New Endings and Old Beginnings
What was thought permanent is now wasting away
2022 has the rumblings of being the beginning of a pretty consequential time for dictatorships around the world. The Ayatollah of Iran is facing unprecedented unrest and grassroots uprisings due to oppressive governance and police brutality, Putin is facing challenges to his legitimacy due to the unpopularity of his losing war in Ukraine in the public and private spheres, from citizens, military leaders and business people and politicians alike. Xi Jinping is now facing unrest across the country due to COVID lockdown procedures and oppression of the press.
Back home, in much less consequential news, unrest in the financial sense is threatening to upend large swathes of the world’s largest economy. Twitter is facing the very real possibility of complete insolvency as the now debt-laden leader makes massive cuts across the company, promising to slash infrastructure spending by ridiculous amounts while decimating his work force with layoffs and atrophy. The entire social media enterprise is on shaky ground, with Meta’s spending on crackpot ideas like the hysterically-executed “Metaverse” raising eyebrows (and concerns) of investors. META 0.00%↑ has dropped 64% YTD, and while Twitter’s share price is no longer possible to ascertain due to Elon taking it private, it is very likely to be worth a fraction of what it was worth at its peak after shedding major advertisers.
The upcoming (or already arrived?) recession, rising real estate interest rates, Trump announcing his candidacy, dictators on shaky ground and business behemoths we once thought to be permanent fixtures of society makes for a grim outlook on the next year. There are, though, certain things beginning that look quite familiar. After the rumblings of chaos at Twitter turned into a deluge of hysteria, many users flocked to Mastodon, a decentralized, federation-based social media platform. Infosec.exchange popped up and, in a month, built up tens of thousands of users. Instance administrators all saw a massive influx of new users as the Fediverse grew by the millions almost overnight. This flocking to a new social media site reminded me of an accelerated version of what happened when the migrations happened from MySpace to Facebook to Twitter, when users flocked from SMS to apps like WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram.
This great migration is hardly new, but its consequences are very likely to be dramatic over the coming year as Meta feels the heat and Twitter continues to crumble. Mastodon has proven a fantastic home for those that want a more genuine experience on social media, and while there is certainly a larger learning curve to Mastodon than, say, Twitter, I have faith that the migration will continue.
Enough talk of the cracking foundations, though, let’s talk about this month in research!
More New Beginnings
This month was the month I dove headfirst into learning Rust, and damn I love this language. The memory safety, speed, developer experience and refreshing approach to type safety has made me fall in love with the language, despite its quirks.
I’ve got about 9 hours worth of Rust-related malware development streams up over the last ~month and a half. If you want to go through and watch them, you can find them in this playlist.
I’ve also started working with the Bevy engine to do some Rust-based graphics rendering. Bevy’s entity component system (ECS) is quirky and is definitely a learning experience for me, but the possibilities of combining a system-level language capable of rendering complex graphics to WASM with a language that can serve as a web-based backend API are endless.
This Month in Review
This month was pretty successful. I started streaming Rust development on a whim and it’s done incredibly well on the channel, leading to a 4.5% increase in subscribers and a 20% increase in public watch hours. At that rate, I’ll reach the 4,000 watch hours I need to have a monetized channel in… 7 months.
The blog has grown well too! I’ve posted a blog on developing good malware, a blog on how we talk about malware and an article on Rust variable scopes and lifetimes.
Next Month’s Plan
Next month is all about execution to finish the year off right.
Finish my web scraping book - My book on Python web scraping (on sale for $8.00 in its work-in-progress state) is just about finished. It just requires some polish, a couple chapters finished and some code to be published. After that, it’s just time to sell.
Pre-launch a programming course - I’m going to be pre-launching a 101-level course next month. Cheap/free courses were pretty much what gave me my start in software development, so I’ve always wanted to build up a good list of solid courses to help give back. I’ll keep this newsletter updated on that front!
Keep streaming (and learning) Rust - Rust has been a blast to learn, and I’m looking forward to continue streaming it as well. You can keep up-to-date on when I go live by subscribing to my channel.
Releasing a web app - I started working on a small web application on the side to help do research on Mastodon and other fediverse sites. I want to get at least the beginnings of that site launched next month.
With all of these plans, I very well may release a mid-month newsletter update to let you know when I launch things and what I’m up to. Until then, take it easy and enjoy the holidays!