Ten years ago today I walked into the lobby. I got my photo taken and picked up my badge and a laptop. Or, as we say at Google, today is my tenth Googleversary.

Less than a month later Google's security team discovered Operation Aurora, an advanced cyberattack campaign conducted by China aimed at obtaining intellectual property from U.S. companies ( Read more... )

LiveJournal emailed me "What was on your mind 10 years ago?" because apparently #10yearschallenge is a social media thing. LJ then self-answered by quoting the post I wrote on Obama's inauguration day, "They Still Call it the White House, But That's a Temporary Condition" with links to thematic P-Funk and James Brown songs on YouTube (which are ( Read more... )

Obama's speech about surveillance last week featured the following paragraph which gets modern cybersecurity totally backwards: We cannot prevent terrorist attacks or cyberthreats without some capability to penetrate digital communications, whether it's to unravel a terrorist plot, to intercept malware that targets a stock exchange, to make sure ( Read more... )

According to additional details from Snowden leaks published by The Guardian, GCHQ, the UK's counterpart to the NSA, is wiretapping all or most transatlantic cables which terminate in Britain, i.e., most traffic between Europe and the U.S ( Read more... )

The problem with social networks is that they present the same context for all sharing, no matter what the content. Even with LiveJournal friends groups and Google+ circles, your heart wrenching post about inner demons might show up between two lolcats and people think you're a let down when they want a laugh. Or your flippant lolcat might show up ( Read more... )

Apparently all the AIM developers have been fired by AOL.I'm rather disappointed by this. I've had an AIM account since '97 or '98, which predates flwyd.dhs.org (1999), trevorstone.org (2002), LiveJournal (2001), and (of course) GMail. The communication systems I used before that -- bvsd.k12.co.us, colorado.edu, nyx.net, irc.undernet.org -- don't ( Read more... )

A recent This American Life is all about that awkward period known as middle school. Near the beginning of the show, they state that middle-school-aged kids have more neuron development than at any other time after infancy. That period of our lives is thus, in large part, us becoming the us we will be in life ( Read more... )

Facebook announced this week that when you visit Pandora for the first time, they'll hand over all of your friend information so Pandora can set up your station with music your friends like. This is the sort of "What were they thinking!?!" news I hear about Facebook every six months or so. The frequency of such moments is the main reason I don't ( Read more... )

Even though I've been on the Internet for more than half my life and on the web for three quarters of its, I have some significant new tech and Web 2.0 luddite streaks. I don't have a cell phone, for instance, though that's as much because I don't want to pay lots of money to deal with the phone company's shenanigans as it is because I don't want ( Read more... )

The Great Firewall blocks LiveJournal and many blogs (perhaps even every URL that starts wit rss. or feed.). But I should be able to post through this handy proxy.

I make no promise of update frequency, though. I'd rather be having adventures than writing about them. The latter can come later.