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I like to travel, f*ck with technology, and partake in the occasional tropical drink.
I am also a co-host on The NBD Show podcast.
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We all know AI is not with out it's biases but I wanted to see what it had to say about Social Media today.  Below are the results of the following ChatGPT prompt. To be clear the results where directly copy and pasted  from ChatGPT itself. Also the prompt was submitted in a new prompt window. 


Prompt: Rank social media sites by misinformation, racism, negativity, then give them a skeezy score 1 out of 10 1 being least skeezy 10 being the most skeezy. Also write a small paragraph of why they got the score they did. Alsod add some additional context around each score. 


Here is a ranked list of major social media platforms, evaluated on misinformation, racism, and negativity, along with a Skeezy Score (1 = least skeezy, 10 = most skeezy). Each score includes a short paragraph of context explaining why the site ranked as it did and additional notes for nuance.

🧨 1. 4chan / 8kun

  • Misinformation: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Racism: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Negativity: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Skeezy Score: 10/10

Why: These imageboards are almost entirely unmoderated and known for incubating conspiracy theories, extremist ideologies, and deeply offensive content. While not designed as traditional social platforms, their influence on broader online culture (QAnon, Gamergate, etc.) is significant and often toxic.

Additional context: These platforms operate outside of mainstream moderation norms, with anonymity allowing hate speech and disinformation to flourish unchecked. 8kun (formerly 8chan) in particular has been linked to multiple mass shooter manifestos.

🧨 2. Telegram (Public Groups / Channels)

  • Misinformation: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Racism: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Negativity: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Skeezy Score: 9/10

Why: Telegram allows encrypted messaging, which is great for privacy — but in public channels, it's become a haven for far-right groups, COVID-19 misinformation, and neo-Nazi recruitment. The lack of moderation or reporting tools in these public spaces makes it fertile ground for unchecked extremism.

Additional context: Telegram itself isn’t inherently malicious — private chats are often innocuous — but its hands-off stance with public channels gives rise to unchecked disinformation and hate communities.

🧨 3. Truth Social

  • Misinformation: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Racism: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Negativity: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Skeezy Score: 9/10

Why: Created as a reactionary platform, Truth Social caters heavily to a politically conservative user base and has become a misinformation echo chamber, especially around elections, vaccines, and political conspiracies. Moderation is inconsistent and ideologically skewed.

Additional context: Its very branding around "truth" ironically draws users looking to bypass fact-checks or moderation policies from mainstream sites, which creates a feedback loop of unchallenged disinformation.

🧨 4. X (formerly Twitter)

  • Misinformation: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Racism: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Negativity: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Skeezy Score: 8.5/10

Why: Since Elon Musk's acquisition, moderation policies have been rolled back, bans have been lifted on previously suspended hate accounts, and trust & safety staff have been cut. The platform now hosts more unchecked hate speech and misleading content than ever before.

Additional context: X still has massive global influence, but its tilt toward “free speech absolutism” has emboldened bad actors. The loss of context labels and verified source trust has made misinformation harder to identify.

🧨 5. Facebook

  • Misinformation: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Racism: 🔥🔥🔥

  • Negativity: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Skeezy Score: 7.5/10

Why: Facebook’s older user base makes it a prime target for scams and misinformation, especially political and medical. While Facebook invests in moderation, algorithms still amplify divisive content. Private groups often incubate harmful rhetoric outside public view.

Additional context: It’s a double-edged sword — Facebook does have fact-checking and reporting mechanisms, but the scale and demographic tilt often undermine those efforts.

🧨 6. Reddit

  • Misinformation: 🔥🔥🔥

  • Racism: 🔥🔥🔥

  • Negativity: 🔥🔥🔥

  • Skeezy Score: 6/10

Why: Reddit is as good or bad as the subreddit you're in. Some communities are extremely positive, educational, and self-moderated. Others are toxic, conspiracy-driven, or subtly bigoted. Site-wide moderation improved after 2020 but gaps remain.

Additional context: The karma system can incentivize outrage and sarcasm, and the site has a history of being slow to remove deeply harmful communities (e.g., r/The_Donald, r/Incels).

🧨 7. YouTube (Comments + Algorithm)

  • Misinformation: 🔥🔥🔥🔥

  • Racism: 🔥🔥🔥

  • Negativity: 🔥🔥🔥

  • Skeezy Score: 5.5/10

Why: YouTube has improved moderation, but its recommendation algorithm has a known bias toward extremism and rabbit-hole content (especially with political, health, and financial topics). The comments section is often a wasteland of trolling or hate.

Additional context: The size and reach of YouTube give it disproportionate power, and even fringe creators can amass millions of views before content is flagged or removed.

🧨 8. Instagram

  • Misinformation: 🔥🔥

  • Racism: 🔥🔥

  • Negativity: 🔥🔥🔥

  • Skeezy Score: 4/10

Why: While Instagram isn't a major hub of political misinformation, it’s a source of filtered reality that can lead to toxic comparisons, fake influencer lifestyles, and subtle reinforcement of beauty standards and classism. Racism tends to be more covert or in comments.

Additional context: Instagram Reels and Stories do occasionally promote misleading health or wellness content, but overall it’s less toxic than text-heavy platforms.

🧨 9. TikTok

  • Misinformation: 🔥🔥🔥

  • Racism: 🔥🔥

  • Negativity: 🔥🔥🔥

  • Skeezy Score: 3.5/10

Why: TikTok’s youthful user base and engaging format can spread misinformation quickly — especially pseudoscience or political content — but the platform actively removes harmful content. Racism and negativity tend to appear in comment sections more than videos.

Additional context: The platform’s opaque algorithm has raised concerns about echo chambers and state influence, but its vibe is generally more entertainment-driven than combative.

🧨 10. LinkedIn

  • Misinformation: 🔥

  • Racism: 🔥

  • Negativity: 🔥🔥

  • Skeezy Score: 2/10

Why: LinkedIn is mostly professional, so overt toxicity is rare. The skeeziest content here tends to be humblebrags, cringe thought leadership, or fake hustle culture — not hate speech or disinformation. It’s the least toxic of the major platforms.

Additional context: That said, it’s not free from issues — DEI-related posts sometimes bring out covert racism, and some job scams or pyramid scheme tactics do pop up.

🧨 11. Mastodon / Fediverse

  • Misinformation: 🔥

  • Racism: 🔥

  • Negativity: 🔥

  • Skeezy Score: 1.5/10

Why: Decentralized and often community-moderated, Mastodon avoids much of the toxicity of mainstream platforms. It attracts more tech-literate, privacy-conscious users who tend to self-police well. It’s still niche but healthier overall.

Additional context: It lacks mass adoption, which may protect it from the volume of trolls and misinformation that plague other networks. However, moderation quality can vary by instance.



In the past cyber security groups within organizations have often been portrayed as the dark t-shirt wearing, cranky geeks that no one wanted a call from. This stereo type has gotten better but there is always room for growth.

The idea of Defense in Depth has been around for a long time and has changed as technologies and strategies have evolved, but the one method that is often neglected or may not even exist within an organization is user engagement. But wait, every October our security team sends out a boring drab email telling us we need to complete our Cyber Security Awareness training, isn't that enough? Training definitely checks the box for compliance in many situations but it really doesn't promote engagement with employees or contribute to a security culture within an organization.

So how can we become the Kylie Jenner of security within our department? Well first you need to take some plays from the social media influncer's playbook.

Create content

  • Create topical content, take advantage of high visibility security events that happen in the news.
  • Be transparent to a point with your coworkers to share what your team is doing to protect them.
  • Make the content engaging and fun, It doesn't need to be a dissertation filled with technical jargon, make it approachable and something coworkers will want to share and talk about. 
 

Gain a following across social media platforms

  • Create a public channel on your internal collaboration tools like MS Teams or Slack. This is where you can post updates or snippets of what the team is working on.
  • Post on your internal home page have a regular section on the main homepage where you can post small articles or links to longer blog posts about things going on in the department.
 

Schedule content

Be consistent and frequent the more you post and communicate across all the channels, email, internal chat, internal blog, etc. The more interest you will create.

Brainstorm possible content

Engage other teams like the sys admins, developers, even interested coworkers and even your internal social media teams. Diversity will also help with engagement and the skills of the other teams will enhance your ability to connect with your coworkers.

Analyze feedback and platform analytics

During yearly or quarterly security awareness training include a poll about how effective the security team's communication has been.

Engage with followers to build a community

  • Through posting regularly on the internal channels you can keep engagement and interests active.
  • More personal engagement like light and fun security exercises with staff can build a culture. These can be easy as a role based exercise at lunch and learn.
  • The secret is to not make this mandatory, inspire the staff that are interested in security this is what will go viral. If your interactions are super positive and productive, those co-workers will talk to their peers and you can make security awareness go viral.

Attend events and guest spots

  • Get out there. Put a face to the dark scary security team. Shine a light on the security team, show them that you all are approachable and not just the team that says no all the time.
  • Being approachable is important when a client clicks on something that may be bad; you don't want them to be scared to report the issue.


Becoming a security influencer in your company will stimulate the security culture benefiting everyone. Through regular engagement with your coworkers you can stimulate conversation within the department about security and through conversation awareness will be the bi product. Having an open door policy and creating an environment where anyone feels comfortable to ask questions or report issues will help build the culture.

Though building the security awareness of everyone you work there is the potential this positive impact will spill outside of your company. When you coworkers go home and speak with their families and their friends your impact can have even a bigger impact than you know. You are through communication creating a positive impact that can spread even further than you can imagine .

So embrace your inner social media influencer and harness it for good.


 


Staying connected is crucial, especially in situations where traditional infrastructure fails. Off-grid communication solutions become vital during natural disasters, remote expeditions, or any scenario where cell towers and internet access are unavailable. One technology that has garnered attention in this space is Metastatic. But what exactly is it, and how does it fare as an off-grid communication platform?

 

Metastatic, in essence, aims to create a resilient, decentralized communication network. It leverages a mesh network architecture, meaning devices communicate directly with each other, hopping from node to node to reach their destination. This eliminates reliance on a central server or infrastructure, making it potentially robust against single points of failure. Think of it like a digital version of passing notes in a classroom, where each student acts as a relay.

 

Potential Benefits of Metastatic for Off-Grid Communication:

  • Resilience: The decentralized nature of a mesh network makes it difficult to disable completely. If one node goes down, the message can likely find another route. This resilience is paramount in disaster scenarios.
  • Range Extension: Each device in the network acts as a repeater, extending the overall range of the network. The more devices participating, the larger the potential coverage area.
  • No Central Infrastructure Required: Metastatic doesn't depend on cell towers, satellites, or internet connections. It operates independently, making it ideal for remote locations or situations where infrastructure is compromised.
  • Potential for Various Data Types: While primarily focused on text messaging, the underlying technology could potentially support other data types, such as location sharing or small file transfers, depending on the specific implementation and bandwidth limitations.
  • Privacy Considerations: Depending on the implementation, mesh networks can offer a degree of privacy as communication doesn't necessarily pass through centralized servers. However, security measures are still crucial and require careful consideration.

 

Drawbacks and Challenges of Metastatic for Off-Grid Communication:

  • Device Dependence: The network's effectiveness is directly tied to the number of devices participating. A sparse network will offer limited range and resilience. This "network effect" means adoption is key.
  • Power Consumption: Devices constantly relaying messages consume battery power. Power management is a significant concern for off-grid scenarios, and efficient protocols are essential.
  • Complexity: Setting up and maintaining a mesh network can be technically challenging, especially for non-technical users. Simplified user interfaces and setup procedures are vital for wider adoption.
  • Security Vulnerabilities: Mesh networks, while decentralized, are not immune to security threats. Proper encryption and authentication mechanisms are crucial to prevent unauthorized access and manipulation. Research and development are ongoing to address these vulnerabilities.
  • Limited Bandwidth: Mesh networks typically offer limited bandwidth compared to traditional networks. This can restrict the types of data that can be transmitted and the speed of communication.
  • Interoperability: Different mesh networking protocols and implementations may not be compatible, limiting communication between users with different systems. Standardization is an important factor to consider.
  • Real-World Testing and Deployment: While the concept is promising, widespread real-world testing and deployment are still needed to fully evaluate the performance and reliability of Metastatic in various off-grid scenarios.

 

Conclusion:

Metastatic and mesh networking technologies hold significant potential for off-grid communication. Their resilience, range extension capabilities, and independence from central infrastructure make them attractive alternatives in challenging environments. However, significant challenges remain, including device dependence, power consumption, security concerns, and the need for simplified user experience. As the technology matures and addresses these challenges, Metastatic and similar solutions could become invaluable tools for staying connected when traditional communication channels fail. Continued research, development, and real-world testing are essential to unlock the full potential of this promising technology.

 

 Mestastic Links:

 

 

 Enjoy

 

 

WiFi calling is an essential feature that ensures seamless voice calls when cellular signals are weak. However, if you have a firewall with strict outbound filtering, WiFi calling might not work properly unless you allow the necessary ports and domains.

 

In this guide, I’ve compiled the correct firewall rules for enabling WiFi calling on the three major U.S. carriers AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile as well as Google Fi. This information is often scattered across forums and carrier support pages, so my goal is to provide a centralized reference.

 

Why Your Firewall Might Block WiFi Calling

WiFi calling depends on specific ports and protocols to securely connect your mobile device to the carrier's network. Many firewalls block or inspect IPSec, SIP, and HTTPS traffic, which can interfere with call setup and quality. Configuring your firewall to allow the correct traffic ensures uninterrupted WiFi calling.

 

WiFi Calling Firewall Rules by Carrier

Verizon WiFi Calling Settings

  • Ports to Allow:
    • UDP 500, 4500
    • TCP 143
  • Destination FQDNs (Fully Qualified Domain Names):
    • spg.vzw.com
    • wo.vzwwo.com
    • sg.vzwfemto.com

 

AT&T Wireless WiFi Calling Settings

  • Ports to Allow:
    • UDP 500, 4500
    • TCP 143
  • Destination FQDNs:
    • epdg.epc.att.net
    • sentitlement2.mobile.att.net
    • vvm.mobile.att.net

 

Google Fi WiFi Calling Settings

  • Ports to Allow:
    • UDP & TCP 5060, 5061
    • TCP 443
  • Destination FQDNs:
    • voice.google.com

 

T-Mobile WiFi Calling Settings

  • Ports & Destination Networks:
    • UDP 500, 4500, and TCP/UDP 5061 → 208.54.0.0/16
    • TCP 443, 993 → 66.94.0.0/19

 

Best Practices for Configuring Your Firewall

  • Allow outbound UDP traffic on required ports (especially 500, 4500 for IPSec tunneling).
  • Ensure TCP/UDP 5060, 5061 are open for SIP signaling (Google Fi and T-Mobile).
  • Whitelisting carrier FQDNs and IP ranges can help avoid issues with content filtering.
  • Disable deep packet inspection (DPI) on IPSec traffic, if your firewall supports it.
  • Enable NAT traversal (NAT-T) to avoid issues with UDP encapsulation.
  • Ensure a valid NTP source as some carriers rely on time synchronization.

 

Final Thoughts & Future Updates

This is a preliminary guide, and I plan to update it as I gather more information or test additional configurations. If you have any firewall settings that have worked for other carriers, let me know in the comments!

 

By properly configuring your firewall, you can enjoy seamless WiFi calling without sacrificing network security. Stay tuned for updates as I refine this guide with more details.