The bit about the "aims of the module" comes from its aims to get people thinking in a certain way about security, something I definitely already had. But that doesn't mean it had nothing to teach me - it was quite a while ago that I took it, but one exercise about the nuances of the setuid bit and how misconfigurations could be exploited stands out as something I doubt I'd have come across otherwise. There was also plenty of content on cryptography and basic binary reverse engineering/attacks that I'd not seen before.
My level of ability and knowledge isn't consistent - some places I'd dug into more, and some less. With tech, there's always a more detail to be explored and more learning to be done, even in areas I'm familiar with.
The professor did take this very well, as it happened - he asked me to come along to one of his office hours to discuss how I did it and what I might do to prevent it, among other things. The quote "if you can exploit it like this, you're not really the target audience and you've already achieved the aims of the module" from the article is basically something he said to me word-for-word in that chat - in the end, it almost seemed like he was hoping someone would go after the implementation itself!
There's a pretty clear line between "this inheritance is enough to make you comfortable and sort you out for life" and "this inheritance will make you rich beyond your own comprehension" - there's a certain amount of money that nobody has a need for.
This makes me think of a system that just got replaced where I work - multiple hundreds of temporary workers being tracked through their setup and onboarding processes through one massive Excel spreadsheet, saved on a shared Teams group that everyone edited at once. It was held together with prayers, fickle filters, custom views and loose validation rules and I hated it the whole time it was active. We'd frequently have to make sure to remove rows from it and put them in an archive spreadsheet to keep the main one performant enough to function - but that split made it difficult to sift through data when someone had an issue. Not to mention that records routinely went missing or got overlooked.
It's now a SharePoint database - I don't know what I think of that, but at least it was built for the job and has some solid integrations with other systems in it that make life easier.
Ohhhh, this felt so familiar. Listening to music while mindlessly scrolling and waiting for... something. Yikes. I really don't think I like technology any more.
