It’s been a heck of a week, so I’m just going to leave readers with some reading, as in webcomics or free to download comics that may help get us through the garbage fire of international politics we now live in.
Operation: Pineapple Sparkle is a sponsored comic that was created by Area 1 Security, a cybersecurity company, to promote the need for their services. They’ve produced two online comics about the need to be vigilant against phishing, and other kinds of cyber attacks, with a third due in August. All three will be collected for print later this year.
They’re all drawn by François Vigneault, of Titan and Lineworks NW fame, and it follows a team of operatives trying to break into the computers of an unnamed corporation. The hackers are financed by a group that has its own huge corporate structure, adding some irony to the situations, and the whole thing is presented like an entertaining caper story in a cartoony but effective style. The hackers are colored in pink and the corporation in blue, to make things incredibly easy to follow.
On our PW podcast, which was just posted, I was tasked with reading som eof the new Rebirth comics, and I struggled to get through them, whereas I breezed through Operation: Pineapple Sparkle with no problems whatsoever. That’s partly my taste, but also partly because O:PS is a clearly presented story with recognizable sides and no backstory to drag me down. YMMV.
That said, one element of O:PS did annoy me: the hackers are all guys and their victim is a busy female executive. This couldn’t be anymore sexist and revanchist than if if was an actual episode of Silicon Valley. Aside from this, the comic is funny and charming.
The lesson of not clicking on grammatically poor emails taht request your password (and shecking all links in emails before clicking) will be know to most moderately hep internet users, but we can all use a refresher course now and then. Here’s a preview of a few pages but you can read the whole thing in the link
