Some blockchain implementations – public, non-permissioned ones in particular – have a really interesting property: Nobody owns them. As a sentence, it’s a simple statement. There is no owner. As I’ve considered it, however, this is far more subtle and powerful than merely having a…
Nobody cares about the cloud. It’s a statement that requires a bit of explanation – since “the cloud” is so ubiquitous. I see it advertised on highway billboards, in airport concourses, and everywhere in between. I believe that my current resume and LinkedIn profile may…
I had the opportunity to write a guest blog post for Elastifile. It’s about the fact that a lot of the data in the life sciences is housed on big NFS fileservers. It has been challenging to shift our workflows, which rely both on the…
I’ve been reading Who Owns the Future by Jaron Lanier. It’s a good book, and you should probably read it. It’s particularly important if you’re a person who participates in the economy – which is most of us. Among the good points he makes is…
Another day, another data breach. The Swedish government has apparently exposed personal identifying data on nearly all of their citizens. The dataset came from the ministry of transportation. It included names, photographs, home addresses, birthdates, and other details about citizens – as well as maintenance…
Public key encryption, or PKE, is one of the oldest techniques in the blockchain toolbox. PKE dates from the 1970s and has a lineage of being “discovered” by both military and civilian researchers. It’s powerful stuff: One of the early implementations of a PKE system,…
“Hybrid,” is the answer. I’m talking about “on-prem vs cloud,” the bugaboo trick question that has plagued us for nearly a decade. What I mean by reframing the question like this is that – absent other details – the location and ownership of servers is…
It’s summertime – season of thunderstorms. Most days are punctuated with ominous clouds and distant thunder. Actual rain, however, is rare. The forecast is consistent – temperatures may spike up to uncomfortably hot in the afternoon, and there are low odds of a thunderstorm. I…
Earlier this month, an information security firm found a multi-terabyte dataset of personal information on at least 198 million American voters unsecured, in a world readable S3 bucket. They did the responsible thing and notified the owners, and then wrote a very accessible description of…
A very smart and well informed colleague recently shared a thought that disturbed me. I’m writing it here mostly to get it out of my head, and also in the hopes that the eminently quotable Admiral Rickover will once again be proved right: “Weaknesses overlooked…