Thank you, my dear teachers !!!

A lot of things have happend since i last wrote here. I was sick, healty, happy, sad, afraid, confident, sad, happy and in a lot of ther moods. Nothing is the same, and nothing will ever be the same now. What do I mean by that? Keep on reading and you'll see:

1. I was in my last semester at the Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu (Hermann Oberth Faculty of Engineering). I've seen them all: indiferent/bad/absent/incompetent/moody teachers. I had only one final exam to pass (it was the graphics programming course) and i had to take that exam. I still hate that teacher (yeah, you Rodica Baciu, I'm talking about you) because of her incompetence, but it's all over now.

2. As every student that finishes a University, I still had one final exam to pass, in order to graduate: the thesis exam. I went to my teacher and ask him if he agrees for me to study the problem of "Buffer overflows in modern operating systems" as my final thesis exam. He said it's ok, and ok it was.

For ~3 months I was living and breathing my thesis. I had an average of 50 tabs on the subject, opened with Google Chrome. I learned a lot. It was really insane!

3. I already wrote my thesis, i even had the working exploit for my Winamp 5.572 target. It was the day before I should have presented, and out of curiosity I went to the University to see the level of the thesis. After seeing this, I backed down from my original tought of 100 slides to only 20 slides, because of the short time (20 minutes/student).

4. My time to present has comed. After 5 minutes I've seen the look on one of my teachers (Lucian Vintan) and he asked me: "How is this still possible? I thought that they solved this problem by now!". I've said that it's an ongoing battle against the good and the bad guys, and it's never game over. He understood and stood still, but the others started to ask me questions in a hotical manner, and my answers were the same (not the quality, but the answers).

Instead of being there for 20 minutes, I was in there for 50 minutes and my teachers graded me with 8,55. I was really upset! It wasn't the grade that upset me, it was that i've seen it in their eyes that they didn't understood everything that i've done, and that they can't acknowledge my hard work that i've invested in my thesis. 

5. I was furious, mad, hurt and after 1 day of healing, i went yesturday to the University to assist to the thesis exam of another "University", Roger. I stood there for 3 hours and after that I've seen the diference between us and them and our teachers and theirs. 

"What's an object? What's the role of syncronization reggarding operating system process? How would you describe the process of sincronization in real life?..." these were the simple questions that they had to face, and unfortunately they didn't knew the answers to this simple questions. It was amuzing and sad in the same time...

One teacher asked me at the end: "How do you feel, now that you've seen the quality of others?". I replyed: "I feel like a little/big genius. Thank you from the buttom of my heart for every second that you've all spent learning us, because you did a heck of a job". We shaked hands and I left.

Now it doesn't matter. I'm not mad anymore about my thesis grade. I've moved on. Now I realize, that what I have done is far more important than a simple grade. I've learned to learn, i've learn to write a thesis, to know my place (for the moment being), to know what i know and the teachers gave their best in order to pass their knowledge to us. This is more important than any grade that I could have been given.

Now the University road has comed to an end for me. It's time to get a job, give my best and prove myself. Another road has started, but I want to end this post with this simple and honest message, and my full gratitude: 

Thank you, my dear teachers !!!

Romania and "hackers"

Hello there, it's been a long time since I have written something here. It's not that i ran out of ideas, it's my busy schedule that takes all my time (you know, last semester at the University and all).

The topic that I want to talk about now, it's regarding "hackers". I use the quote sign, because real hackers are few (even now, after 20+ years of Internet), so I'll talk about the other ones, like script kiddies, spammers, phishers and the ones alike. We can categorize them however we want: by their type, by their abilities,  by the amount of money that the earn, by their popularity (remember Gary McKinnon) or by their country. The last category interests me, so let's get it going.

Romania is apparently a country like any other. We're known mainly because of Dracula's Castle and Dacia Logan manufactured by Renault. We have recently (meaning 20 years) escaped from the communist regime that was imposed by Ceausescu, and some still regret those days (unfortunately too many, if you ask me). I was too littler to remember those days, but I enjoy the liberty that I have now, so I am indifferent to the remarks of the ones that state that then were some good times.

It's hard to live in such a country. The middle class is almost not present, we have either poor, other rich people. The minimum salary is 173.82 EURO, which isn't much at all. The thing that will amaze you, is that we have an impressive amount of luxury cars everywhere you look. Romania is the land of cars, not the land of choice IMHO. However, between luxury cars, very beautiful women (and i really mean beautiful), palinca, our hospitality and other good things, we have our really nasty things. You can't survive in Romania if you're not a "hacker" of some sort. Believe me, it's impossible. From the moment when you arrive until the moment you leave, you must think like a Romanian, else you're going to end up bad. Everybody is up to get you (and no, I don't suffer of paranoia). If you don't know somebody when you're ill you can end up dead because of the health system, you will pay at least 3 times more for a cab if you don't look twice, you will be sucked of time when you'll go to pay your bills (yes, we still do that, paying online is still a luxury) and many other problems. The biggest problem that I as a youth see, is that of a proper education. Having the mentality that we have (a balkanic mentality, even tough we're not exactly in the Balkans, only 6% of our territory is) is our worse problem, and you can see it everywhere you look: bad roads, poor service, poor education, poor health system, no responsibility and even bad leaders. It's hard to really accomplish something with this reality that you see everywhere around you. But enough about Romania, and let's start talking about...

Romania and "hackers". Our mass access to Internet started about year 2003, until then it was difficult to have your own Internet line. I still remember the days of my high school when I was going to an Internet Cafe near me, payed by the hour, saved as much information as I could, copied it on a floppy and them study it at home. It was painful, but I remember of that period with a smile on my face. 

Nowadays everybody has access to the giant network called Internet. We have hi5 profiles, silly statuses on yahoo messenger, we check our e-mail for the last spam that our family sent us, but very few are using the Internet properly. The problem with the access given to the masses to the Internet, is that we started having spammers  and phishers around us, people that live and make good money by phishing others for money. I don't have a problem with them necessarily, but I have a problem with the fact that they call themselves hackers. This is what makes me crazy. They never compiled a linux kernel, they didn't ever programmed the hello world program, they don't know how to compile a program without the proper #include files, they have no idea what penetration testing means, but they call themselves hacker. This is ironic. The  national media encourages the term hacker, and they praise with it. This is bad. At least the media should set things right, but they don't. Let's take Antena3 - "Romania ranks second in the top countries from which attacks are launched to obtain data". Since when is phishing considered an attack? I agree with malware, viruses, trojans, or even targeted attacks, but sending an e-mail with a link and then waiting for someone to login to your bogus webpage or selling an airplane (yes, it did happen) through ebay it's not something what i consider an attack. This is just my opinion. Our romanian hacking sites are few (rst and [in]security-romania from my knowledge) and their quality is not extraordinary, so let's get real.

I wish you all the best and stay safe... until next time!

PS: After writing this post, I stumbled upon this: http://garwarner.blogspot.com/2010/04/nicolae-popescu-romanian-hacker-at.html. It explains how things are going in my country. The leader, Nicolae Popescu, is in liberty even tough he is on of the ringleaders of the group. How can this happen you may ask? The answer is simple: in Romania everything is possible if you have money (and of course, you know the right people [which you do, if you've got the money]).

PPS: Do you see the amounts that cops confiscated from them? It seems that it pays out to be a phisher in my country... or NOT! Your liberty values more than any amount of money in this world!