I started doing these retrospectives 3 years ago in my first year of independence. I reckon they're a good thing for everyone to do if not in written form then at least mentally to look back on your achievements of the year. They're a great way of reflecting on success (and indeed, on failures) and they also help explain why we all feel so damn tired by the end of the year!Here's my 2018 highlights, starting with travel:Travel"Oh yeah, I'm totally gonna travel less this year" - me every single yearIn reality, my travel ended up looking like this:That's the same number as last year, 4 more days and another 8,000km. On the other hand,...

Patience.Frugality.Sacrifice.When you boil it down, what do those three things have in common? Those are choices.Money is not peace of mind.Money’s not happiness.Money is, at its essence, that measure of a man’s choices.This is part of the opening monologue of the Ozark series and when I first heard it, I immediately stopped the show and dropped it into this blog post. It's a post that has been many years coming, one I started drafting about 5 years ago. One I kept dropping little bits and pieces into as the years went by but never finished because the time just wasn't right. It was only after reflecting on the responses to the...

I'm home! And it's a nice hot Christmas! And I've got a new car! And that's where the discussion kinda started heading south this week. As I say in the video, the reaction to my tweet about it was actually overwhelmingly positive, but there was this unhealthy undercurrent of negativity which was really disappointing to see. Several other non-related events following that demonstrated similar online aggressiveness and I don't know if it was a case of too much eggnog or simply people having more downtime to be dicks online, but it was a really odd spate of bad behaviour.Be that as it may, I hope there's some useful content in this one but I do appreciate the car bit...

And that's it for Canada. I recorded this Saturday morning local before heading out for last runs with the family. It's been fun but as I just tweeted sitting here in the airport:That’s it for Canada! It’s been fun, but it’s time for sunshine again 🇨🇦 ✈️ 🇦🇺 pic.twitter.com/Pbxy83MlHo— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) December 23, 2018 This week I'm talking about my new (free!) Pluralsight course, yet more data breaches, some really wacky Spotify attitudes towards passwords, a cool new Report URI feature we're looking for beta testers on and introducing an all new sponsor - strongDM. That's it from Canada, it's off to a hot Aussie Christmas now and the next few days will come...

I'm in Whistler! And as I say at the start of this video, I did seriously consider having a week off these videos, but I found a comfy spot by the fire and a cold beer and all was good in the world again. This week has some updates on my Canada travels, a couple of data breaches I loaded during the week, new HIBP stickers and some really screwy password practices at HSBC. I'll still be here in Whistler next week so will pump out one more snowy update before heading home for a hot Christmas. ReferencesThe worker safety HIBP sticker is pretty cool ("The user has worked __ days without having being pwned")HSBC has a rather odd approach...

I'm on countdown to take-off for the next 2 and a bit weeks so I'm going to keep this intro really short because it's sitting between me and a relaxing cold one (as soon as the bags are ready). Heaps of services got pwned, Australia has a screwy set of circumstances (and reactions) around a cyber bill and HIBP had a 5th birthday celebration which resulted in stickers and a really fun live AMA video. That's it for now - next week's update comes from the snow! ReferencesWe've all been scraped (66M people had their data exposed after it was scraped off LinkedIn)My data was included (This will give everyone a good sense of what sort of stuff was...

So today is Have I Been Pwned's (HIBP's) 5th birthday. I started this project out of equal parts community service and curiosity and then somehow, over the last 5 years it's grown into something massive; hundreds of thousands of unique sessions a day, millions of subscribers, working with governments around the world and even fronting up to testify in Congress. I'd love to say I had the foresight to see all this coming but I didn't. Not one bit of it. I just did the things I thought made sense at the time and that was that.As the 5th birthday approached, I asked people what I should do. There were many good suggestions but chief among those which were...

I'm pushing this out a day late so firstly, apologies for the break in what's otherwise a pretty steady cadence. But having said that, as I say at the start of this video I've really been struggling with work / life balance lately. As such, I recorded this Thursday evening then spent most of Friday on the jet ski with my son. We balanced out a lot of work on this trip 😎But check out the scenery! Just stunning. Saw hundreds of turtles, dugongs, mantas and star fish. Just an amazing place. pic.twitter.com/kgWBhK8nrD— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) November 30, 2018 Getting back to business as usual, I was in Sydney for a day trip during the week, I'm...

It's a no-blog week, but that doesn't mean any less is happening! This week, I've finally wrapped up the Lego Bugatti, got myself into the new iPad, connected my washing machine (I know, I know, I didn't plan it this way!) and then isolated it on a separate IoT network. What a time we live in... Oh - and speaking of times we live in, our data is getting thrown around the place like never before thanks to data aggregators and their constant breaches and frankly, I'm a bit fed up with it. All that and more in this week's update. ReferencesGet yourself some real cheap Pluralsight! (that's $100 off an annual subscription right there - one third!)My new...

Bit of a change of scenery this week; I've gone to the other end of the house whilst invasive palm tree roots are water blasted out from beneath my office window as part of our garden renos. But hey, that's a nice place to be on a day like this 😎Other than the location, it's business as usual. There's been some interesting discussion on biometric this morning, I'm appealing to developers of extensions and add-ons to whitelist themselves when a CSP is present and I'm talking about Google's U2F implementation. That last one in particular has had a heap of traction so appears to have struck a bit of a chord. Checking out Google Analytics, it looks it made it...