I used to work at a Swiss bank. At investment banks they have a virtual Chinese wall that exists between folks who do deals and the trade floor for obvious reasons. At my bank, and this is back in 2000/2001, the people who did the deals and those who traded shared elevators, lunch rooms, pubs […]
May 31, 2013 | Encryption, Philosophisizing, Politics, Privacy | 1 comment
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
I came up with a thought experiment a few months ago and have been testing it on the smartest people I know. This thought experiment relies on you agreeing with three premises: 1. Our knowledge of the natural universe will continue to increase. 2. Our ability to share information among each other will continue to […]
March 16, 2013 | Philosophisizing, Randomness | 1 comment
During the last several years I’ve had the opportunity to see great leaders in action and the misfortune to see great deceivers at work. Both have one characteristic in common. Many would call it charisma, but I’d like to expand on what I think that “charisma” thing is. Pause for a moment. Think about the fact that […]
March 15, 2013 | Business, Randomness, Startups | No comments
Update: HM’s Director of Comms was kind enough to post a response here (see below in comments), Elmarie responded in the comments, today the issue was resolved when the owner of the HM distributer in South Africa called Elmarie and apologized for the way things were handled and it sounds like they’ll be working together on […]
March 13, 2013 | Rants | 3 comments
Bluehost reached out to me a few weeks ago to say “Hi, and by the way we love Wordfence”. I was doubly stoked because they have been my favorite WordPress host for some time now. To date I still haven’t found a single performance issue or vulnerability on their platform. Their stuff just works! So we’ve […]
This started as a comment in reply to the sad posting on Hacker News that Linux Kernel contributor Andre Hedrick had taken his own life. I’ve seen a huge number of posts on HN during the last 2 to 3 years about depression and I worry that the Valley is an environment especially condusive to […]
July 28, 2012 | Philosophisizing | 9 comments
I am the creator and maintainer of Wordfence, an anti-virus and security plugin for WordPress. We are still a young plugin, but already are about to pass 50,000 downloads. Often when our customers have a problem with Wordfence, they create a temporary admin account for me and I sign in to their (usually) hosted WordPress […]
[If you haven’t seen “Taken”, please stop reading now because this contains spoilers. I’m sure you have though as the movie is 4 years old now] I watched “Taken” with Liam Neeson for the second time this evening. It’s an awesome, awesome film. It struck me that the movie is actually about something more than […]
July 26, 2012 | Film | 1 comment
Facebook’s second quarter revenue is expected to be $1.1 billion. That would give them roughly $4.4 billion per year, not exactly a number that justifies the $100 billion market cap they were/are hoping for. Compare that to Google’s $37 billion last year with current $200B market cap and Facebook isn’t even a player yet. The […]