🐝 Hive Five 205 - Join or die

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Hi friends,

Greetings from the hive!

I hope you've had a great start to the year. I wish I could say the same... I've seen the inside of an ER twice already.

The fam got sick on the 31st, which lasted for several days up to a week. Yikes.

Fortunately, we're all doing better now.

Let's take this week by swarm!

🐝 The Bee's Knees

1. The Great American Poisoning or, wtf is going on with our food system. MORE

2. Lightyear introduces a new way to manipulate PHP files by leveraging the versatility of filter chains, which offer an abundance of possibilities for an attacker to disguise or modify files. MORE | TOOL

3. 2024 was a year of challenges for @Aaronfrancis: newborn twins, two-year-old twins, developing arthritis, getting laid off during paternity leave. But after starting a business with @steve_tenuto, they doubled their old salaries. MORE

4. Streaming platforms have gained unprecedented control over movies, yet produce forgettable content. MORE

5. Breaking the Chain: Wiz Uncovers a Signature Verification Bypass in Nuclei, the Popular Vulnerability Scanner (CVE-2024-43405). MORE

Table of Contents

• 📰 Updates

• 💼 Work

• 🌎 Community

• 🍄 Level up

• 🛠 Explore

• 📈 Learned something?

📰 Updates

🍯 My work

🗞️ News

1. Waymore v4.8 bug fix: "When downloading responses and creating the file name, sometimes the file extension is incorrectly derived and has / in it." MORE

2. 13 trends in technology that will affect programmers and software engineers in the year 2025. MORE

💼 Work

💰 Career

1. Anemon is a tool designed to simplify the creation of tailored CVs, addressing the tedious process of crafting personalized applications for every job. MORE

2. Discover trends in tech, based on analysis of 10 million jobs per month. MORE

3. What to Expect from a Security Internship. MORE

4. Professional Twitter strategy guide: 1. Post something valuable your people want to learn, 2. Implicitly promise to keep doing it, 3. Learn what is valuable, start building your own stuff to post instead of merely commentating on others. MORE

5. High achievers resist growth not from fear of change, but because they've mastered being who they are, seeing identity protection as the most sophisticated form of self-sabotage, rather than failure avoidance. MORE

🚀 Productivity

1. Kepano, the CEO of Obsidian, has created a set of templates leveraging dataview and properties. Simple and effective. MORE

2. How to utilize an atomic note-taking system to effectively research new topics and advance your career. MORE

3. Simple 3-step method to organize tasks, reduce stress, and boost productivity - shift it forward, tackle your enemy, and separate the rest. MORE

4. The community shares productivity hacks, strategies, and tools that genuinely worked for them in 2024. MORE

5. Organizing part-time research in Obsidian. Techniques for structuring and connecting ideas to support an ongoing research project. MORE

🌎 Community

🎉 Celebrate

1. Critical Thinking is starting a research lab with first researchers @fransrosen, @MtnBer, @kevin_mizu, @monkehack, and @PikuHaku. So dope! MORE

2. @alexbindrei had an exceptional year, starting work at Microsoft, earning 3 times more bounties than in 2023, and attending hacking events in Poland, Singapore, and the UK, even visiting a military base. Amazing! MORE

3. @iqimpz had a remarkable 2024, making over 250% of their previous year's salary, ranking 4th on the USA @Hacker0x01 leaderboard, and taking 4+ months off. Love this! MORE

4. @nahamsec received a $100k bounty from @meta. LFG! MORE

⚡️ Timeline

1. Bashbunni New York vlog covering BTS terminal feud, coding struggles, and time with friends. MORE

2. @Tib3rius and @TracketPacer engage in a lively discussion about cybersecurity and technology, delving into various topics of interest. MORE

3. As a new year approaches, @yassineaboukir reflects on the swift passage of time and the profound changes, personal growth, and new perspectives gained over the past year. MORE

💛 Follow
Awesome accounts to follow. Randomly selected from my curated Twitter lists.

1. @tannaurus | Tanner Gill | Senior Software Engineer @1Password. Stay at home dog dad. Recovering coffee snob.

2. @ProfessorMesser | Professor Messer | Training the world, one video at a time.

3. @drewwash | Drew Wash | Domain Name Development Guy․

4. @simonw | Simon Willison | Creator @datasetteproj, co-creator Django. PSF board. @nichemuseums. Hangs out with @natbat + @cleopaws.

🍄 Level up

📰 Read

1. From Arbitrary File Write to RCE in Restricted Rails apps. An arbitrary file write vulnerability by abusing the cache mechanism of Bootsnap, a caching library used in Rails since version 5.2. MORE

2. The Ghosts in the Machine: Spotify’s plot against musicians. MORE

3. What valtown learned copying all the best code assistants. A summary of the latest in code gen tech: Claude, Cursor, cline, windsurf etc. MORE

4. The Gogs self-hosted Git service is vulnerable to symbolic link path traversal that enables remote code execution (CVE-2024-44625). The latest version at the time of writing (0.13.0) is affected. MORE

5. Dwarkesh (Deeply researched interviews) spent a few weeks in China and shares his first impression. MORE

💡 Tips

1. Simple script that routes curl traffic through Burp Suite, a popular web application security testing tool, allowing developers to inspect and modify HTTP requests and responses. MORE

2. Rule for clean eating: avoid foods with sugar, corn products, refined flour, or potatoes in the first three ingredients. This "Don't eat the SCRAPs" approach aims to help people improve their diets. MORE

3. Indiehacker Marc shares his effective workout routine and eating habits to achieve 10% body fat without a gym. MORE

4. Using "async" Slack channels has been a key tool for @beondeck while operating fully remotely with 62 teammates across 14 time zones for the past 18 months. MORE

5. Using LLMs and Cursor to become a finisher. Learn to refine specs, bootstrap code, and iterate effectively to rapidly build and deploy your projects—even with a busy schedule. MORE

🧠 Wisdom

1. Great outcomes often require one to be different. Most people do not exercise, earn $500k/year, or stay married for 20 years. Decide how to be exceptional and work towards it. MORE

2. Growing a Human: The First 30 Weeks. Reflections on the strange experience of growing a human from scratch, without any conscious understanding of how you are doing it. MORE

3. Amanda shares a Google Sheet template for you to map out your 2025 goals. How to make the most of 2025 with her system and setup. MORE

4. "Stop booing yourself off stage before anyone had the chance to see you perform." MORE

📚 Resources

1. Guide: Introduction to Investigative Journalism. Written by some of the top investigative journalists from around the world. MORE

2. Collection of hand-crafted bash scripts for various common tasks. MORE

3. Password Reset Code Review and Pentest Checklist. MORE

4. Paper from Bytedance (TikTok) describing their novel real-time recommendation system: "Monolith". Key Innovations: 1) Collisionless embeddings: 100% unique representations for different items. 2) Real-time training: Enables rapid model updates to capture the latest user trends. MORE

5. Explore a curated list of minimalist and mindful apps. MORE

🛠 Explore

🧰 Tools

1. curl-impersonate is a special build of the curl tool that can mimic the network behavior of the four major web browsers: Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox. This allows developers to perform TLS and HTTP handshakes that are identical to those of real browsers. MORE

2. Web service that provides historical information about social media accounts. It can currently be used to look up 542 million historical screen names for 443 million Twitter accounts. MORE

3. RustAutoRecon is a fast, multi-threaded network reconnaissance tool written in Rust that performs automated enumeration of services, boasting significant speed improvements over the Python implementation. MORE

4. Depix is a proof-of-concept technique to recover plaintext from pixelized screenshots created with a linear box filter. MORE

🎥 Watch

1. The documentary "Join or Die" explores the decline of community engagement through the research of sociologist Robert Putnam, creating an American civic crisis. MORE

2. I've said this before and I'll say it again, the quality of the content Natalie makes is out of this world. It's the definition of art. Also, check out her entire Borderless series as the video is about that. MORE

3. The AIE World's Fair 2024 talks explore the leadership and vision needed to shape the future of AI. The playlist offers insights from experts on this rapidly evolving field. MORE

4. This extended episode of Drink Champs features a lively conversation with the legendary hip-hop duo Black Star (Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli) and comedy icon Dave Chappelle, packed with more stories, laughs, and shots. MORE

5. Making audio waves that look and sound like things. MORE

🎵 Listen

1. @rhynorater reflects on his bug bounty goals for the past year and sets new objectives for the coming year, including some exciting prospects. MORE

2. David and Mike reflect on the successes and failures of 2023 and set their intentions for 2024 in the 220th episode of Focused. MORE

3. The 2024 Milly Awards: Best Investment of The Year, Worst Investments of The Year, Biggest Personal L, and more. MORE

4. An interview with Jose Valim, the creator of Elixir. MORE

🌐 Technology

1. Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 by @simonw. MORE

2. API Parrot is a tool designed to reverse engineer the HTTP APIs of any website, making it easier for developers to automate, integrate, or scrape sites without public APIs. MORE

3. Explore the 2024 AI timeline, showcasing over 118 launches, many of them quite significant. MORE

4. How an AI Mindset Can Streamline Your Intelligence Analysis. MORE

👀 Interesting

1. Great talks most people have never heard organized by presenter name and then speech topic. MORE

2. Lululemon, known for its athletic apparel, has created a men's sneaker that is well received. MORE

3. The best way to sell to, brand, persuade, or inspire people is to condense your idea down to Two Words. MORE

4. Walmart's expansion may make surrounding communities poorer, according to recent research, despite the company's famous low prices. MORE

5. Why Majora's Mask's blue dog took 25 years to win the race. It appears to be unable to win the race, but it's not as impossible as most claim. MORE

💭 Quote

📈 Learned something?

Until next week, take care of yourself and each other,

Bee 🐝

^{This newsletter may contain affiliate links that support its costs. These links lead to tools, courses, and resources that I've personally found helpful.}