Sure, all's fair in a CTF. That story came to me through the mouths of at least a handful of people, who might have a bit of an incentive to exaggerate given that they hadn't quite been able to get to zero and might be a just a little sour :P
The state was quite helpful, yes–for x86 it seems like a "clean slate" shellcode would be quite difficult, if impossible, to achieve as we saw. However, I am left wondering how other ISAs would fare…perhaps worse, since x86 is notoriously dense. But maybe not? The fixed-width ones would probably be easy to try out, at least.
