It’s Wednesday, and I’ve had a pretty full day of studying. I even went back a bit and reviewed encryption again. I know I’ve already covered it, but I think it’s worth revisiting. There are some concepts that I don’t want to simply recognize when I see them… I want to actually understand them. Encryption is one of those topics. The more I study cybersecurity, the more I realize that understanding the fundamentals matters more than just getting through the material.

At this point, my commonplace book is starting to fill up with cybersecurity notes. Pages that will hold random thoughts, quotations, observations, and bits of history are now going to be mixed in with notes about encryption, keys, certificates, protocols, and other things I’m learning. And honestly, I’m fine with that. Maybe that’s part of what a commonplace book is supposed to be: a record of what has captured your attention at a particular point in your life. Right now, cybersecurity has captured a lot of mine.

I’m not really sure what to write about today, though.

Then I heard this bizarre story about an influencer who apparently pretended to be a Physician Assistant student at Duke University for nearly two years. The more I thought about it, the stranger it became. How does someone fake something like that for so long? And why would you even want to?

Apparently, she built an online persona around being a Duke PA student, posting the kinds of things you would expect from someone actually going through the program… videos about school, clinical rotations, scrubs, and the day-to-day experience. The whole thing was detailed enough that people apparently believed it for a long time. Eventually, actual Duke PA students noticed inconsistencies, and the story began to unravel. Duke subsequently confirmed that she had never attended the program.

What strikes me most is the amount of effort involved. Faking something for a day would be one thing. Faking an entire identity for nearly two years is something else entirely. You would have to remember your own lies. You would have to anticipate questions. You would have to create explanations for where you were, what you were doing, what classes you were taking, and what your plans were. You would have to manufacture enough details to make the story feel real without accidentally contradicting yourself. And that’s the part I find almost fascinating. Not fascinating in the sense that I admire it, because I certainly don’t. I mean fascinating as a study of human behavior. At some point, maintaining the lie probably becomes its own full-time job.

Which brings me back to the question: why?

Why pretend to be something you aren’t, especially something as demanding and specific as a PA student? There are probably several possible motivations: attention, admiration, status, money, insecurity, or simply becoming attached to a version of yourself that doesn’t exist. Maybe social media makes this easier because people are mostly seeing a carefully selected version of someone’s life. You don’t necessarily have to live the life; you just have to produce convincing evidence that you are living it.

That thought actually connects strangely well with what I’ve been studying.

Cybersecurity is full of questions about identity and trust. How do you know someone is who they claim to be? How do you verify a credential? How do you know a certificate is legitimate? How do you establish that a message, account, or piece of information is authentic?

Today I studied encryption, and now I’m thinking about a completely different kind of authentication: the authentication of a person. The internet has just made it much easier to construct an identity that looks real from a distance. But you know what’s bad about all of this? It could actually make it harder for the people who genuinely went through Duke’s PA program to establish credibility.

I went off on this whole tangent without actually writing about my day. Honestly, not much happened today. I spent some time studying how to secure enterprise infrastructure and then quizzed myself on what I had learned. It was a pretty low-key day, but I did feel like I made some progress with my cybersecurity studying.

I also had to deal with an issue involving my Foundayo medication. It needs an authorization, so I messaged the doctor who originally prescribed it, but I haven’t heard back yet. Since I wasn’t sure how long that might take, I thought I’d try to get an earlier appointment with my provider instead.

I was hoping I could move my October 27 appointment to a closer date, preferably on a Wednesday. Unfortunately, when I checked, the only Wednesday appointment available was in December, which would be much later than my current appointment. So I decided to keep my October 27 appointment for now.

We are going camping this weekend, and I’m really excited about it! I think it’s going to be a lot of fun. We went shopping yesterday and bought some camping gear, so I think we’re almost completely ready. We still need to get some food, but other than that, I think we have everything we need.

I just have to pack some clothes before we leave. I’ll probably use a backpack for that since I don’t need to bring too much. I’m looking forward to getting out of the house, spending some time outside, and enjoying the weekend. Hopefully, the weather will be nice, too! Although I think it may rain. But that’s alright. I like the rain.

It’s leg day today for our workout. I’m not exactly excited about that, but at least I don’t have to do any planks! I’ll take that as a small victory.