Answering a series of questions orbiting the larger question “how is the job (in infosec)?”. I answered this kinda rapid-fire on Reddit, but decided to come back here in the note and give it a bit more thought and embellishment…

Annual report on how much it costs to run all of my Shellsharks-related services and components… 1 Shellsharks.com operating costs (2023) ↩

Here’s a question for fellow website-havers / #IndieWeb folks. What’s something you would like to do with your site that you haven’t done, not because you haven’t had the time, but because you’re just not sure how to do it?

In the past, I’ve been a bit self-concious about how/what I posted on my site. I believe there’s some part of my readership that comes to my site specifically for infosec-related stuff. So anything NON-infosec that I post is something that they may see on my site, or in their RSS reader and cause them to lose interest in my site because it’s no longer just the infosec stuff they want to see.

omg, I just realized I can auto-generate Table of Contents and Footnotes using kramdown. I’ve had this blog for over 5 years, using kramdown the whole time and never bothered once to read the documentation and learn about all it can do 🤦‍♂️. Turns out I can generate a table of contents using this syntax and insert a footnote like this [^1].1 Insert a footnote at the end of the doc using [^1]: Text here ↩

I took the James Coffee Blog “Which HTML element are you” quiz (I got the idea from @reillypascal) and it turns out I’m the <sup> element.

Answering the age old question, “what certification or training should I take?”

As others have said, Mastodon.social is fine, you have not screwed up. Are there some downsides to Mastodon.social? Sure, but that goes with any server, or any platform or any choice you make in life (haha). Some folks on Mastodon (or the Fediverse at large) deride Mastodon for A. being “too big”/centralized, B. not liking their moderation practices, C. their association with efforts such as Meta’s Threads federating, and/or D. certain accounts they have that folks may not like elsewhere. Whatever. Mastodon.social is FREE to join, is obviously widely federated - which helps with reach and search, and since it is the flagship instance, has decent moderation, good support, bleeding-edge features, etc..

@sol2070 I’ve seen a few posts like this pop up in the last few weeks, all with similar theme, e.g. “no one reads your blog but you should do it anyways”. I agree, in part - at least with the fact that you should blog, whether anyone reads or not. But the fact is, people DO read your blog, they will stumble across it, and given the scale of the Internet, of the world, you do have an audience, no matter how niche what you have to say is. I talk about that here.

Very interesting… In April of 2024 I debuted my “Activity” feed, which serves as a cool unified timeline of all the different things goin’ on on my site (e.g. changes, posts, notes, podcasts, social media stuff, etc…)

Forgive everyone here asking about Lemmy. I mean you are on the Fediverse here so people will naturally ask you about Fedi-native stuff 😄. But, it’s not just that. Reddit has, how to put this delicately… become garbage. First, attacking sub mods and now this. It’s just not a great place to be, even if it still has some juice thanks to all the time and energy those communities have invested in that place over the many years.

If you find something on the web you like, bookmark or otherwise save that link straight away, preferably with some sort of commentary/tags/context so you can search for it when the time comes for you to access it again. Seeing how search engines are rapidly becoming useless, it’s no longer a given that you can re-find things after you’ve lost them. I’ll add that search over the Fediverse is still very bad, so this saving advice is doubly true for here. Find a good toot? A good link from a toot? Save it.

A reference directory of known vulnerability scanners.

Phew 🥵, what a flurry. Made a ton of changes to the site. The home page now features a mixed feed of all of my posts, notes, logs and other content types. I’ve also started a link blog to share cool links I come across. Finally, I’ve figured out how to paginate a TON of stuff, to make some of my pages more performant (my Activity page is one good example of how pagination is making that page usable on mobile now).

After quite an extended hiatus, I am getting the itch to start tinkering around with my site again - fixing some stuff that doesn’t work well, adding new features, sprucing up the theme, etc… I’m even considering re-writing the whole thing in 11ty, but that’s the nuclear option. For now, I’m going to try and fix/add things while staying on Jekyll

Li’l desk buddy #plushtodon

I have a lot of different points-of-presence on the Fediverse - my “main” Mastodon account, this GoToSocial account, another “alt” Masto account, a Lemmy account, my new Pixelfed account, and many more actually.

I really need to remember to “PESOS”, i.e. reverse-syndicate things that I write about here to my site. Too often I want to reference something I posted about on Fedi but can’t find my post thanks to the abysmal search there. Copying things to my site is supposed to be what fixes this issue!

Not to beat this into the ground, but I think it’s an interesting side-by-side comparison. Let’s look at the fundraising efforts for Pixelfed and Free Our Feeds…

Here we go again… Mike Masnick just posted his writeup titled “How ATProtocol Encourages Competition, Resists Evil Billionaires, Lock-In & Enshittification”, and as usual, I’ve got some thoughts…