CrankySec

How are you, friends?

The whole debacle around Anthropic going all "Oh my god, I cannot believe we are this good!"

You know shit's getting out of control when your friends and family start asking you about this "new AI hacking thing" they saw on Instagram.

What's up, friends?

A lot of peeps out there shocked, and I mean SHOCKED!

In the masterpiece movie "Analyze That", there's a scene between mafioso Paul Vitti, and actor Tony Bella, who's playing a character based on the former.

Hello, friend!

How do you do, friends?

Hi!

I am an idealist.

As of this writing, it is the year 2025.

Right off the bat, let me state for the record that I have, in fact, used LLMs.

I was going to title this something like "The smart person's guide to tech bullshit", but that pretty much would go against one of the points that I'm trying to make: "smarts" is very hard to define.

I wasn't going to write about this at all.

A friend of mine once shared with me a saying from where he's from: "If the grass suddenly changed color, a lot of people would starve to death."

Where I come from, there's this saying that goes something like "the smart guy's weakness is believing everyone else is dumb."

By now, it should be clear to everyone that the whole "Tragedy of the commons" concept was not intended to be an argument in favor of preserving the commons.

There was a time back in the mid-to-late aughts where it looked like being in cybersecurity (née information security, a.k.a. infosec) was a good way to make a living: it was an interesting field that required a lot of knowledge about a lot of things, most

The jumping point of this post is what happened to Chris Krebs, and how the "community" reacted to it.

I was watching Daniel Stenberg's FOSDEM video about the curl project's approach to security, and that got me thinking a bit about how wild it is that an open source project operating on a shoestring budget can deliver such an ubiquitous piece of software…

In the grand scheme of things, our actions don't matter.

If you've made this far into 2025, congratulations!

What a week, eh?

Howdy!

You know that saying from Dale Carnegie, right?

Hi!

It's that time of the day, again!

Howdy!

I've been in a bit of a writing slump lately, and I can say without a shred of doubt that this slump is going to be here for a while.

About a year ago, I was driven out of a job by a very incompetent person.

Hello, friends!

All else being equal, nearly all cybersecurity jobs suck.

So.

A token is a symbol.

It is that time of the year again.

What a couple of weeks, eh?

Quick one because I ain't got much to add to the conversation.

Hello, We’re reaching out to let you know that some of your data was accessed without authorization.

The other day on our Discord, I linked to the Chicago Electrical Code to maybe make some obvious point about the need for standards and the enforcing of said standards.

If there's one thing we strive for here at the CrankySec HQ is helping people.

What up, friends?

It's not really that uncommon for me to get feedback on my writing that goes like "Shit, dude.

As I wandered the barren wasteland that is LinkedIn, something absolutely not interesting caught my eye.

Back when this profession of ours was trying to find its place in the world, some smart people who thought the state of computing was shit got together and started to make some noise.

In 1983, percussion enthusiast and Nobel Prize laureate physicist Richard P.

It's my honor today to deliver the commencement address for this incredible student body.

In honor of the NHL playoffs (S tier), the NBA playoffs (C tier), and the NFL Draft (a solid E tier), let's imagine a world where companies and the workforce operate like some professional sports teams do for no other reason than to think about other styl…

Do you ever get the feeling that no one really understands what you're saying, regardless of how you say it?

I don't know if you folks know this, but there's this concept called The Shirky Principle, defined thusly: Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

Did you guys see we made it to Hacker News?