If You’re Not Paying, You’re The Product. I hate the above phrase. My problem with it isn’t in its intent, because I agree with the sentiment. We as consumers need to look at the products we use an determine whether there might be some hidden costs to the convenience that companies provide us. So what’s my issue? EVEN IF YOU PAY FOR A SERVICE, YOU ARE STILL A PRODUCT. I’ve been thinking of a video that I saw about a year ago. It’s from consumer-friendly lobbyist and personal hero of mine, Louis Rossmann. ...

Introduction When you first become a hacker, you develop something of a “hacker vision” that follows you when you go about. You tend to notice things like smart meters that control the city’s electricity supply, or kiosks that are running intel compute sticks, or whatever. When you understand how the tech works, you can’t help but ask yourself if you could exploit that. And hospitals will drive you crazy. Hospitals are highly digitized palaces with open ethernet jacks, presumed places of privacy, and computers running Windows 7 because their scanners aren’t compatible with anything else. I wouldn’t be surprised if every hospital is currently hacked. ...

Ok, for the last time Ross… So I LOVE using git. Once you get over the initial learning curve of which commands do what, it’s super easy to save your work and roll it back if you make mistakes. More than that though, it’s probably the most reliable way, I’ve found to take notes. The problem… I always have to Brave search how to set up a git repo because I can never remember: ...

What’s the Deal with Data? If you read my post on the best tech video ever, you will know that I will always prefer plaintext files over pretty much every other format. In that article I explain how the simplicity of plaintext and the flexibility of unix tools make text not only easier to work with, but remarkably powerful, and un-killable if you know how to use git. The problem with text is that there is a kind of limit to what it can be used for without adding more abstraction to it. Let’s say you want structured data, similar to the kind you might find in a spreadsheet. You’ll run into an issue with plaintext because it doesn’t force a structure itself. It’s freedom becomes a vice in that context. You’ll have the freedom to mess up the data. ...

The Problem In my last job, the people were fantastic, the work fascinating, and the clients were decent folks even when things got pretty heated. The biggest problem I had to deal with on a daily basis wasn’t anything to do with the normal frustrations of modern working; it was with the time keeping system! The Old Time Keeping System The timekeeping system that my last employer used was awful. It was a website wrapper around some ancient salesforce application. There were a number of thin clients, but the website was the most recent (and most buggy). ...

At 11 years old, I was diagnosed as having Asperger’s syndrome, now called Autistic spectrum disorder. I know what you’re thinking: “Wow, the guy who wrote a program to find friends is Autistic? Shocker”. Lol, yeah… I’ve spent years honing and crafting my social skills to a level where people have no clue that I’m on the spectrum. All of these skills are relatively easy to learn, and it surprises me how few people know some of the more rudimentary tricks, even among sales, managers, and others who put serious stake in communication. So as a public service to my awkward friends and colleagues, I want to share a few tricks that can help you get out of your head and start communicating with others in an effective and reasonable way. ...

In the tech industry, everything moves fast. A tool that worked perfectly yesterday is broken today. A technology that you relied on suddenly shifted its license and now you have to move to a competing technology. You’re constantly being asked to conjure up new solutions to problems that involve vocabulary terms you’ve never heard of. It’s a lot, and it’s not for everyone. But here’s the rub. Because you’re constantly in a state where you don’t know the exact syntax of a new language you need to use or you’re fumbling to find the words that you just learned yesterday, it can quickly make you feel like you don’t know anything. ...

Log4j It was December 9, 2021. I was working as a Vulnerability Management Consultant working for X-Force Red. Suddenly, it was all hands on deck. A new vulnerability had hit the scene and it was EXPLOSIVE. Log4j was a little logging library that java used and it was in EVERYTHING. All of our clients had it and they were worried. We spent weeks working with each of our POC’s (Point of Contact) and helping them identify their vulnerable machines. ...

Introduction: The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a government agency in the US that set up various standards for emerging technologies. In my past job, we used the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 to secure our clients, and I think it might be good to write down some of the principles in case it comes up in a job interview. This will be a part of a new series called “X for Nerds”, where I cover various topics that you might need to know before walking into a cybersecurity job. ...

I had a thought the other day when I was watching the “Unreasonably Effectiveness Of Plain Text” video. In either this video or another, he talks about a SciFi/Fantasy novel that he is writing where futuristic future people are surfing old text files from the internet, because after a thousand years, every other filetype had mutated so much that their formatting was lost to time. This triggered a specific thought for me. ...