Sky’s Blog

Far from solving all your problems, if you rely on government to solve your cyber-security problems, I think you’re more likely to end up with restricted access to the Internet and someone other than hackers evaluating your communications. And I mean this is a possibility not only from your own national government but due to future international “cooperation” among governments.

Here are five reasons why you have to build your own cyber-protection capabilities rather than relying on governments to solve any of your security (and cyber-attack) problems for you. And you have to be vigilant and aware of what’s going on that might put governments even more in control of your online communications, reducing the options you have available to communicate privately with others as well as to defend yourself. (continue reading…)

Domain takedowns: With law-enforcement recently taking down domains that they assert are engaged in peer-to-peer sharing ¹ and with UK agencies perhaps looking for the power to seize domains ² associated with criminal activity, I see some possible parallels. First, note that all that might be required for takedowns is a request from law-enforcement, and that the domain owner doesn’t necessarily know why the domain is down—it just is taken down. But wait—I see parallels elsewhere… (continue reading…)

I cleaned out my news reader subscriptions this morning¹ and found that of about 30 blogs I dropped, most of them hadn’t been updated in over a year, or even since 2006 in a couple of cases. Are people getting tired of blogging? (For that matter, are people getting tired of tweeting? I hardly ever do it any more…) To lay a motivational foundation, I was cleaning out my subscriptions because I now read them on an iPad and it has been taking me nearly a couple of hours a day to read them, so I needed to cut a lot of duplicates—seeing the same information several places, in blogs that are just “repeaters.”

Ten reasons my buddies might have quit blogging (remember, I call blog posts “articles”):

• Too much time goes into writing a single article
• email inbox is over 1,000 and need to catch up
• too busy reading other blogs
• watching video more than ever – still haven’t seen all the TED videos
• iPad doesn’t provide an easy way to write for the blog (get a keyboard!)
• 400 podcasts stacked up and no longer commute to work so I can’t get through the backlog
• don’t have anything original to say and got tired of repeating what others were saying
• started tweeting and then I didn’t even have enough time for tweeting
• quit blogging for {pick one} summer/trip/vacation/religiousholiday and just never got the energy to start again
• got a real job. (Whatever that is…)

Hmmm…the balance to be struck is between consuming and producing, I think. And consuming is far easier than producing.

Looking back at some of the talk in the halls of the US Congress for about the last year, particularly about clarifying (or solidifying) Executive branch (they’re saying the President) authority to shut down some Internet capabilities in the case of an emergency¹, such as a cyber-attack, makes me think that humans are fond of just shutting their eyes when faced with danger. (continue reading…)