How to Present

- 1 min read
Standard Con Presentation Who Are You? Give 3-5 sentences or bullets about who you are, how long you’ve been doing the relevant skill and a 1-2 sentence explanation of what you’re talking about. What Problem Did You Solve? Make this relatable. Tell a story, so the audience can connect with your problem. Ask a question, have you ever had X happen? Tell us /why/ we should care Present Your Possible Solutions I could X, Y, or Z.

Of Civic Religion

- 2 mins read
Recently a friend pointed me to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract to help understand the idolatry/worship of Trump, MAGA, and the American government. Its worth reading if you get a moment. Book 4, chapter 8 discusses the idea that a society requires a sort of idolatry called the “Civic Religion” to exist to hold people into a cohesive society. He mentions 2 other forms of religion, the “natural” religion that’s grown from every society of idols and gods and myth, and the “revealed” religion.

3 Accounts Method

- 7 mins read
For years, I’ve tried to come up with a normal and sane way to manage money that didn’t involve complicated technical solutions (usually with a high price tag…I’m trying to save money!). I’ve tried everything. YNAB, Mint, GNUCash and everything in between. Finally I settled on the 3 Accounts Method of my own design. Its simple. It is almost set it and forget it. And It automatically helps you fulfill the parallel goals of paying down debt and building savings.

2025.04.22.News You Should Know

- 5 mins read

Series: News You Should Know

Ransomware crooks search for ‘insurance’ ‘policy’ right away • The Register - Researchers reviewed 3 years of ransomware forensics and found threat actor SOPs usually involve searching for “insurance” in company documents. If found, ransoms are around 2.8x the average. If there’s a double extortion attempt, the ransom is around 5.5x’s higher. Law biz appeals £60K ICO fine over 32 GB digital burglary • The Register - UK law firm loses 32GBs of case data and decides its not a personal data breach.

2025.05.27.News You Should Know

- 5 mins read

Series: News You Should Know

Wyden: AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon weren’t notifying senators of surveillance requests | TechCrunch - In the letter, Wyden, a longstanding member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that an investigation by his staff found that carriers were not notifying senators of legal requests — including from the White House — to surveil their phones. A report last year by the Inspector General, revealed that the Trump administration in 2017 and 2018 secretly obtained logs of calls and text messages of 43 congressional staffers and two serving House lawmakers, imposing gag orders on the phone companies that received the requests.

2025.05.20.News You Should Know

- 4 mins read

Series: News You Should Know

Hackers scam Coinbase users and ransom data for $20M • The Register - Coinbase said that at no point during the compromise could the attackers have accessed customers’ funds, and confirmed the sources of the data were insiders bribed to steal information on behalf of the extortionists. The company said the data does not include passwords or private keys, but depending on the use, the following details of its customers may be compromised:

2025.05.13.News You Should Know

- 5 mins read

Series: News You Should Know

Microsoft ends Authenticator password autofill, moves users to Edge - App will stop storing passwords. Users have until August 1st to move passwords to another option. June 2025: You can no longer save new passwords in Authenticator. July 2025: Autofill will stop working in Authenticator; stored payment info will be deleted. August 2025: Saved passwords and unsaved generated passwords will no longer be accessible in Authenticator. FBI: End-of-life routers hacked for cybercrime proxy networks - Threat actors are breaking into edge devices, notably Linksys and Cisco EoL routers, and adding them to residential proxy botnets.

RSAC Cool Thing

- 4 mins read
This years RSAC was a strange experience. AI and Quantum saturated the expo floor, while talks ranged from IT to OT and everything in between. And weird political overtones stifled the environment. Regardless of the weirdness, I decided to hit the expo floor and find the weird, the cool, and the special. And I was successful! Two different companies jumped out at me. One, Oasis offered an actual use case for quantum while Sepio offered a new endpoint security product.

2025.04.15.News You Should Know

- 6 mins read

Series: News You Should Know

Pharmacist accused of spying on women using work, home cams • The Register - Pharmacist spent nearly a decade installing malware on coworkers PCs, including remote web cam viewers and keyloggers. Pharmacist is currently employed at another healthcare system and is not jailed. While the employer is being sued for failing to protect their infrastructure and employees. VMware revives its free ESXi hypervisor • The Register - Free ESXi is back apparently…if you want it.

2025.04.08.News You Should Know

- 4 mins read

Series: News You Should Know

One of the last Bletchley Park’s heroes Betty Webb dies • The Register - Webb along with a number of other prominent women in the cryptography field worked at Bletchley Park to help decrypt some 10k German intercepts per day. Women have a long history in the Computer Science and Cryptography fields, I would highly recommend Invisible Women by Caroline Perez, Hidden Figures by Shetterly, BROAD band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet - Claire Evans,