The Insider Weekly #3 - My Cyber 2023 | Fasting | chromeGPT
My biggest win for the holidays was that I didn’t gain weight. I don’t exactly know how I did it, but these may have helped:
I remained active throughout the whole period, usually riding my bike and walking.
I kept track of calories using cronometer.com. I do this since 2014.
I ate 2 meals a day on most days, sometimes 1 meal a day.
I fasted for 24h - 36h twice, between Christmas and now.
What’s fantastic about this is that I don’t have to do any ‘damage’ control for any period of time, such as: gain weight during the holidays => starve yourself for X weeks afterward => fall off the wagon. Many people do this.
Something I don't like about this period is that I didn’t study as much and I didn’t wake up at 7:30, like I got myself used to prior to the holidays. I usually woke up around 8:30 - 9:00 and now I’m having trouble getting back on track. But patience, my friend, patience…
Another win was that I got to spend much more time with my close ones.
I started the year in full force when it comes to work, specifically my penetration tests and appsec assessments. I’ve already clocked 3 pentests in 2023, which is an awesome start. More than that, I began collaborating with a new company, alongside the companies that I already work with.
I hope this new company will bring me loads of work from now on. What is up to me is to me to put in the high-quality work for the pentests I perform.
On another side, I began the year with a major $$$ loss, as one avenue of my investing took an unexpected turn for reasons beyond my control. I didn’t take a hard psychological hit from it probably because I couldn’t do anything (to my knowledge) to prevent it and also probably because I know what to do in the future.
As I said in one tweet earlier this week, the only thing I need when facing difficulties is the right mindset. With the right attitude, I’ll be on my way, trying to reach even further.
Last week I also published a chrome extension called chromeGPT on my GitHub profile. With it, you can simply highlight any text on your screen (such as long articles) and have it summarized by AI in a paragraph. Please ‘star’ it on Github if you use it. It’s free.
I’m taking advantage of this weekend of not traveling and planning to clock in hours in the office. I enjoy going to my office (in a coworking space) on the weekends because it’s so very quiet. And I don’t get to do much of this because I’m seldom at home…
What I plan to do this weekend:
working on the next videos for my Youtube channel.
planning and assigning more work to my assistant.
reading a few scientific papers that have been pending on my reading list.
practicing cybersecurity hands-on via tryhackme.com and studying from 3 books on my tablet.
reading books on the Kindle app on my tablet. One of the books I’m currently enjoying is by Herbert Shelton - The Science and Fine Art of Fasting published first in 1934. I’m reading the 5th revised edition from 1978.
I plan to read more books than last year (*54). *Correction from last week saying I read 55.
playing with ChatGPT & GPT3.5 and getting deeper into prompt engineering and hacking LLMs (large language AI models).
doing a bit of recon on the private targets I have on different bug bounty platforms.
Come to think of it, this is quite a lot for one weekend’s worth. But all of what I said above sounds like fun to me and not like work/duty. So, I’ll be enjoying it.
Also, the weather looks nice outside, so I’ll also probably be spending at least 2-3 hours riding my bike.
From cyberspace, the following are noteworthy pieces I consider worth checking out:
Slack's private GitHub code repositories stolen over holidays
Insights from the books I read in 2022 (by yours truly)
The Future is Here – Now What? - Patti Titus - CSP 103 - CISO Stories
Web Hackers vs. The Auto Industry: Critical Vulnerabilities in Ferrari, BMW, Rolls Royce, Porsche, and More (very very good write-up)
Static vs. Dynamic Testing of Android Apps (by yours truly)
Follow these Amazing Infosec Creators (by yours truly)
That’s just about it for this week; I’ll see you next week in batch #4.