Weekly update

I'm irrationally excited about the new Prusa 3D printer on order, and I think that's mostly to do with planning for the NDC Oslo talk I plan to do with Elle, my 11-year old daughter. I'm all for getting the kids exposure not just to tech, but also to being able to talk to others about tech and involving them in conference talks since a young age has been a big part of that. But what I'm especially excited about is that this won't just be an "aw, isn't it cute seeing kids talk at a conference" ki...

For a weekly update with no real agenda, we sure did spend a lot of time talking about the ridiculous approach Harvey Norman took to dealing with heavy traffic on Black Friday. It was just... unfathomable. A bunch of people chimed into the tweet thread and suggested it may have been by design, but they certainly wouldn't have set out to achieve the sorts of headlines that adorned the news afterwards. Who knows, but it made for entertaining content this week 🙂 References 1. Sponsored by:...

Think about it like this: in 2015, we all lost our proverbial minds at the idea of the Kazakhstan government mandating the installation of root certificates on their citizens' devices. We were outraged at the premise of a government mandating the implementation of a model that could, at their bequest, allow them to intercept traffic without any transparency or accountability. The EFF said the following at the time: If the country's ruling regime were to successfully implement this plan, it woul...

Most of this week's video went on the scraped (and faked) LinkedIn data, but it's the ransomware discussion that keeps coming back to mind. Even just this morning, 2 days after recording this live stream, I ended up on nation TV talking about the DP World security incident and whilst we don't have any confirmation yet, it has all the hallmarks of another ransomware case. In advance of that interview, I was trawling through various ransomware Tor sites and the volume of big names appearing there...

Yes, the Lenovo is Chinese. No, I'm not worried about Superfish. Yes, I'm running windows. No, I don't want a Framework laptop. Seemed to be a lot of time this week gone on talking all things laptops, and there are clearly some very differing views on the topic. Some good suggestions, some neat alternatives and some ideas that, well, just seem a little crazy. But hey, I'm super happy with the machine, it's an absolute beast and I expect I'll get many years of hard work out of it. That and more i...

So I wrapped up this week's live stream then promptly blew hours mucking around with Zigbee on Home Assistant. Is it worth it, as someone asked in the chat? Uh, yeah, kinda, mostly. But seriously, having a highly automated house is awesome and I suggest that most people watching these vids harbour the same basic instinct as I do to try and improve our lives through technology. The coordination of lights with times of day, the security checks around open doors, the controlling of fans and air con...

I did it again - I tweeted about Twitter doing something I thought was useful and the hordes did descend on Twitter to tweet about how terrible Twitter is. Right, gotcha, so 1.3M views of that tweet later... As I say in this week's video, there's a whole bunch of crazy arguments in there but the thing that continues to get me the most in every one of these discussions is the argument that Elon is a poo poo head. No, seriously, I explain it at the end of the video how so constantly the counterarg...

There seemed to be an awful lot of time gone on the 23andMe credential stuffing situation this week, but I think it strikes a lot of important chords. We're (us as end users) still reusing credentials, still not turning on MFA and still trying to sue when we don't do these things. And we as builders are still creating systems that allow this to happen en mass. All that said, I don't know how we build systems that are resilient to a single person coming along and entering someone else's (probably...

This must be my first "business as usual" weekly update since August and damn it's nice to be back to normal! New sponsor, new breaches, new blog post and if you're in this part of the world, a brand new summer creeping over the horizon. I've now got a couple of months with very little in the way of travel plans and a goal to really knock a bunch of new HIBP features out of the park, some of which I talk about in this week's video. Enjoy! 🍻 References 1. Sponsored by: NTT’s Samurai XDR offe...

Ah, home 😊 It's been more than a month since I've been able to sit at this desk and stream a weekly video. And now I'm doing it with the glorious spring weather just outside my window, which I really must make more time to start enjoying. Anyway, this week is super casual due to having had zero prep time, but I hope the discussion about the ABC's piece on HIBP and I in particular is interesting. I feel like this whole story has a long way to go yet, hopefully now having a few months at home wil...