Reflections during my self-quarantine from the COVID-19 pandemic.
I wrote the bulk of this retrospective and then fell into the limbo that are the days between Christmas and New Years Eve before I could hit publish. It usually doesn’t take long for these reviews to reach the 10000+ word range because involves turning the microscope on all the major aspects of my life: noting the highlights, lowlights, and lessons learned. This year was no different. On the other hand, the year was pivotal in such a holistic way that I can anticipate looking back on my life years from now and referring to things as being pre- and post- 2020.
In 1999, David Bowie saw the internet as an “alien life form”. He saw that humanity was on the cusp of something both exhilarating and terrifying: it was a breakdown of the barriers between creators and their communities. Instead of a piece of art or information being broadcasted one-way to an audience, it was becoming more of a dialogue, where the thing that originates from a creator isn't finished until the audience comes in and add their own interpretation. From there the piece evolves, gets sampled and remixed in ways that the creator couldn't have possibly imagined. Bowie called this area where creators and their communities meet "the gray space in the middle": a powerful new area of engagement where the most interesting things happen, and he predicted that this space is what the 21st century was going to be all about…
The recent Twitter hack is the latest reminder that even top companies with the best security teams are not immune against bad actors and data breaches, so why let them handle our sensitive data when we don’t need to? In this article I introduce concept of operational security and how you might begin to identify the information that is out there about you, analyze the risk of this exposure, and deny adversaries from exploiting this data.