Update

I wasn't sure what to write, because as has been all too typical of the past year the news and current events seem pretty awful but my day to day life is... Okay I guess?

I think I'll start with daily life, mostly because anyone can read the news and know what's going on (with a little slice of 'there's not a lot I can do, personally' , about some very worrisome trends) so here goes.

I'm still playing around with the new laptop, and so far it's been kinda fun. If a bit tedious. I decided to go ahead and try setting up a little virtual sandbox on my machine. I mean, I had started doing that on the desktop I built - and I plan to incorporate that more later. But now that I'm vaccinated I'm planning to visit the fam, and I really liked the idea of having all the tools on my laptop.

Plus what was the point of getting all that RAM if I don't use and abuse it?

So. Taking lessons learned from the earlier experience, I downloaded and installed a virtual firewall (pfSense), then downloaded and installed a couple of windows virtual machines. The downloading took a bit of time because my internet is only so fast, and since I didn't want to get sucked into this while officially at work I just did what I could in the evening.

Which meant I was pretty much ready to dig into the next challenge today. I wanted my little vm setup completely isolated from my personal laptop. That is, if I'm about to start playing around with malware I want as little chance of infecting my actual machine as possible. (I think I might have run into my first known bit of malware in the wild, btw. But that's a story for another time.)

So anyways, I connected the new virtual machine to the pfSense, which was fine. Except it wasn't connecting through that to the internet at large. (I will probably keep that off when act doing some analysis, but I wanted the capability. First of all for downloading updates and tools and things, but also because it might be necessary.)

Took a bit of messing around to discover the connectivity was there, it just wasn't resolving DNS. (for the less tech aware - if I put in 'www.google.com' it didn't know where to go because it wasn't converting the name to an IP address. And computers need the IP address to route all your internet traffic.)

I finally sorted that out, but then I needed to configure it so that I couldn't connect to my laptop from the virtual machine. That just required creating the right rule for the firewall. I mean, it took a bit of work to get it configured correctly but at least I had a pretty good sense of what needed to happen.

Voila! I know have a virtual machine on my computer that can connect to the internet, but can't connect to my computer. (pfSense can, but that's different).

Right now I mostly am getting everything updated and various tools installed (ie there are PE viewers and debuggers and IDA and maybe I'll take a gander at the NSAs Ghidra. I don't know, I'm just sort of poking around a bit.)

I think this is such a vast field that I can't possibly learn it all, and will probably settle in a particular area. But I'm not entirely sure which area that is yet, and I kind of like the idea of seeing something operate through all the various levels at least once. That probably doesn't make a lot of sense? I don't feel like explaining it right now though.

Of course, this does somewhat relate to some personal frustrations, because as of right now that's got nothing to do with my job. And I'm not really sure how or when to transition to that possible career. I mean, learning is a good start... Though it could take decades to master. But right now it's basically a hobby, and that's kind of frustrating.

It might be time to start job hunting again, though I am reluctant to deal with all the frustrations and uncertainty that goes with that. Oh, and trying to convince people that yes, I really am the most awesomest candidate and you really ought to hire me. Pretty, pretty, please?

Ugh. I'll probably have to do it eventually, the dissonance between current job and desired work is too great, but I'm not really looking forward to it.

What a crappy world though. Because I know I'm not the only one who feels that way. Who gets frustrated because the things that pay the bills aren't really the things we're passionate about. (and maybe we shouldn't always get paid for things we're passionate about. I've heard people talk about how hard it is to continue to love making art, for example, when it becomes their career. And it does kinda seem like a recipe for burnout. But, Idk. It'd be nice to have that option. And if it's not something I really want as a career, it'd be nice to have the experience before moving on. It's not ever having the chance to see for myself that rather sucks.) 

This applies in other ways, btw. I mean, if it's this frustrating for me as a white woman imagine how much harder it is for the minorities living here. 

This is getting into the larger things. How many more police shootings came just this week (and how many mass shootings on top of that). 

And the news out of Minneapolis is rather disturbing, especially the constant low level flights by helicopters. 

Someone on Twitter argued that its not actually worse now, but rather that we have cameras in our pockets making it harder to ignore. 

But still... It's getting ugly. And the people who really ought to be handling this better - aren't. 

They seem to be doubling down, actually. Doubling down on hate. Doubling down on being assholes. Doubling down on seeing the protests and disgruntlement as a threat instead of clear warning signals that the status quo is not okay. (or maybe they agree that the status quo sucks, but are trying to push for something even worse. As if history hasn't repeatedly proven how terrible their ideas are.) 

Yes, I am looking at all the short-sighted and rather moronic wealthy people who seem to think they can fund outright lies and conspiracy theories without any real blowback. Or that they can squelch any attempt at making a more equitable system without it costing them even more in other ways. And the sheer arrogance of thinking they really know what's best, when they take anything that challenges that view as an affront and a threat. 

That is, I think, the worst of it. That people like that have the power and influence to really warp things. 

Whatever. They're trying to dam a river, but they aren't all that good at constructing floodgates and levees, and they pretty much create the surge that makes those necessary in the first place.