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Comment by nxzero | Hacker News Reader

Anyone know of a good walkthrough if you get stuck?

I don’t know about any walkthroughs, but you might be able to get help/feedback/pointers in the #uctf IRC channel on Freenode.

With all these kinds of CTFs, the chances of being able to do the next level after you read a writeup are rather small. It's better just to come back to it when you have more skills.

Hard to believe that there would not be a chain of steps to gain access. Are you saying that there are, but that the steps in this case are always bundled and in a set series?

(Might be worth stating if in fact you've finished the CTF challenge; otherwise, what makes you sure this is the case?)

I think the idea is that there is such a level of understanding required to really supply an answer that unless the walkthrough is extremely informative, and you take extra time to really understand what it's explaining, then you'll likely have problems on the next level. But yes, it should be possibly to have a walkthrough that you can learn from. I think a set of progressive hints would work better.

In my opinion, having challenge without a deadline that a walkthrough or hints are available waste interest in the topic; aka get an email, build interest, etc.

You can find walkthroughs by googling a bit (I myself wrote walkthroughs for the last 4 levels), but I'd highly recommend doing it without cheating. The amount you learn from figuring it out yourself is exponentially more than what you learn from reading a walkthrough. Most important is how you learn to think, by carefully looking for vulnerabilities and examining what you have control over and how the program uses your input.

Spend enough time learning the instruction set and the concepts involved and the answers will become apparent.

Learning to cheat is part of the progress, but agree that at some point Google is not an option.

Honestly really isn't for myself, but based on experience teaching a wide variety of people, that some people learn different ways and are more willing to take something new on if they feel they won't break "it" (which is what the website does) and feel there's a built-in for getting to done. Most users get that connect the dots isn't the same as DIY, but still a option that helps some users that would have never tried, but were interested in the topic. Thanks for commenting.

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