Intrusion Countermeasures, Recreationally

There's a line people like to repeat about cyberpunk. William Gibson imagined cyberspace, simstim, decks, the Sprawl. He missed the cell phone, but he got the mood exactly right.

The network is alive. It's hostile in a curious way. Things notice you. Things try things.

For years, that mostly showed up as ghost stories. Put a Windows machine directly on the internet and it'll be popped in four minutes. Let a normal person touch airport Wi-Fi and they'll lose their identity before boarding Group 3.

Those stories weren't wrong, but they turned most people into spectators. Security became something professionals did behind glass. Far away.

If you work in this space long enough, the glass gets thick. It becomes policy, compliance, alerts at bad hours, and explaining the same risks to different audiences. Necessary, but joyless.

What's been interesting about running local AI lately is that it feels like play again.

I haven't done a capture-the-flag in a long time, but putting a box on the network that I actually care about, that curious bots might try to bamboozle, scratches the same itch. It's not a lab. It's not production. It's slightly-more-real-life netwars.

I'm keeping it boring where it matters. LumberClaw only talks over Tailscale. There's a Slack instance that's just me. Behind that is the usual paranoia of the last two decades: 2FA, scans, IDS, canary tokens. And honeypots, because honeypots are still fun.

The difference is that this isn't work.

No tickets. No auditors. No explaining why a thing matters. Just watching who knocks, how they knock, and what they seem to be hoping for. I get to observe it as closely as my paranoia feels like that day.

At the same time, a whole new crowd is wandering into this space. People who've never played netwars before are suddenly running interesting services and learning, in real time, that the internet notices.

That's not a warning. It's not a lesson. It's just a shared moment.

Some things probably don't belong in experimental toys. Bank data comes to mind. The rest is mostly about curiosity and attention.

I'm packing level-4 ICE, choom.

(Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics. If you thought I meant Minnesota, you're on the wrong blog.)