The power of knowing your rights

There is power in knowing your rights. Not many bother. Or they think they know them already. They purchase goods or services believing that certain protections are in place, only facing reality when they try to enforce them later.

There’s a lack of education in schools around consumer rights, or even human rights. If we are being honest there isn’t really much education around finance. Most school leavers don’t know the difference between a debit and credit card, or how to balance a bank account. Mathematics, reading and writing, a partial second language if you are lucky, and some science is all most leave school with.

You can educate yourself. The likes of Martin Lewis and Rob Moore offer free education on finance and your rights as a consumer. It’s worth taking the time to learn all you can. If nothing else you’ll learn how to make better purchases and how to look after your own financial health.

Knowing your rights is a very powerful tool that we should all acquire.

Peter Pan Syndrome

Men can suffer from Peter Pan Syndrome. It’s a thing.

You are forever a big kid. You never grow up. You don’t do adult. Toys just get more expensive.

One day you realise that you are as old as your dad was when you looked up to him as a grown-up. Yet you don’t feel like a grown-up. Not yet anyway. If you were to look in the mirror then you would realise how old you are, on the outside. But on the inside? You still feel like a big kid, but with responsibilities and bills to pay. You fake adult as best as you can hoping that one day you’ll get there, but not yet, not today. Today there’s a new Lego set to build, or an online campaign to look forward to, or maybe a movie marathon with your mates and pizza.

Tomorrow, tomorrow you’ll do adult. Today you are still a lost boy.

After ambition burnout

Ambition burnout. It’s a weird combination of words implying that it is possible to burn-out from ambition. But it is real and something that I’ve personally experienced.

I’ve always been driven by ambition. As a child I wrote a list of things I wanted to achieve by the time I was 18. I completed the list well before my 18th birthday. I wrote another to achieve by the time I was 30. It included things like to live in a nice home, have a nice car, a great job, and to travel around the world. I completed it by age 29.I wrote a few more, which I achieved. Then I hit the aforementioned burn-out. I ran out of things that I wanted to achieve. So I idled. With no more drive or goals I coasted along. I embraced mindfulness, journalling, meditation, and long walks. They kept me sane but barely.

Those of us driven by ambition can feel a real sense of loss when we no longer have ambition to steer us forwards. We merely exist like everyone else. With no measurement of progress, no sense of achievement. Just being.

It can lead to depression, and bad health. Ambition burnout can leave you hollow. A loss of drive, no mojo, no spirit.

So what comes after ambition burnout?

Work experience

Work experience is much about working out what you don’t want to do as much as working out what you do want to do.

Many forget that. They try to find the perfect position to elevate their CV. Not all jobs and experiences need to be recorded. Some just served a purpose. Even if that purpose was to work out what you didn’t want to do in life.

Everyone should try as many roles as they can at the start of their career. It’s a great opportunity to figure out what you enjoy and what you don’t. Otherwise you may study and study to be X and when you finally start working as X you discover that you hate it. Now what? Well try something else. It’s never too late to switch careers. Each role is experience, good or bad.

Perpetually moving between problems

Some days I feel as if I am perpetually moving between problems. As I fix one another appears, then another, then another, with no end in sight.

Some days you feel like you are winning. But it’s a brief moment, for shortly after another problem arises.

There’s a saying: More money more problems. It’s related to ownership and responsibility. The more you own or are responsible for, the more chances there are of problems arising for you.

If you own a house then maintenance or insurance problems can occur. If you own another property that you rent out then you could have problems with tenants, lettings agents, contractors, or insurance. If you are employed you could experience employment-related problems. If you own a business you could have problems with employees, customers, suppliers, and so on. You get the idea. The more you own or are responsible for in life the greater the amount of problems you will have to deal with. Such is life.

Never enough

There’s a type of annoyance that I refer to as the never enough annoyance.

You are out and about running errands in your car and your water bottle runs out and you are very thirsty. Or you are out on a long walk or jog. There’s just never enough.

You are painting a room and the paint tin runs empty with just a bit of wall left to paint. Frustrating. There should of been more than enough, but there wasn’t, there’s never enough.

There’s a job that you have almost completed but you need to be somewhere else soon. There’s never enough time!

You have a day off work and you plan to use it to finish important jobs that you’ve been putting off for far too long. The day is almost over and you feel like you’ve hardly made a dent. Where did the time go?

There’s never enough.

Instagram is full of tease pron

Instagram is full of tease pron. It’s one opinion. I can see where it came from after hearing it for the first time. There appear to be a lot of female users on there that use it to offer taster content in the hope that you will follow through to their paid links on Patreon, Only Fans, or such premium sites.

The posts push the boundaries of what is allowed on Insta. Simulated acts, revealing outfits, teasing questions. Nothing too graphic, but close. Some maybe too close resulting in account bans. The need for multiple backup accounts just in case you cross a line.

Memes are used to try to encourage more likes. Plus cosplay, roleplay, gaming, and product use. Anything to get more followers in the hopes that followers convert to paid subscribers. Masters of tease.

With hard content requiring full-on identification verification, accessing soft content via Insta is becoming more popular. Just use your imagination.

Balance with good

Some days just feel like everything is going wrong. Sometimes it may feel like weeks of nothing but one bad thing after the next. Work, home life, the bits in-between. Nothing but bad.

To prevent every day being as bad as the last I like to do something that I refer to as balancing with good. Plan things you enjoy to balance out the bad things so every day doesn’t feel like a big weight on your shoulders, that you have something to look forward to. Even if it’s just watching your favourite TV show with your partner, or beers with a few friends, or just an hour or two alone with your favourite book. Balancing the bad with these pockets of good will help make each day feel a little less bad.

Has AI killed Google Dorking?

When performing OSINT research I often utilise Google keywords and advanced features, also known as Google Dorking. It’s a great way to find content and data that a basic search may fail to retrieve. Recently however, I discovered that AI, namely GPT, can retrieve the same results, and sometimes even more, faster than I can dork, prompting me to speculate whether AI has replaced the need to learn advanced OSINT techniques at all. Maybe OSINT 2.0 is learning to master AI prompts to conduct OSINT research faster and better than manually?

I put this to the test. I was recently asked to research a company. I like to use mind-mapping to join up the data that I find. Using Google Dorking and various sites that offer data on public companies I compiled a lot of information in around an hour, all linked together with reference points and a timeline. I then asked GPT to research the same company specifying the parameters. In five seconds it not only retrieved all the information that I had found, but it had additional information that I had not.

I’ll admit that at first I was annoyed that it was faster than me but after thinking about it I realised that it was also very useful. It provided links and evidence along with its findings, which I could follow to verify. The outcome was new sources that I could add to my own playbook. I also decided that I could use AI to assist with the process but that you have to follow a trust but verify rule. Check everything it tells you and back it up with evidence as it may have hallucinated some or all of its findings. It helps to think of AI as a virtual OSINT assistant in this case. You can give it something to research, but make sure you yourself check everything it returns.

As for whether AI has killed Google Dorking, I still use dorking to verify what AI returns as it may of missed something, possibly considering it irrelevant or out of scope.

A positive negative

Leaving a negative review on a website is harder than you think. Especially on manufacturers’ web sites. The reviews are often moderated and any negative feedback is quickly policed. Even one-star reviews politely written are quickly removed or responded to in a way designed to remove the impact.

One time I tried leaving a negative review for a big ticket item on a popular UK home DIY website. It was an honest review about the quality of the item and lack of customer support when I complained. I quickly received a response saying my review failed to meet their feedback policy and would not be posted. They did not tell me why it failed or how I could correct it. I changed the text but left the one star and it failed every time. All other reviews were at least four stars. So I left the original text and gave it four stars. It was accepted.

I conducted some research and found that others had also figured this out and were using it as a way of leaving negative feedback. They would give the item they were reviewing four or five stars but the text would be negative pointing out all the flaws with the item. It appears that this technique is bypassing a weak filter, possibly human, designed to flag any review of three stars or less for a more hands-on review, or in some cases an outright rejection.

It does call into question how useful such review sites are if they can be gamed in such a way. I’ve learned not to trust reviews on the actual product or service’ website and to use an independent review site, and maybe even more than one.