Well, this is one of  Adrián Lamo ‘s computers: Beautiful, isn’t it? He obviously owns this machine (to “own” something means you can fix it when it breaks, and the above has obviously been fixed many times). Here’s one of my own boxes: Yes, I’m using “box” literally… and yes, we actually installed LEDs  inside the power supply  (hint: there are two circuits inside, high voltage and low voltage; one of them can kill you and burn your house down, while the other will only burn your house down (which may or may not kill you)). It’s eco-friendly, too (the cardboard is biodegradable and the components are from the trash). TL;DR: The best computer for a hacker is one that they own. P.S. Also read  Adrián Lamo's answer to How did Adrian Lamo learn to hack? Possibly the most important aspect of my early computer experience was finally having a computer system that was  mine . I could experiment with it. I could break it and have to fix it. I could mess up the sett

Say, you’re writing a buffer overflow exploit, and you have figured out that you need 1337 bytes of padding. What are your options? Type them by hand. This will be annoying and error-prone (how sure are you that you hit the “A” key  exactly  1337 times? because one more or one less will ruin the exploit). Write a C program to generate them - with a loop and a counter. This will be less annoying and less error prone. Write a Python program to generate them. There it’s just  "A" * 1337 , done. But it gets even better! How did you find this vulnerability? Python is the plug-in language of the Immunity debugger. And how do you intend to deploy the exploit? Python has networking libraries. And HTML parsing libraries and what not. It’s a high-level, easy-to-use Swiss army knife. Guest Author Vladislav Zorov programming enthusiast. Lives in Bulgaria Love my answers? Donate to my gaming budget:  paypal.me/vladizorov