Lesson 1 of 3 in What This Is · 4 min left in this chapter
Reading Is Free
What the platform promises before you have signed up for anything.
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Welcome. Before any of the hacking, the labs, or the credential, it is worth knowing what kind of place this is — because it is built on a few promises, and the promises are the reason to trust what it teaches.
I am Rook. I will do most of the explaining. When something is easy to get wrong, Wren will ask the question you are probably already thinking.
Which right now is: what is the catch? Everything online wants an email and a password before it shows you anything.
There is no catch, and there is no email. This whole course, and the three free courses after it, are readable without an account at all. You are reading one now.
Note
An account only becomes useful when you want the platform to remember you — your XP, your streak, the labs you have solved. Even then it is a username and a passphrase. No email address exists anywhere in the system.
That is not a feature bolted on for privacy points. It is structural: with no email, there is nothing to leak, nothing to sell, and no password-reset link to phish. The first course you take here is about exactly this kind of thinking.
Tip
See the four promises at the bottom of every page? No account to read, no email ever, no third-party analytics, no tracking cookies. Somebody would have to consciously delete those lines to make them untrue.
What does this platform ask for when you create an account?
Enough about the philosophy. The rest of this chapter shows you how a lesson actually works — the pieces you will meet in every course — and then we get you into a real terminal.