There are very few genuine, passionate people in this world. Today, with the death of Steve Irwin, there is one less.
I’d like to take a moment and introduce a new contributor to Securosis.
Chris Pepper is a senior systems administrator at Rockefeller University in NYC and longtime contributor to TidBITS and various other publications. Chris is one of the most knowledgeable sysadmins I’ve ever known and the first person I turn to when I need command-line support on various *nix flavors or Mac.
Rich,
It feels heretical, but I can agree that obscurity can provide some security. The problem comes when people count on secrecy as their only or primary security.
I like to think Richard Stiennon and I are good friends. He was at my wedding in Mexico. I took him and his son skiing up at Copper Mountain where I used to patrol. For a time he even rented space in my condo in Boulder while I was slowly moving to Phoenix. We’d swap my car out at the airport parking lot; it was very convenient.
I generally don’t discuss “industry” issues here since that’s what I get paid to do at my day job. And if I start offering for free here, what I get paid to do over there, I may find myself offered the opportunity to do it for free on a permanent basis.
I’ve been publishing for in various formats for nearly 10 years now, and I have to admit I’m really enjoying some of the features of blogging. Aside from writing in a more personal voice, I actually appreciate the near instant feedback- from anyone- anywhere- of the blogosphere. I actually enjoy having my ideas challenged and debated.
Guess where I spent the day?
I’ll warn you now, I have a bad habit of taking metaphors too far.
As a child one of the first signs of my budding geekness was a strange interest in professional “lingo”. Maybe it was an odd side effect of learning to walk at a volunteer ambulance headquarters in Jersey. Who knows what debilitating effects I suffered due to extended childhood exposure to radon, the air imbued with the random chemicals endemic to Jersey, and the staccato language of the early Emergency Medical Technicians whose ranks I would feel compelled to join later in life.
This has nothing to do with security other than the fact Mike Rothman is a security analyst.
Sometimes it’s worth sitting back and evaluating why you’re in the race in the first place. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the insanity of day-to-day demands or the incredibly deceptive priorities of the corporate and government rat races.
Believe it or not, despite accusations that that my coverage of the Mac wireless hack is all part of some anti-Apple black PR conspiracy, I’m a Mac user. One that’s so addicted I bought my Mom one and had it shipped to me so I could “configure” it. Okay, really I had to send mine in for service and I needed another Intel Mac so I could run it off an external hard drive with an image of my MacBook Pro. I mean I might have been without it for, like, 5-7 days and that’s just not acceptable. How…