I’m Paul Ducklin, but everyone calls me Duck. I’ve been in cybersecurity since the early days of computer viruses, right at the pointy end - reversing, coding, analysing, responding, and supporting the community. (You may know me as one of the names behind the legendary EICAR test file.) I’m an accomplished, award-winning technical writer well-known for explaining even super-complex technical stuff in plain English, from esoteric cryptographic bugs to wacky security exploits. I’m an experienced and entertaining speaker who consistently gets glowing feedback for the quality and impact of my talks, live malware demos, and webinars. Readers and audiences love my material and enjoy coming back for more, If you have any writing, speaking or presenting you’d like me to do for you, or if you’re a journalist looking for informed and eminently quotable content, please get in touch via my ABOUT ME link.
Paul Ducklin
@pducklin@infosec.exchange
infosec.exchange
𝔸𝕞𝕠𝕤 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝔸𝕣𝕞𝕒𝕕𝕚𝕝𝕝𝕠'𝕤 𝔸𝕝𝕞𝕒𝕟𝕒𝕔: Ever wondered why internet RFC docs avoid the word "byte"?
If you want to sound fabulously pompous, say, "Terms such as 𝘣𝘺𝘵𝘦, 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥, 𝘥𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥, 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘳𝘵, 𝘭𝘰𝘯𝘨, and 𝘲𝘶𝘢𝘥𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘥 don't have an obvious semantic or historical relationship with the number of binary digits (𝘣𝘪𝘵𝘴, for short) that they contain, and remain dangerously ambiguous to this day when calculating how much memory they need. So it's better to choose words and abbreviations that more clearly denote the size they take up in memory or in network packets."
If you want to keep it simple, say, "String quartet? 4 people. Quintet? 5 people. Octet? You know exactly how big the band is stright from the name, right? Same idea when you talk about an 𝘰𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘵 in computer memory. 8 𝘣𝘪𝘵𝘴 make an 𝘰𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘵. Done."
Find heaps of human-friendly, non-AI-generated, plain-English advice from Amos and the team on the ☀️SolCyber blog:
https://solcyber.com/blog
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