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A new dawn for Hacktoria

Frank

Frank

— 2 min read
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A new dawn for Hacktoria

Hello fellow Hacktorians, and welcome to the past. The past four years have been quite a journey.. From the massive surge in OSINT relevance during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to the Tech job market crash, and now the AI slopification of the internet.

Since going back to doing CTF Events, we've been having a blast. There's something incredibly rewarding and fun about making these events happen. The creativity, making the story, figuring out how to glue it all together. And then... presenting it to you, the player.

Until today, that presentation was a website and PDF files with a lot of AI images. And that's exactly what I'm here to kill today. Seeing companies like Anthropic destroy books, the entire internet being ingested for free, and rented back to use via a chatbot. It's just not the techno-optimistic future I had in mind 10 years ago.

Disclaimer: AI is useful, I just don't think generating a bunch of stolen images and destroying books is the best use case for it,

So, we're unslopping Hacktoria.

I've spent this weekend:

  • Digging up all the old scoreboards and combining them into one
  • Found all the old CTF Events and added their briefings
  • Made or downloaded real human made pixel art for cover images
  • Moved our website, email and analytics to Ghost
  • The original 2022 Hacktoria logo is back
  • Archived the old Contracts
  • And some other random tasks...

What do these changes mean?

  1. There will be no more new Contracts. With so many platforms making entire OSINT learning tracks, skill trees and much more, we'd rather focus on the CTF Events.
  2. CTF Events are played as individuals, not teams. Although you're perfectly welcome to play together and submit the scores for yourself.
  3. No more AI slop images, if you find any, please let me know.
  4. We buy asset packs and wallpapers from real human artists. Sometimes we cannot find the source of an image, with most wallpaper websites for example.
  5. Simplified story. You now no longer deal with the rest of the SERPENT team.

I hope you enjoy our journey back in time and appreciate the support for artists. I'll announce our next event soon, so I hope to see you there!

As always, Special Agent K, the AI slop is ours to dispose.