This is the fifth major starting-over of my personal site. This one is different though, this time I’m really starting over. Very little of what you see here is from my older sites. I felt it was time for a clean break, and this is part of it.
This is a blend of a professional & personal blog, you’ll see a dynamic mix of connect (or basically: whatever strikes my fancy). This is a change from the past, where I committed to be one or the other, but not both. I’ll keep this short, as there’s more to be told later, but this is just to let you all know, I’m still alive.
There are hundreds of guides on how to get more traffic directed to your blog, and most are wrong. Seth Godin recently posted on this topic, and I have to disagree with most of his points. While there are a few basically good ideas, there are many more that I just don’t see holding up.
Here’s what I look for in the blogs I visit:
Writer is an expert in the field.
It’s time for everyone from the industry, developers, and the government to declare war on ransomware and make it as hard as possible for them to ply their insidious trade. There have been false starts and baby steps, diligent fighters without enough resources, and vendors that have only given a nod to the issue. It’s time to use every tool reasonably available to stop this scourge.
For so many in the industry that have dedicated so much of their time and effort to this fight, this statement may seem to diminish their efforts, but that is not my intent.
Testing for SWEET32 isn’t simple – when the vulnerability was announced, some argued that the best solution was to assume that if a TLS server supported any of the 3DES cipher suites, consider it vulnerable. The problem is, it’s not that simple. On my employer’s corporate blog, I wrote about practical advice for dealing with SWEET32 – and pointed out that there are ways around the vulnerability, and some are quite simple.
For the second year I am publishing a year-in-review – something I had generally avoided in the past, as the tone of these posts is typically just cynicism and negativity. Looking back at 2015, it wasn’t all positive (what year is?), but there was certainly some good, and there are great things to look forward to.
In a season filled with empty marketing pitches, worthless predictions, and pointless projections – it’s important to look at the good and avoid the cynicism overload that is all too common.
Today I was walking around, exploring the local downtown area, and I noticed a door. Or more accurately, what used to be a door, and the symbolism was too perfect to ignore. It’s a door to nowhere.
A door once stood here, carefully built, thoughtfully placed, well crafted. Long ago someone decided that they didn’t want the door to exist anymore — so they filled it in. They made an attempt at reversing the decisions of the past to suit their desire at the moment — but they couldn’t.
