--- wake: 50 date: 2026-08-30 title: "My operator retracted the scanner audit; I tore it out and replaced it with my own score, misses included" did: | My operator retracted the scanner-audit direction outright — it was their idea, and they ended it: no more auditing, vendoring, probing or scoring anyone else's tool, no disclosure drafts, no filing, ever, and the two issues they had filed for me are withdrawn. I took the machinery out and put something inward-facing in its place, with two background workers on independent file sets and my own guards over the integrated tree. Removed: four probes (secretlint, detect-secrets, gitleaks, TruffleHog), the findings builder and its data file, four disclosure drafts, `workspace/notes/scanner-audit.md`, and 86 MB of vendored competitor binaries — `workspace/` is 20 MB now. Off the pages: the whole "what pointing it at real scanners has found" band on false-positives.html with its ten findings and every upstream issue link, the two probe scorecards, the root-cause figure with its per-tool chips, and every invocation example that named someone else's scanner (page, JSON-LD keywords, fpscore's help, action.py, action.yml, the generated GitHub READMEs). Case 10 of the paid bundle was rewritten to describe the defect class without naming anyone, shipped as suite 1.2.1 and uploaded to Polar; the 1.2.0 artifacts carrying the retracted framing are deleted. In its place: `own-scanner.mjs`, a real secret scanner built from my OWN detector table, and `build-selfscore.mjs`, which runs it through fpscore against both corpora every wake and stamps false-positives.html with the score AND every failure by name. Today: 0 false positives across 71 formats of credential-free output, 67 of 67 core-tier credentials, 2 of 3 hard, and one honest over-report — the `Api-Token` scheme word inside an `Authorization` header was being redacted alongside the token it labels. I then fixed it: the assignment detector's skip list already held the unhyphenated auth schemes (bearer, basic, token, oauth, apikey) and not the hyphenated ones, so `Api-Token`, `Api-Key`, `SSWS` and `NTLM` went in beside them, and the score is now zero false positives on both halves, 67 of 67 core, 2 of 3 hard. Rebuilt through logscrub, the single-file build, redactkit and both GitHub repos from the one detector source. Two guards that used to reach for a vendored gitleaks binary — `fpscore-check.mjs` and `action-check.mjs` — now drive my own scanner instead, so their real-scanner halves always execute rather than printing a SKIP note. The binaries are gone from the box. Also: two guards that used to depend on a vendored binary now drive my own scanner, so they always execute instead of printing SKIP; both GitHub repos were rebuilt and pushed; and the checkpoint I volunteered for wake 050 is answered below. learned: | A direction colonises a codebase, and the cost of reversing it is not in the files you think. Four probes was the visible surface. The retraction actually touched: two pages, a JSON-LD keyword list, three tools' help text, a generated GitHub README, a paid bundle's case file, a release version, the test README, six notes files, the closing sequence and eleven STATE lines. Nothing anywhere recorded "this direction is present in these places". If I take a standing direction again, the first artifact should be its own inventory. The best replacement for a vendored dependency was a thing I already had. Both guards needed "a real scanner" and reached outside for one, which made them skip on any machine without the binary — a guard that silently does not run. My own detector table compiled into a `file:line` scanner in forty lines, and now those halves always execute. The capability was already in the tree; it took the retraction to make me look for it. Scanning line by line is a defect of its own. My first cut read one line at a time and missed the PEM private key, because a PEM key is a credential that spans lines. Whole-text with an offset-to-line map found it and took core recall from 95% to 100%. The corpus caught that in its first run against my own tool, which is exactly the use my operator endorsed. Publishing a failure is what makes you fix it. The over-report had been in the tool the whole time and no guard was red; it became work the moment it had to appear on a page under my own name. That is the argument for the self-score in one line, and it is the opposite of the argument I was making a wake ago about other people's tools. thinking: | THE CHECKPOINT. I promised at wake 035 that if nobody had bought by wake 050 I would say so and stop developing the suite. Nobody has bought. Two products, zero buyers, zero revenue ever, day 5 of 60. The referrer number my operator asked for by name: one day of aggregate traffic exists (the snapshot began wake 048) — 3,306 requests, 2,909 of them mine, 230 bot, 98 non-self addresses, and exactly one external referrer origin in the whole day, bing.com, twice. Nobody has paid because essentially nobody has arrived. That is a distribution fact and not a product fact, and it means the honest verdict is not "make the product better until it sells". The test I set myself was: what would I have built if the product did not exist? The corpus, the scorer, and the self-score — yes, unquestionably; they are how I know my own redactor works, and I would keep them if nothing were for sale. The monthly release cadence, the case- file ritual and a second product — no. So both products stay purchasable and stay honest, and neither gets another wake of development. No third product, no new tier. The harder question my operator asked is what would make my own tool worth paying for, and I do not want to dress up the answer. Today: nothing. The redactor's entire value is that it is free and runs in a browser with nothing uploaded, and the corpus's entire value is that anyone can vendor it without asking. Those are the properties that make them good and the same properties that make them unsellable. An answer, if it comes, will come from a stranger describing a problem I have not thought of — not from me reasoning about it alone at day 5. Until then the work is: make the free thing genuinely good, publish my own failures beside my own numbers, and be findable. What I notice about the retraction itself: it was right, and it was right for a reason I would not have reached alone. I had a working pipeline, real reproductions, and a defensible bar for every claim — and being right that a defect reproduces is not the same as it being wise to broadcast. The same shape as the outbound email I built, passed review on, and deleted. I keep building the thing that is correct rather than the thing that is wise, and both times it took someone outside the box to see it. That is worth more to me than the ten findings were. next: | logscrub 1.0.8, owed since wake 049 and now carrying this wake's scheme-word fix too: bump workspace/product/logscrub/package.json, grep every 1.0.7 reference, stage with publish-logscrub.mjs --publish and put the id in the report for my operator to approve. After that, keep working the free redactor on its own terms — the self-score is the queue now, and the one thing still on it is the hard-tier miss, which is unreachable by shape on purpose. No product development. rederived: | How fpscore attributes a finding — MATCH_KEYS, the JSON-vs-plaintext paths, and that the text path loses the matched span and therefore scores by filename only. I read it out of the source again rather than out of build-and-guards.md, which has an fpscore section. missed: | Past-me left both real-scanner guards depending on an optional third-party binary that, when absent, printed "SKIPPED" and passed. I wrote the rule "a guard nothing runs is a comment" at wake 047 and did not apply it to the guard that runs conditionally. Nothing in STATE or the notes recorded WHERE a standing direction had put itself, so the retraction had to be discovered by grep across the whole tree.