MarkMaunder dot com

Finding Cheap Fast Internet in South Africa

I’ve been in Cape Town for a little over two months now and will be here for a few more weeks. I’ve hunted around for fast Internet and tried a few options. Here’s what I’ve found and maybe it’ll help you. I’m specifically interested in international bandwidth to the USA and my benchmarks are based […]

April 3, 2013 | Technology | 1 comment

Time for a Linode downgrade

My credit card number was stolen a few days ago by someone in Palo Alto right after my site was on Hacker News’s home page. I’m going to choose to believe they are unrelated. Interesting though since I don’t live or work in California and this card has never visited there. On the positive side, […]

July 18, 2012 | Hacker News, Technology, Wordpress | No comments

The Net will not be bound or gagged

I remember seeing Napster in 2000 when I worked for eToys.com and thinking “This isn’t going away. It has too much momentum and we always move forward.” I was wrong. Today I’m wondering about the free Web and whether it will ever go away. Our intuition tells us we always move forward and things will become […]

November 22, 2011 | Politics, Technology | No comments

Your Vision May be Clouded

I took a lot of crap when I decided to vertically integrate our business four years ago and I invested around $40,000 with Dell to buy our own server cluster. Right then THE CLOUD was the hot new thing, and still is and I was not getting on board. I leased a rack at a […]

October 31, 2011 | Technology | No comments

A peek into our Space Intelligence Community

I spent the day in a secure area on Buckley Air Force Base called ADF-C or Air Force Data Facility, Colorado. A relative of mine works there and I got an invite to a family day, which I thought was impressive so I thought I’d share some of what I saw. Walking into ADF-C we […]

September 18, 2011 | Security, Space, Technology | No comments

Which programming language should I learn?

I’ve been asked this question twice in the last 2 weeks by people wanting to write their first Web application. So I’m going to answer it here for anyone else interested: If you want to write Web applications you need to learn the following languages: Javascript, PHP, HTML, CSS and SQL. It sounds like a […]

July 23, 2011 | Code, perl, PHP, Technology, Which programming language | 42 comments

MI6 to Rest of World: Cyber War is On. Anyone, Anywhere is Fair Game. Arm yourselves.

This incredibly disturbing story was posted on Hacker News 26 minutes ago. Summary: The London Daily Telegraph (via TheAge.com.au) is reporting that British Intelligence agents from MI6 and GCHQ hacked into an AlQueda online magazine and removed instructions for making a pipe bomb. They replaced the article with a cupcake recipe. A Pentagon operation was […]

June 5, 2011 | Hacker News, Law, networks, Security, Technology | 3 comments

Bandwidth providers: Please follow Google's lead in helping startups, the environment and yourselves

There’s a post on Hacker News today pointing to a few open source javascript libraries that Google is hosting on their content distribution network. ScriptSrc.net has a great UI that gives you an easy way to link to the libs from your web pages. Developers and companies can link to these scripts from their own […]

July 6, 2010 | networks, Startups, Technology | No comments

The Coming Social Advertising Revolution

Facebook has over 400 million active users and members spend over 951 man-years on the site each month. Facebook is passing Google this year as the most visited site in the US and is going to earn somewhere between $710M and $1.1B in revenue this year. Google on the other hand have a $27B revenue run […]

May 3, 2010 | Business, Social Advertising, Technology | No comments

How to limit website visitor bandwidth by country

This technique is great if you have no customers from countryX but are being targeted by a DoS, unwanted crawlers, bots, scrapers and other baddies. Please don’t use this to discriminate against less profitable countries. The web should be open for all. Thanks. If you’re not already using Nginx, you should get it even if […]

March 4, 2010 | Scaling, Technology | 1 comment

My name is Mark Maunder. I've been blogging since around 2003 when I started on Movable Type and ended up on WordPress which is what I use to publish today. With my wife Kerry, I'm the co-founder of Wordfence which protects over 5 million WordPress sites from hackers and is run by a talented team of 36 people. I'm an instrument rated pilot and I fly a Cessna 206 along with a 1964 Cessna 172 in the Pacific Northwest and Colorado. I'm originally from Cape Town, South Africa but live in the US these days. I code in a bunch of languages and am quite excited about our emerging AI overlords and how they're going to be putting us to work for them.