Monopoly Customer Service

After a few years of avoiding the cable industry, I went ahead and signed up for Comcast Highspeed2Go, a new bundled service where they resell Clearwire and combine it with conventional broadband home internet service.

As per usual large non-technical business operations, and I feel that I must classify Comcast as such, they launched a product [...]

The Politics of Respect

There is a lot of perennial talk of social engineering and direct project/resource management. Attempts to solve complicated political situations with manipulation or a slick widget tend not to work very well over time. They are not addressing the underlying issue.

The wedge of compliance or a mandate from a framework may get some base [...]

Best of 26c3

Here is my list of the most important talks of the 26th Chaos Communication Congress [26C3] held in Berlin, Germany that was held last week.

Since my German language skills have eroded into near-worthlessness, I’m only going to mention presentations available in the English language.

Many videos are not yet up, but of those that are, these [...]

On hackers, maturity, and the international market

There has been several published works on the what the media calls hackers, the hacker underground, the information security industry, and the technorati class in general lately. Here are a few:

Phrack #63 section 13 The death of the underground
Zero For 0wned The “Industry check” section
H Security All Around My (Black) Hat
CNN Technology Hanging with hackers [...]

The Trials of Toorcamp

Toorcamp was many things this year.

It was fun.

It was uncomfortable.

Dustdevils ate things occasionally.

It was turbulent due to the trouble with Levitate to get hackers to help promote their event for free or they wouldn’t fulfill their agreement to let us use the missile facility for talks and workshops.

There was some excellent music.

There were fine people [...]