Announcing the Digital Resilience Audit Series
If you’ve followed this blog, you know I often dive into the intersection of technology, privacy, and everyday life. Today, I’m launching a new, focused series that sits right at that crossroads.
I’m calling it the Digital Resilience Audit.
What is a “Digital Resilience Audit”?
In simple terms, it’s a forensic look at whether the essential websites we have to use—for banking, utilities, and communications—are built to work for us, or to work on us.
Digital resilience isn’t about surviving a hack. It’s about a website functioning reliably for someone who blocks third-party trackers. It’s about an error message that actually diagnoses a problem instead of saying, “Try our app.” It’s the measure of a service’s integrity under normal, legitimate use.
When these platforms fail (and they often do), it’s typically dismissed as a “you problem”—clear your cache, update your browser. But what if the problem is in their foundation?
The Method: From User to Investigator
In this series, I won’t just be a frustrated user. I’ll be applying a specific analytical framework as an independent researcher:
Document the User Experience: Compile the public history of complaints (often spanning years on forums like Reddit and Hacker News).
Analyze the Technical Failure: Identify the likely architectural culprits—bloated scripts, broken authentication APIs, cookie dependencies that punish privacy.
Decode the Strategy: Ask the critical question: Is this chronic instability mere negligence, or is it “purposeful neglect”—a business strategy to abandon the open web and shepherd users into more controlled, trackable mobile apps?
First Up: The Gatekeepers
For the inaugural audits, I’m focusing on two modern gatekeepers: Xfinity and Chase.
Xfinity (Comcast): For many, the only internet choice. Its login portal is infamous for session timeouts, cryptic errors, and loops that seem designed to trigger a support call.
Chase Bank: A financial giant whose website has been publicly documented as painfully slow and unreliable since at least 2017, with errors that explicitly push users toward its mobile app.
Both are perfect case studies. They provide essential services with limited competition, and their digital front doors are frequently broken. Why? What does their mobile app work flawlessly while their website falters? The answers are more revealing than any privacy policy.
What to Expect
Each audit will be a deep dive. You’ll get a clear history, a plain-English technical breakdown, and an assessment of what the failures tell us about the company’s relationship with its customers.
This series is born from a belief that users deserve clarity and that broken systems should be documented, not just endured. The first full audit, “Chase Bank - A Technical Autopsy of Systemic Web Failure,” will be posted soon.
Stay tuned. Let’s see what’s really behind the loading spinner.
How Offshore Customer Service Puts Your Security at Risk
The Smoking Gun: False Claims About SMS Verification
Big Tech is killing Crypto!
Recently, I had someone fraudulently open a Bank of America Checking Account in my name.