Periphery Leaks Reality
Longtime readers know that if you respond to one of these, I’ll probably write back – especially if you drop the F-bomb – but I’ll do it in this forum so I can keep the daily cadence. So: congratulations, Alex.
After reading about me being creepy, not nice, Alex wrote that one of the wild things about AI is how good it is at “extracting information from even the most innocuous input.” And it is. But AI aside, innocuous inputs are often the best inputs.
There’s a concept in cybersecurity called the side-channel. This is the idea that rather than attack or defend the main thing, you exploit or protect the things around it – the byproducts of normal operation. Because how those byproducts behave can tell you a lot about the thing itself and, in the case of hackers, provide entry.
Think about when certain jobs are scheduled to run, or how much power a system draws. The main thing gets manicured; the margins don’t. Since entropy is undefeated, reality has to leak somewhere.
Periphery, in other words, leaks reality.
I saw this in a CIM the other day. Great numbers and a tight story, but the next-highest paid employee behind the CEO/owner was making $65K. That suggests no infrastructure or redundancy.
Or a construction firm that boasted a record $65M of backlog, with only $8M currently in progress. In fact, the “record” existed because a lot of the awards were old. Not a good sign.
With so many folks focused on the center, the place to look is the edges. Periphery leaks reality. Maybe put it on a hat.
– Tim
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