Recollections of an Imposter

Blog

  • Don’t use WordPress

    I made this website with wordpress via the free website hosting that is provided via Academic Software. My preliminary findings at this point is that this experience has been much more painful then it has any right to be. Setting up wordpress itself as a platform wasn’t hard, but it wasn’t trivial like you would expect something like this to be.

    I have to do setup that really feels like it could just be included in the automatic setup. But then, after clicking a list of buttons manually, WordPress constantly taunts me that I have to pay for all kinds of greyed out buttons, including security measures.

    After struggling with the horrendous UI I managed to create and publish some posts with basic layouts and this is enough for me.

  • UDCP Paper

    I made a paper/tutorial about sensor simulation with real-time visualizer. I came to this topic by combining an aspect from my electromechanics degree, namely sensors and automatization and my IT experience.

    First I searched for a library that would give me the option to simulate sensor data and publish this with the MQTT protocol, MQTT being a lightweight protocol that is designed for communication between Internet of Things (publishers) and other machines (subscribers). Pysor seemed to fill the roll of subscriber. Next I looked for a program that I could run on my computer that could act as the subscriber. For this I used Mosquitto.

    The problems started when the published messages just did not arrive at the subscriber. Manual command prompt publishing did work, so I began debugging my code. After a long time of fruitlessly changing variables I asked chatgpt and it remarked that I needed an extra line of code to actually connect to Mosquitto. This somewhat surprised me as this code came straight from the Pysor github page.

    After this I looked for a way to visualize the data. Since chatgpt had helped me earlier I decided on an experiment where I would bounce between chatgpt and anthropic and see who could actually generate code that would work and do what I asked. This did not go very smoothly, although they did do a better job then I could have done.

    Finally I did some research for a light literature study, namely that visualizations help people make better decisions and are generally helpful.

  • Hack The Future

    Hack the future is a one day hackathon in which students normally combine in teams to tackle various IT related challenges. This year at least one person signed up solo, namely me. the option to form no team being so unthinkable the system broke down somewhat processing my admission.

    The actual challenge I signed up for was one involving PL/SQL, an Oracle specific variant of SQL that adds various Procedural Programming features.

    Most of the challenge was structured as Capture-The-Flag assignments, many of them following on each other. I was expecting to go down with dishonor considering my solo admission, but this was only partially the case, although I still ranked low.

    More surprisingly, there were two prizes to be won for every challenge. One for ranking first and one for a presentation which we were to give at the end of the challenge. I titled my presentation “Reflections of an Actual Impostor” and made observations from the point of view of a former IT student whom switched away to a technical degree. Somewhat fortunately for me the other students misunderstood the assignment somewhat and the challenge was sparsely populated, so I had a premonition I could actually win a prize.

    This turned out to be correct. I won a few things, such as a powerbank and a desk lamp. I also got a 3d printed trophy, and of course a nice photograph with the people who organized the challenge.

  • Hack the Holidays

    Nog een Tech&Meet binnen Howest, maar nu met Inti De Ceukelaire. Dit was zeker de meest bezochte en uitbundigste Tech&Meet event en gericht op een diverser publiek. Het evenement zelf was ook veel meer gericht op Inti zelf en zijn exploten.

    De presentatie zelf ging vooral over chatbots, met veel ludieke momenten. De focus lag op de deterministische en vreemde manier waarop chatbots hun output genereren. Vaak gemaakte fouten in de output van vrijwel alle chatbots hebben een eenvoudige causaliteit. Dit maakt ze natuurlijk kwetsbaar voor aanvallen van mensen. Opvallend hierbij is hoe de persoonlijkheid van chatbots onstabiel is, waardoor je ze gemakkelijk een rol kan toewijzen en situaties verzinnen om beveiliging te omzeilen.

    Verder waren er ook momenten, bijna “sketches”, waar nogal ongerelateerde varia aan bod kwamen. Voorbeeld hiervan is een trui met nummerplaten op geprint om zo te proberen boetes te incasseren.

  • CyFun

    Een presentatie van Johan Klykens over CyFun (CyberFundamentals) binnen Tech&Meet. Deze presentatie was gefocust op IT professionals binnen bedrijven en dus waren er veel meer niet-studenten aanwezig.

    Het onderwerp was van een zwaardere materie dan de andere Tech&Meet’s en veeleer gefocust op Risk Assessment, implementatie en Compliance, er was ook een hoofdstuk over Supply Chains. De vragen achteraf kwamen ook veelal van IT’ers binnen bedrijven en waren soms moeilijk te volgen als student.

    Het belangrijkste punt is dat er verschillende niveaus zijn binnen CyFun implementatie die gradueel benaderd kunnen worden en dat er een focus is op haalbaarheid en kostenefficiëntie.

  • The Quantum Threat

    25 maart was er Tech&Meet aan Howest. De aanwezige spreker was Eric Michiels, Executive Architect bij IBM met een specialisatie in Quantum Computing. In deze talk ging hij kort over de technische details van Quantum Computing, maar voornamelijk ging het over de tijdshorizon, gevaren en uitdagingen met betrekking tot encryptie.

    Het meest interessante voor mij was het speculatieve aspect. Het vooruitzicht is dat er een punt komt waarop conventionele encryptie snel verouderd wordt. Er is evenwel geen duidelijke timeline voor wanneer, maar volgens Eric zal het er snel zijn en dan hebben we nieuwe encryptie nodig volgens een totaal andere architectuur. Er zijn dus volgens hem al veel bedrijven bezig met hybride encryptiesystemen om al te beveiligen tegen de toekomstige aanvallen van quantumcomputers.