoo! But once all that’s done, you’re tired. After two weeks of nonstop activities, you just need a break, but without a place to return to, you can’t. Your body and mind are in fight-or-flight mode. This takes a toll on the body. This is why I prefer to do short trips from my “base”, which is Edinburgh, rather than travelling indefinitely.

• The crisis I had was that I was really tempted to do some longer 6-month trips between countries, and to pack up in Edinburgh and move my stuff back to my parents’ house. But this was an impulse, and after speaking with some good friends, one of them said something that “I’d likely have gotten addicted to the responsibilityless-ness” and that struck a chord with me, because that’s exactly what it was. A lack of responsibility is utterly liberating but too much of it does more harm than good, as taking on greater responsibility is how you mature as a person. So I’m determined to find the middleground by staying in Scotland, and doing short trips occasionally.

• On a similar note, I think people love the sense of community that they find in hostels and such. It’s pretty easy to meet new people and everyone has a similar mindset. But realise that this is by no means exclusive to travel - you can find this at home if you put yourself out there and meet people. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that this can only be found in life on the road.

Resources

• Unexpected security footguns in Go's parsers: A pretty nice article on some Go security pitfalls. These seem super easy to mess up.

• Novel SSRF Technique Involving HTTP Redirect Loops: This is a bit confusing at first but take some time to understand it. It’s really weird, and therefore very cool.

• Security Advisory: Anthropic's Slack MCP Server Vulnerable to Data Exfiltration: Another cool article from wunderwuzzi.