In a 'digital by default' society, essential services must be accessed online. This opens users to digital deception not only from criminal fraudsters but from a range of actors in a marketised digital economy. Using grounded empirical research from northern England, we show how supposedly 'trusted' actors, such as governments,(re)produce the insecurities and harms that they seek to prevent. Enhanced by a weakening of social institutions amid a drive for efficiency and scale, this has built a constricted, unpredictable digital channel. We conceptualise this as a "snipers' alley". Four key snipers articulated by participants' lived experiences are examined: 1) Governments; 2) Business; 3) Criminal Fraudsters; and 4) Friends and Family to explore how snipers are differentially experienced and transfigure through this constricted digital channel. We discuss strategies to re-configure the alley, and how crafting and adopting opportunity models can enable more equitable forms of security for all.

Producing secure software is challenging. The poor usability of security Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) makes this even harder. Many recommendations have been proposed to support developers by improving the usability of cryptography libraries—rooted in wider best practice guidance in software engineering and API design. In this SLR, we systematize knowledge regarding these recommendations. We identify and analyze 65 papers, offering 883 recommendations. Through thematic analysis, we identify seven core ways to improve usability of APIs. Most of the recommendations focus on helping API developers to construct and structure their code and make it more usable and easier for programmers to understand . There is less focus, however, on documentation , writing requirements , code quality assessment , and the impact of organizational software development practices . By tracing and analyzing paper ancestry, we map how this knowledge becomes validated and translated over time. We find that very few API usability recommendations are empirically validated, and that recommendations specific to usable security APIs lag even further behind.

This paper reports on Zoom Obscura – an artist-based design research project, responding to the ubiquity of video-conferencing as a technical and cultural phenomenon throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. As enterprise software, such as Zoom, rapidly came to mediate even the most personal and intimate interactions, we supported and collaborated with seven independent artists to explore technical and creative interventions in video-conferencing. Our call for participation sought critical interventions that would help users counter, and regain agency in regard to the various ways in which personal data is captured, transmitted and processed in video-conferencing tools. In this design study, we analyse post-hoc how each of the seven projects employed aspects of counterfunctional design to achieve these aims. Each project reveals different avenues and strategies for counterfunctionality in video-conferencing software, as well as opportunities to design critically towards interactions and experiences that challenge existing norms and expectations around these platforms.