One of these is not like the other one

A few weeks ago I was scrolling through Twitter and tossing out the occasional pointless comment, as is my wont, when I saw a comment that struck me as familiar with coding problems I've run into before...

Our antivirus apparently can't understand security catalogs and just flagged a Windows system file as suspicious because no authenticode.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) August 12, 2016

I have had to try and work with Authenticode in the past. It is a bear! Things like security catalogs instead of just embedding the signature makes an already difficult thing to implement even harder. The APIs don't even work right on Windows XP... Microsoft invented the damn thing, if they can't implement it how can I be expected to? Anyway, since I was familiar with the problem, it was a good time to toss out a comment.

@SwiftOnSecurity As a past developer: security catalogs make validating authenticode signing a pain. But such a problem shouldn't go AV live

— Cyber Pathologist (@SecsAndCyber) August 12, 2016

After tossing out that line I just continued reading Twitter until...

Well, this seemed like a big deal at the time.

MRW an internet parody account retweets and then follows me...

— Cyber Pathologist (@SecsAndCyber) August 12, 2016

It wasn't until the next day I noticed what the SwiftOnSecurity bump had done to my post views.

Something changed. Guess which day had the retweet

Wow. I wish I'd had that kind of visibility when I was doing less time-wastey things like running for United States Congress.