ENT is a great premise and has its moments but it's not well executed and for that I 100% blame Rick Berman.

My recommendation is to start with TNG but skip most of Season 1 other than "Encounter at Farpoint," and maybe watch only selected episodes from Season 2. Then you're good to go through the rest of the series (although there are some episodes you can do without).

Someone else suggested N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series, which is also an unusual take on the post-apocalyptic and survivalism stuff that a lot of people are into these days.

Hi CISSPs and other folks with cyber-focused certifications! Did you know that you can often fulfill your CPE or other continuing education retirements by listening to podcasts? Well, now you know! Here’s my secret to keeping up with those CPEs - the Security Now! podcast with Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte.

You can also find summaries and transcripts of past episodes on Gibson’s website, which is refreshingly old-school and script-free.

I'm part of that, I quit Reddit and nuked all my content on the way out because they're not only forcing Apollo to close down, they tried to blackmail Apollo's developer. I used to be a premium subscriber too.

That's a good question. First it's important to understand that hash functions for pirated games or other programs are actually different from hash functions used to detect media like pictures, movies, and sound recordings.

If you alter a piece of code or text from the original version the hashes will no longer match, but typically those hashes should match and some kind of alarm gets tripped if they don't.

With media files like music, movies, or pictures, it works the other way around. Detection tools are looking for something that is not necessarily an exact match, but a very close match, and when such a match is found, alarms get tripped (because it's CSAM, or a copyright violation, or something like that).

As to the techniques you mentioned for concealing a pirated game in a ZIP file with a bunch of junk TXT files, that's not going to work. The reason it doesn't work is that if you ZIP something, all that uses compression algorithms that change the contents of the ZIP file in predictable repeating patterns. It's easy to detect and compensate for. Now, if you use your ZIP/compression tool to actually encrypt the file with a good algorithm and a strong password, that's different, but then you don't need to pack it with junk. (And distributing the password securely will be a problem.)

Please, people who know more about hashing and media detection with hashing, let me know if I got something wrong, I probably did.

It would have worked and it would have protected privacy but most people don't understand the difference between having a hash of known CSAM on your phone and having actual CSAM on your phone for comparison purposes and it freaked people out.

I understand the difference and I'm still uncomfortable with it, not because of the proximity to CSAM but because I don't like the precedent of anyone scanning my encrypted messages. Give them an inch, etc.