Gonçalo Valério

Month: August 2019

  • Rust examples and exercises

    Learning to program in Rust is as easy like other languages out there, because it ends up having different constrains and new concepts that you will have to go through, in the beginning everybody fights the compiler at least a little bit.

    I started this journey a while ago, however I’ve been progressing slowly just dedicating some time once in a while when I don’t anything else to do.

    I did what many recommendations on the internet tell you to do, start by reading the official book, that is in fact pretty good. But after reading one or two chapters, we need to practice and play with the language to have a feel of it and explore the new concepts you had just learned.

    So in this small post I just want to share two open resources that can be used while you read the book to practice what you have just learned.

    The first one is a website with examples you can modify and execute live in the browser called Rust by Example.

    The second is an official rust project that will put your knowledge up to a test called Rustlings.

    You can use it like the above video or with rustlings watch that stop and reload each exercise until you solve it.

    This is it, I hope they end being helpful to someone else as well.

  • Staying on an AirBnB? Look for the cameras

    When going on a trip it is now common practice to consider staying on an rented apartment or house instead of an hotel or hostel, mostly thanks to AirBnB which made it really easy and convenient for both side of the deal. Most of the time the price is super competitive and I would say a great fit for many situations.

    However as it happens with almost anything, it has its own set of problems and challenges. One example of these new challenges are the reports (and confirmations) that some, lets call them malicious hosts, have been putting in place cameras to monitor the guests during their stay.

    With a small search on the internet you can find

    Someone equipped with the right knowledge and a computer can try to check if a camera is connected to the WiFi network, like this person did:

    Toot describing that a camera that was hidden inside a box

    If this is your case, the following post provides a few guidelines to look for the cameras:

    Finally, try to figure out the public IP address of the network you are on ( https://dshield.org/api/myip ) and either run a port scan from the outside to see if you find any odd open ports, or look it up in Shodan to see if Shodan found cameras on this IP in the past (but you likely will have a dynamic IP address).

    InfoSec Handlers Diary Blog

    This page even provides a script that you can execute to automatically do most steps explained on the above article.

    However, sometimes you don’t bring your computer with you, which means you would have to rely on your smartphone to do this search. I’m still trying to find a good, trustworthy and intuitive app to recommend, since using nmap on Android will not help the less tech-savvy people.

    Meanwhile, I hope the above links provide you with some ideas and useful tools to look for hidden cameras while you stay on a rented place.