It has been a tiresome "start of the year": this 2025 has given me some hard surprises in terms of academic opportunities... I was dennied to a PhD scholarship program wich I looked upon for almost a year.

So... fuck it. I will keep walking with or without the stupid PhD. 🖕

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I love martial arts, they have been in my life since I can remember in a diversity of ways, I think the most important lesson that I have learned there is "get up". It doestn't matter how bruised you are... because even to run away from a fight you HAVE to GET UP. The worst thing is to stay on the ground hoping for some kind of mercy.☠

Stay, fight, run, win or escape... either way you have to GET UP. 👾

I was talking to a friend of mine aka "Ghost" 👻 about the impossible task of transmitting experience just by teaching theory without real experience. It is impossible -he said-, in two generations the real experience and value will be diluted and lost forever-.

I can see some of my fellow coworkers that are so comfortable with the vendor-provided software that forget that those are just tools and they do not replace knowledge and real experience of attacks. Most of the time when those tools fail (and they do when it matters the most) they run like headless chickens.

We have the duty of daily training (it can be anything, reading, CTF-ing, maybe a certification... anything helps), we owe that not only to the poor bastards that put they trust in us.... but our duty is to ourselves, we owe to ourselves to keep learning.

Why?

Because if we don't understand the technology and the flaws and downsides of it, the vendors will sell every piece of wortless shit to the companies that are comfy dreaming about they are so cyber-secure, just because some marketing intern named the next firewall with AI "sexsee"💩🤡... and we will believe them.

We have to get up and walk the way of knowledge in order to be mentally independent and ideologically self-reliant, otherwise we would be just techno-sheeps following the next trend. I know is a hard way, I know that learning is not free, it costs money, sleep, social life. But I choose to "get up" and not to drink the kool-aid that slowly enslaves me.

Thank you for being in this journey too Glider.