The irony is not lost on me that the Internet Archive went out of its way to acquire the physical versions of millions of books and loan them out carefully and in a limited way, and is facing a near-extinction-level event over it, while for-profit and VC-backed companies are just stealing people’s content and making up excuses to validate the bad behavior.
I administer ~100-200 domains, and I've never had certificate issues in the past years. certbot runs in a cron and it does all the job for me.
It appals me that the 2nd most valuable company in the world struggles so much with certificate renewals instead - a problem largely solved even for small administrators.
RESEARCH: Backchannel moderation tools like “Chillbot” that prioritize communication over punishment could be effective in nudging members of online groups towards positive norm engagement and creating a more equitable and transparent content moderation process.
In late 1999 Internet Security Security Systems bought Netrex, largely for its managed services business.
In October 2006, when I was the director of IT, IBM bought ISS largely for its managed services business.
I was given lots of opportunities at IBM. Twice I found myself in the wrong place at the wrong time and was on a list to be let go, but other parts of IBM decided to pick me up. I once resigned to take a job at Deloitte, and at the time my manager told me that didn’t work for anyone and made it worth my while to stay. For many years, I led an incident response function for the strategic outsourcing business, which was later spun off to be what is now Kyndryl. I learned a LOT. I learned so much, in fact, that I decided to start a podcast in 2012, partly to make myself smarter, and partly in hopes that I could help the industry avoid the mistakes I was seeing our clients make on a near daily basis. I have deep scars from all the big security events of the 2010’s - heartbleed, shellshock, wannacry, notpetya, and many others.
In 2019, I was leading an internal practice around cyber regulations (in addition to the IR role) and ended up helping the cloud business out of a sticky situation. Unbeknownst to me, cloud had been looking to replace their CISO, and in March 2020, they offered me the job. My first big test was leading Cloud through Covid.
I had the extreme privilege to lead a team of 184 remarkably talented professionals. We did some cool things, but I regret the long list of things that didn’t get done.
As well published in the news, IBM took a hard line on return to office, particularly for executives. They gave people like me a choice: relocate to a key site (Atlanta was not one of them) and work from the office 3 days a week (with tight attendance tracking), or be let go. I have been working from home full time since shortly after IBM bought ISS in 2006 - nearly 18 years. I spend about 1/3 of my time at my beach place, which I was not willing to part with. Plus, I fundamentally disagree with the return to office approach and with how people have been treated, so I opted to “let it happen”, and so today is the day IBM terminates me.
I’ve saved up enough money that I can take a break for a while. It’s been 32 years since I’ve had more than a week off work, and at least 20 since I’ve had any sort of vacation that wasn’t disrupted by urgent meetings, crises, and so on. I’m going to spend some time with my family, especially my extremely patient wife, in ways that I haven’t been able to.
I have a very long list of things I’ll be doing during this downtime. I intend to get back into podcasting; I am going to write some including maybe a book; I am going to focus more on the fediverse instances I manage to ensure they are enduring; I am going to way too many baseball games with my wife (she is a mega baseball fan); and I am going to take way too many pictures and hopefully find some creative ways to make money with those pics.
TL;DR: today is the end of a long journey for me, and the start of a new one. And it’s a good day.
> Here’s why: It’s not “building for yourself doesn’t shift paradigms.”
>
> It’s “building for yourself on a saturated platform doesn’t shift paradigms if you are already the main character.”
>
> Technical product teams are overwhelmingly led by people who are already main characters in tech. So those main characters building for themselves produces incrementalist, weak willed, un-visionary work.
> Yet the whole thing was simply painful to watch, mostly because it was useless on any practical level. This much ballyhooed confrontation between two political foes for the most important office in the world turned out to be featherlight on substance, policy, interest, intellect, imagination, vision, energy, ideas, humor and hope. It was heavy on one thing (besides cringe), though: ego.