And then, because you were never in a classroom and never took a class on security, you probably have no idea what a buffer overflow attack is or how to use tools like valgrind to check for them.

Then you put your C code on the internet and get your server pwned inside of an hour.

Slightly hyperbolic? Yes definitely. But there is a reason we don’t teach C to beginners anymore. Generally you want them to understand the mindset of coding before throwing them in the deep end. And I would bet nothing has caused more people to quit programming then Segmentation fault: core dumped

Pick a popular online service with a public API and write some scripts that integrate with them. Learn by doing.

So long as you have robust data sanitization on the backend to prevent XSS and HTML injection attacks…

If you can get away with just using Markdown, you should definitely use that instead of full HTML.

For most transmissions of digital information (even those here on earth) there’s a concept of a “checksum”. Basically at the end of every message, there’s a special number, and you can do some math on the rest of the message to get that same number. If anything happened to change or damage the message in transit, the math doesn’t work out and so the checksum fails.

I would assume Voyager works in a similar way so every time it receives a message it will compute the checksum and see whether it matches

It’s perfectly normal for your computer to have daemons.