Oof. Getting robbed sucks.

Especially when it’s something like a Gameboy color, and decades later, “Would I still be playing that? Well, crap. Yes, I would.”

Sorry. I would like to tell you if feels better later, but the best I can say is it creates a bond with others who lost their great gaming stuff through misfortune.

Panic on Funkotron is such a good game.

Rampart is fine, too. But yeah. Ouch. Lol.

Yeah. The demand for red team skills is complicated.

There’s plenty of work to do. But there’s a lot of anxiety, and in some cases laws, that make hiring managers cautious.

When a team member is going to sometimes physically break into a data center, things are much simpler if they have an unimpeachable reputation.

And that, itself, is unfair, since everyone’s definition of “unimpeachable reputation” is going to be a bit different. I’m inclined to factor in motives, but not everyone can.

So it’s not the end of the world for a young hacker with a conviction, but they definitely have a more difficult time.

They have a good point though. Pen testing is a vanishingly small corner of our field, and I haven’t seen anyone with a past conviction get hired for those roles, in a long time. (Edit: Of course, I work with privacy respecting folks, so there could be, and their conviction just isn’t famous.)

I’ve seen too many hacker kids think their hacker reputation is going to get them out of trouble, and it didn’t.

doubt the furries will care much about being outed as furries, but cybercrime is a big no-no when it comes to actual employment

Absolutely.

I would prefer our gay furry hackers keep things fully legal, for their own sakes.

That said, Mike needs help from folks like me to catch these kids, and as long as they’re sticking to ethical hacking, I’m not motivated.

Also, I don’t like Mike.

His claim that he actually has my kind of help, actually on his side, is… overconfident, I think.

I can’t guarantee that, though, so I’m glad to hear our ethical hackers have decided to lay low.

In any case, everyone has a slightly different perspective on what counts as ethical, so I hope they’ll stick to legal as much as their conscience will allow, from here out.

Lol. The gay furry Cybersecurity activist’s reputations are already established.

We like them.

I appreciate what they’re doing, and hope they keep a strong eye on where their ethical boundaries are, and keep out of anything too hot for their opsec to handle.

But Mike Howell needs to watch Ocean’s 13.

“I know all the guys you would send after me. They like me more than they like you!”

I self-publish using Markdown, md2html, and an Amazon S3 bucket behind AWS CloudFront.

Heh. In fairness, some of those people check their email every single Tuesday, and have no idea what kind of speeds they’re missing out on.

All the legacy companies are fat, slow, and lazy.

Also often incompetent.

However, there are always some established cliques who know how to play the unit / supervisor and get away doing much less, even feeling entitled to order you around, even though they are not your supervisor.

This frustrated me, until I discovered that many of those folks, who looked lazy to me, understood our business better than I did, and were focusing their efforts on what really mattered.

“We would have been here sooner, but we don’t usually get emails to inform us of fires.”

It’s perfect! The potato* image quality of the Gameboy camera should just about work on my current bandwidth for Zoom meetings.

*No offense meant to any actual potatos, which probably could take a nicer picture.

Me too.

berries and wings don’t just randomly appear out of nowhere from year to year do they?

They do! Any useful trait is likely to appear more than once in different species.

but was unable to reproduce those images in my testing

I bet they worked hard at this…

I hate that more people don’t understand this. It leads to a bunch of discussion and anxiety about nothing at all.

You are correct.

The uncomfortable part is what I’ve learned about the challenges to gain physical access.

Most physical security is equally appalling to most Cybersecurity.

Edit: Incredibly unfun exercise: pick a physical security device you rely on, personally, and do a YouTube search for “device name break in test”. I’ve rarely been able to find a video more than 3 minutes long, for any product, at all. And the actual breaking is usually mere seconds in the middle bit.

As a software development expert, I take issue with

“our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die.”

That’s way off base.

She under-stated the hell out of that.

Our average practitioner is bad at both their own job, and at the jobs of those whose lives their shoddy work complicates.

Anyone trusting us with their lives or livelihood should be very very alarmed.

We’re also now producing artificial intelligence tools that allow us to do equally shoddy work, but now in dramatically greater quantity.

Edit: Let’s say this is 60/40 sarcasm and sincere, and I’m not sure which is the 60%…

I work with some of the best, and I’ve worked with plenty of the worst. I’ve also been both, on different days.

there’s a whole ritual. It’s like a big parade around the village, people have to touch them, throw arms around them, sing, we throw this type of powder on them, carry them around up on everyone’s shoulders up in the sunlight. You have to do it for many hours. But most of the time it works

That is so beautiful. Thank you for sharing this. I might not be able to fully invoke this ritual, but I will carry it in my heart, in case I can adapt parts of it for a friend who needs it.

If a woman (or anyone) says she wants or doesn’t want something don’t presume to know better than her.

Excellent advice. I’m quoting it again here in case anyone reading along missed it, because I wish someone had knocked this into my head before I made an ass of myself a few times.