Rowenna. 2 ‘n’s. Ro-WEN-na.

The problem with an effective defence/protection is that after it’s been working fine for a while, people stop believing it was ever necessary at all. When added to an economic ecosystem that boosts/incentivises grift, fearmongering, divisiveness & suspicion, maladaptive cognitive bias runs rampant

Describe your Bluesky account in a single image

Interestingly, the only people I’ve ever heard speak disparagingly of Jilly Cooper’s novels, are people who have never actually read one.

😭😭😭

My all-time favourite was ‘Pandora’ - if you only ever read one JC novel, make it this one - with bonus art history education!

I’m gutted that #JillyCooper has passed away - she wrote with great skill, humour and insight about the messiness of the human condition, creating three-dimensional characters that were sympathetic in spite of their flaws.

Goodbye Jilly. Thank you for many, many hours of entertainment

Yep. Radium toothpaste, radium chocolate, radium condoms - some of which did actually contain radium and many fraudulent products which had random other toxic ingredients instead. History repeating itself with the Big Data Fairy.

Though smartphones and soft-tokens have caused the the distinctions between processes to become somewhat blurred, it’s true.

As I learned it, something you know + another thing you know = 2SV (eg, secret word check, confirmation code sent to email) whereas MFA requires ‘know AND [have OR are]’ so, password and challenge-response token or biometrics. In the age of SSO, 2SV is weaker than MFA

Yeah, probably!

As it turns out, there’s a whole lot more to ‘thinking’ than simply fooling human observer into projecting anthropomorphic bias, but to be fair; in Turing’s time the field of neuroscience wasn’t up to much so it’s not his fault his test is a bit useless

😂😂😂😂 savage and delicious

Can we please stop offering human sacrifices to appease the petty deities of commerce, it’s not as though that’s even an effective protection strategy, thanks

Yup. Bleak.

Unless you stipulate, and verify secure coding practices, you won’t get them

It’s safest to assume that everyone on the internet is trying to buy, sell, shag or burgle you, until proven otherwise

Friction is a key component of security, eliminating it is a bad idea

My #CyberSecurityAwarenessMonth tips:

Effective due diligence requires more than a self-assessment questionnaire

A contract does not replace the need for assurance monitoring

Sending the password via the same channel as an encrypted file is largely pointless

2SV ≠ MFA

#IrregularVerb: to kidnap

I suspend the usual due process requirements for detention in exigent circumstances

You fail to establish a convincing lawful basis for impromptu restriction of liberty

We protect national security from the threat of you

Those Bastards Over There are taking hostages

So far, all the scoffing I’ve seen about the risks and flaws of this latest UK ID card proposal, has come from people in those demographics least likely to experience harassment, discrimination or disadvantage from mandatory ID.

Fortunately, the range of critics is more diverse

Authoritarianism, hate-mongering, ignorance, and corporate sociopathy are real threats. Trans+ people are not - they just want to live their lives in peace and safety like anyone else.

notinourname.org.uk

Cui bono? Property developers and landlords who can afford indifference to the social costs of their plundering.

Not-so-smart jewellery 🤦🏽‍♀️

Knowledge-keeping is subversive. Remembering the stories they want to rewrite, to take from schools, to make dangerous to say, keeps our ancestors’ struggles alive. Keeping those embers lit so they can be blown back to life with a breath is power. Memory is power.

Although incompetence should be presumed before malice (Hanlon’s Razor), egregious incompetence is, in effect, indistinguishable from malice (Grey’s Law)

Oh hai #OnlineSafetyAct

Yup.

We *will* see malicious AV spoofing;

An AV dataset *will* be leaked/nicked/traded;

Data errors *will* result in digital exclusion and damage

It’s a question of when, not if.

It would require human welfare and dignity to be routinely considered as having value and therefore being part of the cost/benefit calculation.

I mean, yeah; which would be great but until that value can be represented in a spreadsheet, seems unlikely

We created these creatures in our image, and then were all surprised that they turned out to be effective predators 🤦🏽‍♀️

So effective is their camouflage, that most people don’t even realise they’re being hunted - they think they’re just being sold to, employed, competed with, traded with. Bless.

It’s been a thing since around 800BC

What, you didn’t realise that the corporate entity is already a) a legal person and b) a form of artificial intelligence (albeit in a slower and meatier form than speculative literature has primed us to recognise)?

And look how well that’s going…..

PSA: your regular reminder that data is not ‘facts’ or ‘truth’ - it’s a construct of motive and perception, created to serve a purpose.

But it’s not about what we want, it’s about what can be extracted from us and how that can be translated into commercial, social and political advantage.

It’s parasitisation to a degree that would make cordyceps sit up and take notes

Today, the violent enforcers of a rogue regime

Tomorrow, your boss? Your landlord? Your insurance provider? Your bank? A stalker? Your competition?

Who else might buy access to the map of your life, and use it with indifference at best; hostility at worst?