capture-the-flag

On The Shoulders of Giants

#osint #easy

The Clues

  1. Something to do with a machine learning researcher
  2. The phrase “machine learning researchers are not good programmers” is important
  3. The researcher/professor is related to New York Univeristy (NYU), since Osiris Lab is at NYU
  4. Evil brother???

We need to find 3 common hobbies between the professor and his evil brother

Step 0: Search for the phrase

I googled the exact phrase “machine learning researchers are not good programmers” using quotes

alt text

Looking for the term “New York Univeristy” or “NYU” in each PDFs we find professor Yann LeCun.

alt text

Step 1: Find more information on the professor

Searching for “Yann LeCun”, we find his website, which is also listed on his wikipedia page.

alt text

He does have a hobbies section but only 2 are listed and no mention of an evil brother.

Step 2: Find the evil brother

Searching for “evil brother” we find a link to him talking about Phillippe Kahn

alt text

Clicking on Yann is NOT Phillippe Kahn’s evil brother and searching “evil brother” one more time we find:

alt text

Here he mentions three favorite activities (hobbies) which they have in common

  1. hacking
  2. racing sailboats
  3. playing jazz on wind instruments

Step 3: Assemble the flag

Follow the format and make sure to separate individual hobbies with an underscore ( _ ) and words in each hobby with a hyphen (-). All lowercase.