Paco Hope

Last tweet for a while. You can find me on mastodon at paco@infosec.exchange.

It's here. joinmastodon.org/servers

Sadly the folks at #Securitay2026 are still using X. I logged in for the first time in 4 years just to urge you all to consider mastodon. The open, free, and old-school social media. No AI. No algorithms. No ads. The internet can be different. It doesn't have to be like this.

It’s the good one. 404media.co/mastodon-is-th…

It is infuriating that public agencies like State and County use private services like Xitter and Facebook to diseminate information to the public. I must agree to the Ts&Cs of those bad, private firms to do unrelated business with my gov't.

We need high school students to serve as election pages at the polls on Tuesday, Nov. 7. They can help make our democracy work and earn service-learning hours. Apply by Sept. 29: bit.ly/47VwXVG

@fairfaxcounty The fairfaxcounty . gov web site seems down for me. Looking at "isitdownrightnow . com" also says it's been down for a long time. Is something going on?

@threadreaderapp unroll

Mini-rant on organising #slack channels. Within a section, there's only 3 ways to sort. "Recent activity", "alphabetically", and "priority". The "priority" sort is a really stupid name for what it is. It is "frequency" as opopsed to "recentness". 1/n

I tried to tell my #infosec people about https://infosec,exchange/ but Twitter has declared such sites as “potentially harmful” (to their revenue model). Extraordinary.

Those of you joining the exodus to mastodon, find me at paco@mastodon.org.uk

@StorySlug @threadreaderapp unroll

This is why I won’t buy a Tesla. I am picky about who I do business with. They are a bad company.

You don’t know these kids and they don’t know you. But you have a chance to be memorable. On halloween, give out the good shit. Full size candy bars, stuff that they’ll really enjoy. If you can afford to, give a bit of unalloyed joy.

@Jason RIP your mentions/replies. :) almost any graphing package (excel, Google sheets) can make beautiful graphs. It’s just a matter of manually setting EVERYTHING to something better than the defaults. All the other stuff people named have nicer defaults than the old tools.

What’s the best tool for making stunning charts? How do people convert the generic charts in google sheets or excel into good looking ones? Is there software for this or do designers do it manually?

@vickyjo Precisely!

@pacohope Awww, guessing it stuck from your time in the UK?

Had a small argument with my 13-year-old that boiled down to “my house, my rules”. I said to him “someday, when you have your own house, you can set your thermometers to display Celsius”.

A #chatbot is just a menu system that is massively harder to use and orders of magnitude more expensive and complicated to build and operate. It doesn’t give end users different or better outcomes. It just makes the end user spend more time and effort to get the same outcomes.

@UK_Daniel_Card The exit. Start at the exit and keep going.

Where the "best" (puke) place to start when approaching #cyber in an immature org? #go #go #go

As an end user, I get exactly 1 mechanism for sorting #slack channels that I completely control: sections. All other sorting mechanisms (alphabetical, recent, priority) are out of my control. End users need additional direct control: tags, user-set "priority", team-based. 5/END

I have a number of #slack channels where the people and stuff in that channel are IMPORTANT. They are high priority, but they are not frequent. I can't think of another system with a field called "priority" where the user can neither see nor set the priority value. 4/n