Hello, world. I assume the worst.
Why this blog exists, what the inverse of Hanlon's razor actually means, and why 280 characters stopped being enough.
Hanlon’s razor tells you to never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. It’s good advice for your family group chat. It is much worse advice for reading a breach disclosure that took ninety days to publish, names no root cause, and uses the phrase “out of an abundance of caution” four times.
This blog is the long-form home of @inverse_hanlon, where the operating principle runs the other way:
Never attribute to incompetence that which is adequately explained by malice.
That doesn’t mean everything is a conspiracy. Most outages really are a typo in a config file. The point of the inverse razor is narrower and more useful: incompetence is not a stopping point for analysis. When a system fails in a way that consistently benefits the people who built it, “oops” is a hypothesis, not a conclusion. Follow the incentives before you accept the apology.
Here’s what to expect from this site:
- Security writing — vulnerabilities, exploitation, and the disclosure theater that surrounds both.
- Incentive autopsies — failures that look like accidents until you find the roadmap item.
- Occasional retractions — because sometimes it genuinely was a typo, and the razor cuts both ways.
Tweets are for the take. This is for the receipts.