I’m Drakdodare — and I do security research. I also have a habit of taking software apart, cutting the bloatware garbage, and putting it back together the way it should’ve been shipped, weather its Google's awful pixel devices and forcing GrapheneOS or LineageOS onto them, debloating the absolute shitshow that is Windows 11 or just creating my own versions of popular apps and debloating them.
Background
I’m a former Microsoft engineer who worked a little bit on Windows and a former Google Web Administrator whom made sure google.com was always running. Those roles gave me a close look at what “software at scale” really means: messy environments, long tails of edge cases, and the way defaults quietly become policy for millions of machines. It also taught me to value boring outcomes — systems that are understandable, observable, and hard to accidentally break.
What I do
I do security research because I don’t like mystery meat software. I like systems that are understandable, inspectable, and predictable — and most modern software is none of those things. When something ships with a dozen background services, a telemetry pipeline, and a “helper” that phones home, that’s not convenience. That’s extra attack surface and an extra layer of permission you didn’t explicitly grant.
So I take things apart. Sometimes that looks like reverse engineering an installer to see what it actually changes. Sometimes it’s tracing network traffic that shouldn’t exist. Sometimes it’s mapping persistence mechanisms, scheduled tasks, services, drivers, and “friendly” updaters that behave like they own the machine. The pattern is consistent: the user is treated like a passenger in their own system. My work is mostly about fixing that relationship.
#StopKillingGames
I’m also loud about digital ownership because the current direction is bad for everyone except the people who get paid when things disappear. Selling a product and treating it like a revocable license is dishonest, and normalizing “you own nothing” is a slow-motion disaster. People deserve clarity about what they’re buying and a future where purchased games aren’t quietly turned off like a subscription that nobody agreed to.