I’ve been casually following Amazon’s re:Invent Conference announcements and they look quite spectacular. Here’s a quick list of them: LightSail — A new VPS service that competes with companies like Digital Ocean. Elastic GPUs — The ability to attach GPUs to any running VM New F1-branded VMs that are accelerated with FPGAs Athena — A new tool for…

I like looking for great definitions for concepts that people have a lot of confusion or disagreement on. The Internet of Things is definitely one of those terms that qualifies. I like this definition based on the switching role of the computer and the functionality. The Internet of Things The transition from things with functionality having computers in…

I spent a lot of time on the phone with MailChimp support this evening trying to figure out why their editor is so bad. I told them that when I selected a block of text and formatted it as Lato 14, it kind of did something, but it didn’t format it as Lato 14. She explained that if…

Microsoft is kicking ass. I love Windows 10. I love Office 365. Azure is holding its own against Amazon in a lot of ways. And the stock is doing phenomenally well. Amazon is doing similarly well, lead by AWS and their stunning innovation in AI assistants with Alexa, Echo, etc. And Facebook continues to dominate in many areas…

One of the best ways to see what people think of you (media wise) is to see what kind of ads they’re serving you. My buddy Robert just posted how it’s easy to do this with Facebook by using the following workflow. Within the Facebook mobile app, go to: Settings Account settings Ads Manage the Preferences We Use…

If you are a Safari user and spend a lot of time collecting links for later reading, this might be for you. I do a show called Unsupervised Learning every week (I pick my favorite stories in infosec and tech and talk about why they matter), and it’s important that I am able to efficiently collect content throughout…

It’s fascinating to watch smart tech people serially misunderstand Apple’s approach to innovation. In a contortion that would make Erwin Schrödinger smile (or retch) they simultaneously hold in their minds the idea that: Apple never innovates Apple does dumb things Problem is, the dumb things often turn out to be what the industry is copying five and ten…

I’m no @realgenekim, but I’ve been a student of the DEVOPS movement for some time and I have always been looking for the cleanest way to articulate its central benefit. I think I have found a perspective that does this for me, which is to say that DEVOPS, beyond anything else, is about benefiting from practice. I think…

I’ve been trying to think of a way to describe how big Machine Learning is, and I think I finally have a decent one: Machine Learning is the new Statistics. Why Statistics? Because Statistics is the primary mechanism we’ve had for decades for learning about the world. It’s an approach to looking at data and learning something useful…

Everyone is excited about Machine Learning right now. Everyone’s getting into it, talking about it, and describing how their products and services will make use of it. It’s also being considered the future of computing by a number of companies and many pundits. It’s basically the most talked about future technology right now, alongside AR/VR. I think there’s…

People know that when it comes to Android and Apple, I almost always side with Apple. Or, stated differently, when new Android announcements come out, I tend to have something of a “Meh” attitude about them. Perhaps there’s some bias there, but I don’t think that’s most of the cause. And here’s some evidence of that. I’m absolutely…

I’ve been thinking over the last few years about how insurance and cyber-security are going to intersect. A lot of these ideas turn into conversations with Jeremiah Grossman, since he is fascinated by the topic as well. What I’ve been thinking about recently is how long the insurance cycles are, with massive changes of risk occurring between renewal…

I have a strange feeling that Apple’s new AirPods are about to be one of the biggest things to happen to consumer technology in, say, 4 years. I think what Samsung and Apple have done with their phones in the last few years have been nice, but there’s not been anything that changes our interactions fundamentally. If the…

I was thinking earlier about how drastically education could change as the result of technology. Here are some random thoughts along that vector: Everything becomes about local learning pods. So it’s any small room with displays, cameras, and a place for people to gather. The content is pre-made and is best of the best, crowd-rated from around the…

macOS Sierra introduced iCloud Drive as a deep part of the operating system. It’s easy enough to see in Finder, but I had trouble finding it at the command line. So I went hunting and found out that iCloud files are stored under ~/Library/Mobile Documents at the full path of: ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/ Hope this saves you some time!

A lot of people have been worried about the feel of the new iPhone button. Either worried about it, or after having tried it they actually don’t like it. I’ve had an interesting experience with it, and I wanted to capture a quick and related thought about it. I love the new way of unlocking and returning to…

Lots of people are talking about “The Fear of AI”, and whether or not we should. But it’s important to distinguish between two different types of AI here. Machine Learning + Big Data + Automation, resulting in the obsolescence of millions of jobs. Creation of a new, super-intelligent life form, which ultimately attacks, subjugates, or destroys humanity. These…

I just saw Sonal of a16z tweet out her favorite podcast, so I had to take a look. It was about a particularly interesting application of machine learning—one that’s fascinating to me on numerous levels—the ability to predict the success of a written campaign by evaluating its style, vocabulary, and typography. The research they spoke about looked at…

We all know what things are. They’re cars, and chairs, and restaurants, and buildings, and phones, and dogs, and cities. And people. So what’s the Internet of Things? Simple: it’s all those things…connected to each other. So you can ask any question about any thing. Anywhere. At any time. You can get data from any thing, in a…

People are different, and they have different needs in their hardware, but I couldn’t be more happy with Apple’s decision to: Kill off the headphone jack Move to minimalist, elegant wireless earphones I see these as tightly related, which they are. Something Benedict Evans pointed out, that many including myself missed, is that with traditional headphones you had…

We’ve been hearing for a while now about how enterprises are moving to microservices. What are they, exactly? It’s basically the concept of taking a large, monolithic applications and turning them into lots of small pieces that are presented as APIs. So, rather than having a massive app that does authentication, access control, user sign-up, front end display,…

There was a time when Foursquare was the coolest thing ever. You could check into places you went, people would see that, and you could become the “mayor” of those places. But it required that you used the app, and that others were using it too. Question: What killed it? Answer: Facebook. But why? How was Facebook, who…

As I near completion of my book on the Real Internet of Things, I wanted to call out a specific point about visions of future technology. I think one of the best ways to envision what technology we should build is to imagine three things: Technology of the very distant future. Technology that is basically invisible. Technology that…

I agree that this is horrible, horrible advice. https://t.co/r4opI9bymV— Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) August 25, 2016 The sarcasm layers are so numerous and thick on InfoSec Twitter that I honestly can’t tell you what @alexstamos or @swiftonsecurity believe about running your own email server. They could be obviously for it, or honestly against it. Irony often obscures true meaning…

Here’s a crazy idea: what if Facebook extended their platform to include public messages? Twitter is struggling because they can’t figure out how to monetize. Facebook has mastered monetization. But Twitter is global infrastructure. Every brand is there. Most celebrities. It’s part of the mainstream news stream. It’s everywhere. I think Facebook would love to (or should want…

I was very pleased with the WWDC keynote this year. For me it signified something powerful that I think people massively underestimate: Apple is putting massive effort into making technology invisible within our lives. What I noticed most from this year’s updates is focus on reducing technology friction. Smooth transitions between workflows. Making things imperceptibly simple. Etc. It…

In this Report Analysis series I look at various security reports and pull out the main points. This doesn’t replace a complete and detailed read of these reports, but at least you’ll get exposed to some of the key takeaways that you might not otherwise have seen. This particular report was just spectacular. Highly recommended. REPORT: Internet Trends…

Amazon isn’t expected to announce results until Thursday, and they famously strategically forgo profit for the sake of revenue growth. So let’s take them out and replace them with a company with a history of enormous profits, Microsoft. It’s still true: with $10.5 billion in profit, Apple earned more in the quarter than Alphabet ($4.2B), Facebook ($1.5B), and…

Why isn’t your broker made of silicon yet? Channel conflict. Incumbent carriers cannot turn their backs on the agent and go direct-to-consumer without the risk of offending their agent networks. So much existing and referral-based business is at stake that most carriers do not allow consumers to purchase insurance online —  they make consumers purchase through an agent.To…

A year after its launch, it’s now clear that pretty much no one needs an Apple Watch Source: A year after its launch, it’s now clear that pretty much no one needs an Apple Watch – Quartz This comes from some piece that’s currently doing well on Reddit. I think too many people are forgetting that this is…

I think a lot about how to become immortal. More than I should, probably.

Many think it’s a waste of time. Everyone dies, and it’s foolish to think we can avoid it. This piece takes a different view, and describes a number of ways, with varying levels of requirement and effectiveness, one can either avoid dying or live on after death.

They’ll go from most practical to most effective.

Mar 11, 2019 — This no longer works like this. Many people are confused about the difference between starting a tweet with @someone vs. .@someone, i.e. adding a dot or a period before the username. Here’s the difference: If you just reply with @username the tweet will only go to people who follow both you AND that person…

Instead of catching the bus, Crowley decides to get some exercise on this beautiful day and get dinner on his walk home. Unbeknownst to Crowley, a woman named Sofia who lives on the street he’s walking down has just made a big salad for her family and realizes she’s made too much and will have leftovers. Source: A…

A lot of people seem to be unsatisfied with their Apple Watches. I think I know why that is, and it simply doesn’t apply to me. I think many people needed to be convinced that they wanted one in the first place. They had to be sold an ephemeral magic thing that was going to happen. But it…

There’s an entire ecosystem, akin to the App Store in its scale, to be built. When you can quickly and easily interact with Dominos, United Airlines and Capital One on Messenger, and will you ever use their bloated native apps again? The current bot landscape feels a lot like the web in 1995, or mobile apps in 2008.…

There are dozens of sites and resources describing the differences between BSD and System V Unix. I am tired of reading 11 of them every few years when I want to remember some of those differences. So I made this page. The main differences BSD is considered “university Unix”, or hobbyist Unix, because it came out of UC…

I think within the next decade it will become quite common for people to be continuously recording everything about themselves, and everything around themselves. This means 1) things about themselves, such as their vital statistics like heart rate, their activity levels, etc., as well as 2) what they’re saying, what people around them are saying, what they’re seeing,…

There are many interesting trends that are ripening in tech. There is IoT There is virtual reality (the Occulus is shipping this year) There is increasing promise of AI-like assistants in our mobile devices Drones are getting smaller and more powerful I think all of these are going to converge to create a single type of experience that…

If you’ve installed WordPress yourself multiple times you’ve probably run into permissions problems. They manifest in many ways: HTML Error when trying to upload images Cannot upload image at all The site won’t load Etc, etc. There are many articles on this but they’re usually just forum posts where someone complained, followed by a code snippet or command.…

If you like RSS you tend to want to have all your content in one place—your RSS reader. But if you also follow some channels on YouTube this is a problem, since Google doesn’t publish RSS feeds for channels. They want you to start and stop on YouTube, basically. So here’s how to create an RSS feed from…

The concept of network effect (in general) is by now well understood: a flywheel type situation where a good or service becomes more valuable when more people use it.   Many examples out there from the telephone system (the value of a phone increases if everyone has a phone) to Facebook to many marketplaces (with some nuances for the…

Here are some basic comparisons of the Android and iOS (Apple) mobile ecosystems. AndroidApple PRIVACYDA SECURITYCA CONFIGURABILITYAD SATISFACTIONCA RESELL VALUEDA COSTBD QUALITYCA Here are explanations for the ratings: PRIVACY: Apple has repeatedly declared a no-compromise position on privacy, even when it directly opposes the mainstream government position. Google is an advertising company that makes more money the more…

Even obscure variables such as how frequently a user recharges the phone’s battery, how many incoming text messages they receive, how many miles they travel in a given day or how they enter contacts into their phone — the decision to add last name correlates with creditworthiness — can bear on a decision to extend credit. Source: You…

I just had the privilege of getting Active Directory data into Splunk. It was pretty straightforward. Here are the steps. Consult two priests (preferably an old and a young one) Install 47 plugins on the Splunk indexer. Those won’t do anything. Just install them. Install 19 more plugins on your Domain Controller. Those also won’t do anything. Install…

[ An example tweet from my timeline created within minutes of this post. ] Twitter is a black box to many, including people who use it often. Some tweets take off instantly, and others (which you’d expect to do well) just fizzle and die. There’s luck involved, but not as much as you might think. Here’s how to…

I’ve written a lot about the concept of Universal Daemonization and how personal assistants will be such a big part of that future. Basically, our personal assistants (Siri, Cortana, etc.) will be our 24/7 advocates. They will be reading daemon information from everything and everyone around us, and telling us what they think we should know about the…

Apple Pay is an improvement over paying with a credit card, but only marginally. What we really need is a better (faster and more secure) way to give someone your personal information. The primary use case I can think of is filling out forms. Doctors’ offices. The DMV. Credit applications. Etc. It especially sucks when there are multiple…