You can call yourself a "security researcher" and make hand-wavy statements about your desire to "improve the cybersecurity ecosystem" or whatever
But the bottom line is that what you do is simply part of an assembly line, the end products of which, are tools to hack into computers and take information from them
The only legitimate customer for this end-product are governments. "red teaming" is dead/dying. reduced to a dumb box checking/compliance exercise. so glad that we pivoted away from that business.
Anyway...
If you want your work to be truly valued, rather than, idk, being fired for finding too many vulns, then you should bring your talents to a company that actually pays the rent by producing hacking tools for (at least from my point of view) Western governments
It's time to get over the lolbertarian delusional privacy activism schtick and just take pride in the fact that you are a hacker
@Lina_Hoshino@SapphoSys I was about to say the same thing, I've personally pivoted to just doing them in my own time for my own pleasure. Still a bit sad the competitive aspect has basically been eaten up by AI.
Reminiscing over this makes me extremely grateful for how safe London is now. You can be out at crazy hours regardless of gender and come home without anything happening. You could never do that 10 years ago.