Hakiri

DoubleEdge Films, the guys who did the SPIN video footage, which by the way was the opening post of this blog, have another one coming titled INK

Obviously, this is something I am quite looking forward to see.

Simply put New is a very relative word. New to whom? And how do you prove that something new is new indeed? You cannot. Perhaps you can suggest that something is new as nothing like it has been documented before, but again this is very subjective.

You often see rants about what is new and what is old in the security scene: underground and aboveground. Some people will complain that nothing new has been discovered when a presumably new type of vulnerability/research is released. Others will simply take it as new without even questioning it and essentially start a hype.

Perhaps new should be changed with fashionable. Like in the fashion business new things are often well forgotten old things, i.e. ideas always circulate. And new things are simply not possible without the help of old things because we require access to technology, whether it comes in terms of knowledge or tools, to build them. In that respect nothing new is actually new.

The best way to learn is by teaching. It seams that when we teach others we actually learn because teaching is way of transmitting information in the most optimal way and in order to do that, our brains engage with the task to simplify the information and to find the most important bits that are necessary to unfold the rest of it that follows, as such, we learn.

As an experiment, do the following: Pick a topic you know nothing about and study it for a short period of time. Make sure that you pick something that is pretty hard for you to comprehend at first. Now, try to teach your wife/colleges/kids of what you have learned. There is a good chance that by the time you finish your first lesson, you will have a better idea of the topic than you had before.

Is it coincidence that most of the best minds of the past century were also teachers and they were constantly involved with public speaking engagements, seminars, etc? I think not! Of course, most of them were related to the world of academia that also contributed to developing their intellect.

Although teaching is a way of learning, not everybody is good at teaching. This is another skill of its own.

I’ve got so many projects that it will take me a great deal of time to list them all. It is always exciting to start something new if you know what I mean. However, how do you find time to work on all of your projects and still enjoying plenty of other activities? This question has been occupying my thoughts for some time now but I think I pinned a solution.

So how do you find time? It is simple:

1. Make sure that you have clear goals! You may have pretty big goals. This is good! If they are pretty big, split them up to smaller ones. It is easier to work in smaller steps and it helps you keeping focus.
2. Dedicate specific day and time for your project. Make sure that you are not overdoing it. By overdoing a project either will get sick of it or you will loose interest. Also, overdoing something does not necessarily means that you are actually productive in any way. In fact, most of the time, you are not. Just find a day of the week in which you can work on a specific project and stick with it.
3. Rest well. If you book yourself to work on a particular project on Tuesday for example but you are unable to do it, don’t stress. Find time to rest and use your brain instead. The truth is that you can develop the entire project in your head. Once the model is ready, you can dump the whole thing on paper.

Finally, what you really need to answer yourself is whether spending more time on a project is actually worthed. If you think about it, the amount of time spent is totally irrelevant. On the other hand, the amount of focused/productive time spend on a project is quite important. The problem is that the more irrelevant time you spend on a project the further you go from your goal. The more focused time you put into a project the closer you get.

Multitasking or running several projects at once is all about good time management, cutting through the abstract work, resting well and having clear goals.

One of the beautiful things about virtualization is that we can pretty much stop writing software and start writing glues. We no longer need to care about whether software is cross-platformed. We can choose the platform for which we want to develop our products.

I guess all of this sounds too futuristic but I truly believe that one day we will download and install appliances the way we download and install software. Products such as VMWare, VirtualBox and QEMU will be treated no different than Java, .NET, Flash, Adobe AIR and other development platforms. Effectively, we will start thinking in terms of how many CPUs we can handle rather than how many processes although in reality virtual appliances are processes running in the host system. It will all merge and the permutations will become deep and complicated but at the same time this approach may allow us to build self-sustainable systems.

And this is what it is referred to as Software as an Appliance.

Via XKCD, this is what Information Security is all about.

Welcome to the real world!

Pure classic!

The one bit I love the most is where she says that it takes 2 hours to download an electronic version of a news paper. Well, some of us remember the days of analog modems.

From 1000 ideas one should definitely work. So although some say that stubbornness is the key to getting something good out of your work, I believe that it is mostly the combination of chance, timing and well planned execution. Keep in mind though that not all ideas click with people even when they are successfully executed.

My approach to this problem is very simple. I try to get out as many ideas as possible. I know that the majority of them will fail but some of them will work. This way I not only practice my creative thinking all the time but I also get a good exposure on quite diverse topics and problems.

So, do not waste time thinking whether your idea is any good. Just do it and see how it goes. You will see its real colors once you start executing it and you can always give up if it is too much for you.

…is what Twitter is. And it fits very well the egocentric nature of most security dudes (el hackerz), and therefore they are all on Twitter, twittering their way out of the rat race. The only problem I see with micro blogging platforms, such as Twitter, is that there is almost no value whatsoever from your contributions but a bunch of meaningless messages – a history of someone’s no so interesting life.

Don’t get me wrong. Twitter is a good social/communication tool. It works well to deliver small messages to the world. However, essentially Twitter is nothing more than a glorified version of an Instant Messaging client where everybody can see what you are saying. It is a personal branding tool – good for staying in touch with your peers in a very open fashion but bad for anything else.

This is the reason why I prefer blogs, wikis, etc. They are designed to build communities and build on the top of information which can later be reused and build upon. Information is important. It drives progression. Twitter creates noise. I guess this is the secret for its success.

Well, everything new will become old! And Twitter’s roots are as old as the Internet, perhaps even more. The idea will fade away with the time and after that it will raise again, repackaged in a shiny new box and given back to the masses.

It’s a Wonderful Internet is an interactive holiday story. It puts you in the spirit of the upcoming Christmas feasts.

Go check the website! You won’t be disappointed, I promise.