We Are Training the Internet

My darkest professional suspicion is that Flash is not merely flawed. It is pedagogically harmful. Potentially even by design.

We are teaching users that random plugins are normal. We are teaching them to click Allow on prompts they do not understand. We are teaching companies that rich interfaces can be outsourced to proprietary runtimes. We are teaching management that security warnings are background noise.

We are normalizing software as interruption. Need camera access. Click Allow. Need microphone access. Click Allow. Need storage. Click Allow. Need update. Click Later. Need trust. Click whatever removes the box.

Then years later everyone will wonder why phishing works, why permissions are ignored, why patch fatigue exists, why users cannot distinguish legitimate prompts from malicious ones.

Because we trained them. I feel very much ingrained in the machine that perpetuates this but I am trying. Every bad pattern becomes cultural debt conditioning users who can't be aware and really shouldn't need to be aware of what they are clicking.

But many of us are trying to leave things better than we received. We write cleaner code than the platform deserves. We reduce risk where we can. We document edge cases for future archaeologists. We fix memory leaks in applications that should never have been conceived.

There is a dignity in maintenance, even of doomed things but we must be honest. We are building cathedrals atop a sinkhole and congratulating ourselves on the stained glass. We internet denizens and professionals will spend years recovering from choices currently described as innovative.

Popular posts from this blog

The Fallacy of Cybersecurity by Backlog: Why Counting Patches Will Never Make You Secure

By a Former Engineer Turned Cybersecurity Leader For much of my twenty years as a software and security engineer, and now as a cybersecurity executive, I have watched organizations cling to a deeply flawed belief: that security maturity is reflected in the length of the patch backlog, the volume of vulnerabilities closed, or the number of tickets resolved in a quarter. Entire cultures are built around these metrics. Dashboards glow green when patch counts dip. Leaders celebrate the deletion of Jira, SNOW, etc. tickets as if the act of closing them somehow hardened the enterprise. But this fixation on downstream remediation creates an illusion of control while masking the fundamental problem upstream, there is an innovation pipeline that lacks guardrails, architectural clarity, and secure defaults. The symptom becomes the scorecard, and the root cause remains untouched often under a guise of promoting freedom. Security teams often find themselves in a perpetual treadmill of “forever f...
Read more

IPv6 White Paper I: Primer to Passive Discovery and Topology Inference in IPv6 Networks Using Neighbor Discovery Protocol

Introduction IPv6 drastically reshapes the surface of network reconnaissance, replacing the narrow 32-bit address space and broadcast semantics of IPv4 with expansive subnets and a multicast-centric control architecture. In this new model, Neighbor Discovery Protocol (NDP), Multicast Listener Discovery (MLD), and ICMPv6 signaling collectively define how hosts announce their presence, interact with routers, form addresses, resolve local neighbors, and verify reachability. Although this model was engineered for efficiency and stateless configuration, its reliance on predictable multicast traffic introduces a rich layer of metadata that can be quietly harvested by a passive observer. This paper explores the extent to which NDP, and its associated control protocols, leaks meaningful information about a network’s hosts, topology, addressing structure, and operational state. It also outlines how these behaviors can be transformed into the foundation of a silent IPv6 reconnaissance system cap...
Read more

This is Cybermancy

Image
Preface This document is a manifesto, not a tutorial. It is written for practitioners who live inside systems rather than around them. It is for those who build, test, trace, break, and repair complex machinery at scale. It is not concerned with tools, techniques, or exploits, but with the way of seeing that precedes all of them. The worldview here is neither criminal nor romantic albeit a bit poetic and whimsical in my own way. It is operational. It emerges naturally in those who understand that modern systems fail not because they are attacked, but because they are misunderstood. What follows is a statement of posture, responsibility, and discipline for those who recognize that sight itself is the rarest capability on the Grid. Cybermancers are not defined by exploits, hardware, or street legend. Those tangentials  are the residue and not the essence. A cybermancer is defined by how they see the Grid  not as fortresses, maps, gates, and walls, but as a breathing lattice of...
Read more