Product placement in memes

In this modern age where every brand, corporation and small business has a Twitter profile and Facebook page (sometimes in lieu of a website) which it leverages to engage one-to-one with customers, it was inevitable that someone would seize on the humble internet meme for marketing purposes – what better bang for your marketing buck than to “go viral” from an intern’s tweet, right? And how better to keep your brand relevant to the cultural conversation than participating in meme culture? Mostly, this sort of thing provides little than karma for...

Review: Shardlight

Shardlight is a 2D point-and-click adventure game from Wadjet Eye Games, the creators of the Blackwell series and publishers of Technobabylon. Like the rest of Wadjet’s output, it was developed using a tool made in the late 90s to make games that look like they’re from the early 90s. It features Ben Chandler on pixels and Francisco González on writing, with both collaborating on design and programming. Shardlight is named for the shards of uranium glass scattered around its environment, hung from trees and lampposts,...

Review: The Gig Economy

The Gig Economy, which is as of this writing the single post on a WordPress blog entitled Zero HP Lovecraft, is of and about the internet. Specifically, the internet of 2018, its social media and blockchains. What initially appears to be a particularly flowery and rambling blogpost reveals itself as a fictional story at whichever point you start curiously googling its references to invented subreddits and cryptocurrencies. It’s an ambitious work that doesn’t completely hang together: the strong introduction is let down by an jarring change...

Post-Mortem: Trollcave

This is a post-mortem of my Trollcave vulnerable VM. As it goes into implementation details of the different components and their vulnerabilities, it can be considered a comprehensive spoiler. If you’re going to, complete the VM before reading this. By the period between its inception and release, Trollcave was the labour of two years and a bit. But in terms of when I actually worked on it, it was the labour of about three weeks. Over the first week following its initial commit, I coded in a mad frenzy. Then...

Walkthrough: Trollcave

Now that a couple of people have finished my vulnerable VM Trollcave (and let me know) it’s time to release the official walkthrough. OhExFortyOne and LutusHacks have also released walkthroughs, so check those out too for a couple of different takes on the box. There are a few different ways to approach this VM and successfully root it, but the compromise path I built it around looks like this: In addition to this path, there’s a...