I say it somewhat jokingly. Most of the challenges were AI, but there was a specific security track that wasn't about AI (but AI bug bounty hunter won. Not too mad, just annoyed at miscommunication about which countries the sponsor was actually in).
> If anything, this is pretty much the opposite of what a hackathon is supposed to be: A place where you meet people you might not even know, come up with an idea on the spot and develop an MVP + pitch it on a tight (time) budget. Taking an idea you've already been working on for months and using it for a hackathon submission feels... odd
The thing I've been working on is a much larger encompassing system where this would just be a small component. No code reused because no code was written for this yet. My task now is to take the shit code written during the hackathon and make it actually usable.
> The first is probably true, but to really judge the impact of it (Did AI generated ideas actually win?) we'd have to see the results
Yes, the winner also won the Lovable and Claude tracks. Lovable track was specifically about vibe-coding.
It does fall back to the GPS receiver if no internet and no cache but I suppose it's just more power efficient and not on anyone's minds that people would MITM for this purpose.
I still can't believe that certain IOS APIs are locked to paid developer accounts only (PacketTunnel, Shortcuts, etc.) such that you can't even sideload your own app onto your own phone with these features. It's not very well documented that it's paid either. Spent forever a couple months ago figuring out why my code wasn't working before giving up and opening my wallet.
Currently in China (as a visitor). Wireguard literally just works (to a VPS). Mullvad works as a commercial provider, just slower. Xray-core (vless, Trojan) if you're paranoid. I have my own proxy over syncthing relays https://github.com/acheong08/syndicate which I use to proxy to my home in the UK (residential IP) without exposing any ports.
I get rate limited to around 10mbps in Chongqing. Was slightly higher in Beijing.
I built a bad clone of Charles Proxy over the summer as part of another project (iOS VPN -> mitm with custom root certificate -> logging). It's surprisingly simple. It basically goes App -> Packet tunnel -> SOCKS -> a child process (I used https://github.com/AdguardTeam/gomitmproxy) to handle the sniffing and reencryption.
I wonder if AI is good enough to vibe code my horrible hacks into a full clone of Charles Proxy these days.
Annoying fact: Apple requires you to have a paid developer account to access the Packet Tunnel APIs. You can't even test it in XCode simulator because of how networking works in there. It's insane that I can't even develop for my own phone without paying an extra fee to Apple. The error message when you sideload without a paid account doesn't make it obvious at all and it took me a good day or two before realizing .
Weird generalist with a mix of cybersecurity, reverse engineering, run of the mill full stack development, and devops for self hosting. I do whatever I find interesting & learn the skills required along the way.
Currently working on my own little startup but looking for a backup option in case it doesn't work out before my graduation (~April 2026).
The incentives are all messed up & universities can't even do anything about it since if they lose students by being more strict, their stats look worse.
Coming from a student, it's disheartening to see seemingly nobody even remotely interested in the subject. Nobody to talk to about interesting research, to work together on projects with, etc. I'd present something quite interesting (e.g. https://duti.dev/randoms/wip-location-services/ on the massive amounts of analytics being sent off by iPhones) and their eyes would just glaze over and say something like "nerd" or "put the fries in the bag".
I'm sure this is not the case for all universities though. I was lucky enough to intern at the University of Cambridge over the summer & it was really cool working with the PHD students there. They were all highly motivated & actively working on research.
Reproduced the issue after a bit: https://github.com/acheong08/CVE-2025-48384
Then immediately went to update my git version. Still not up on Arch yet. Will refrain from pulling anything but I bet it'll take quite a while for most people to upgrade. Putting it in any reasonable popular repo where there are perhaps automated pulls will be interesting.
You always could by just setting the proxy environment variables (or in settings). The standard port for the tor daemon is 9050.
In fact, it's relatively easy to write a socks proxy that lets you route traffic through a arbitrary protocols. For example, I can serve/visit websites on syncthing with a socks5 proxy as a translation layer: https://github.com/acheong08/syndicate
I write a lot of random code that have very little economic value so there's really no point in keeping it private.
Sometimes they end up being helpful for other people.
E.g. https://github.com/CopilotC-Nvim/CopilotChat.nvim was written in a single afternoon while sitting at a social event I didn't enjoy and now there's 60 contributors and I've completely handed over ownership/maintenance to the community
I still use an ancient version of obsidian on my phone because it works with my hacks to self host the native sync server https://github.com/acheong08/obi-sync
For other open source contributions, I generally just add features I want or fix random bugs. I use exclusively open source software for everything, no big tech accounts at all. So contributing only helps myself
I'm in the UK so it would be surprising for it to be a language proficiency problem. You might be right about outsourcing and machine translation.
> "Will the application has a local repository of songs, will you use database to store songs?"
That question really doesn't make sense since it's specifically an Android development module and the MediaStore API dictates how files such as music are stored. It's definitely not the professor giving the feedback, that much is clear.
I worked on this a while back in parallel. You can dump Apple's entire database in ~2 weeks. Around 3 billion records including China.
You can compress it down to only a few gigs and have everything offline. I also got a ichnaea proxy though not as well tested. Been using it myself and it's alright,
Apple Pay still does send a lot of telemetry about your payments though. https://duti.dev/randoms/wip-location-services/