To Oliver.
Dear baby boy...
Your ISP… your government… spyware… they’re constantly sniffing through your data — in raw text, in metadata, even in DNS requests. Baby boy, nobody will suspect a thing if your DNS points to emojicombos.com. They’ll just brush it off as a Gen Z quirk. That’s how it starts.
I used to work as a cybersecurity expert. We got dozens of calls every day — “My data’s being stolen!” — yet not a virus in sight. Just exploitation, pure and silent.
I’ll never forget Lisa. Sweet old lady, called us back in the early 2000s, maybe even ‘99. Said her password wasn’t working. She hadn’t installed anything. Didn’t click any shady links. But she lived during the HTTP era — the wild west. Back then, Man-in-the-Middle attacks were like golden scars in Fortnite, or whatever you kids are playing now. They were everywhere.
This attacker? Saw everything. Passwords. Usernames. Her online shopping. Even her messages to her granddaughter. She had no chance.
Those attacks are rare now thanks to HTTPS. But kiddo… they’ve evolved.
Today we’ve got UEFI malware that survives a full hard drive wipe. We’ve got malware that spreads via cellular signals and rogue base stations spoofing towers. These aren’t just hacks anymore — they’re ghosts living in firmware, hidden under the OS, invisible to antivirus. I’ve seen machines bleed from the inside.
I’ve seen BIOSes rewritten while the system still ran. I’ve seen air-gapped systems compromised through ultrasonic speakers.
But hey… you were still just a hopeful sperm back then.
Anyway, I’m too old for this storytime. The world’s digital rot runs deep, and I’ve done my share. Take care, Oliver — and whoever else is reading this…
Uncle Jack, retired CS boomer.