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told me “you don’t know ricnar? What? You have to meet him, why don’t you
interview him?”. And no, I didn’t know him, and I’m still ashamed for not
knowing him. A grown up guy showed up to the interview. He didn’t look like
the revel teenager I was used to. He looked more like somebody who was
repairing elevators for many years, which was exactly what he was doing. We
started talking, and as I had “studied” for the interview, I started asking
questions to see if he really knew what he was talking about: he really knew
all his shit. It was a great interview, and if you’ve met him, you know he
can pull out stories and anecdotes from thin air and keep you entertained
for hours. He was actually fixing elevators, but in his spare time, well...
he just became the father of the Latin cracking scene, and by that time, he
had published around a 1000 tutorials on cracking whatever crossed his
hands. I hired him right there, and I remember I got a bit emotional when he
asked me with shining eyes, “So, you mean I can start working and make money
using OllyDbg? It’s a dream come true!”. He then learned python, and writing
exploits, and of course wrote and published countless tutorials on both. His
technique? When he learns anything new, he has a document open to the side,
and writes the tutorial as he moves forward, taking screenshots, and writing
his thoughts. I’ve seen him in conferences, infinitely humble, while a
hundred different Spanish accents from all around talk to him. I wish I had
the energy to write so many tutes.
As the scene started to get weird, with 0-days raising the prices, vuln
markets, friends going silent and machine guns escorting me to the toilet, I
needed to exit. Again, I thought: I want to make money doing what I love, so
I started a reverse engineering shop (Disarmista, now under Futo’s command,
doing a lot more than just RE). Luckily a very early customer wanted me to
help them maintain a Smalltalk VM that was long abandoned, but was core to
their product. And they had a fixed idea: We need you to document the VM
(written in ASM) so we can understand it, and we can only understand
Smalltalk code. So, we sat down to write a Smalltalk VM in Smalltalk, to get
a Smalltalk system that could compile itself into executable form, releasing
“iterde” (Iterative Decompilation) stupid-tool in the path. The project is
still alive, now called Bee and evolved into Powerlang, and it’s one of the
things I’m proud and amazed we could do.
After Disarmista I got a call from LBD, A.K.A. Emi, “Let's do
Satellites!”. He tricked me into a 2 day meeting, sitting in the corner as
“Just a friend, don’t worry about him”, to keep my mouth shut for only 30
minutes as I couldn’t stop thinking (and saying) “what you are saying is all
wrong!” to experienced space engineers (sorry guys!). But well... for what
we wanted to do at Satellogic (true low cost high performing earth
observation satellites) it was the wrong philosophy. It took longer than
what we imagined, but we finally managed to design, build, launch, operate
and sell [50+] satellites and the images of the World they capture. It was
really amazing, again thinking “what? I know nothing about satellites...
I’ll have to start again from scratch, and my brain is already dead”.
But it wasn’t, it was just sleeping out of boredom, and it woke up to the
challenge.
----------
Today, I’m still doing satellites, and their security too. An amazing
team. In a way, we repeated a part of Core’s story, in building an amazing
team and culture, really, because the only way of doing impossible things is
to have fun while you do them, and to get surrounded by people that’s
smarter than you.
I know you likely want to know about how we do satellite security, but
this is getting too long, and it’s too interesting to do a 2400 bps version,
sorry.
I’m going to stop here, though I went back already a couple times to
insert earlier memories.
|=---=[ Inspiration
Wanting to do games was the reason I first learned assembly (why would
somebody learn assembly today?). Then viruses and their reproductive
capability really hooked me. Reproduction is one of the main characteristics
of living organisms, I felt then (though virii don’t have opposite thumbs
like Koalas, which have two).
Reversing stealth viruses I learned there were many tricks only a few
knew, that gave you invisibility. With friends I learned hacking, and the
thirst for knowledge and solving puzzles was just too strong and addictive,
it still is. As for people, I started so disconnected that it was hard to
get a model, though I always say my great teacher was Petro, “just” a
teacher, who was so good at explaining, that you always left thinking you
understood it all and just had the greatest idea of humanity, just by
yourself.
|=---=[ Favorites:
Programming Languages:
Smalltalk and Assembly. Weird, uh? I currently do python mostly every day,
and I’m very comfortable and programmed for money in many languages. But
Smalltalk is my favourite high-level language. I like how it forces me to
think from the point of view of the object I’m currently programming, and
switch to a different PoV as I move to a different class. On the other end,
Assembly. I still love the challenge of building large things with small
parts, and squeezing and squeezing and squeezing. I did manage to find
excuses to do some things mixing the two, and I still think one day I will
go back to continue them.
Pwnie Award: Erm... never followed them, sorry. Did Phrack get one?
Best Hack: Not many, but did I say cracking at all already?