About

Me

I am a hacker, open source technologist at-large, sometimes writer and speaker. I’ve been honored to speak at infosec conferences like DEF CON, DerbyCon, BsidesLV, SecureWorld and SEMAFOR (ISACA Warsaw Chapter). I am an active member of the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), I lead and moderate discussions about electronic rights and civil liberties while educating users how their data is used by companies without their knowledge; things that are ‘free’ online, actually aren’t free. In fact, most of my research over the past few years has focused more on companies weaknesses in protecting customer’s data, and their failures in keeping that data private. Speaking engagements on earlier work dealth with system architecture in the global biodiversity realm, and slides of those are available on my Slideshare account.

With over fifteen years experience with Linux and open source software, I know there’s always another way to do it, so I’m constantly learning new techniques to solve technical challenges. I usually do this by hacking on my home servers, then blogging about my results here. So my blog has always served as a testing ground, and a place to organize my thoughts while allowing feedback for others, and myself to build off. I participate in open source development, and release all code I write on GitHub. I listen to music constantly, hold a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, am a practicing troublemaker and an accidental tourist. In general, I like to keep it real. You can reach me in a number of ways, see the Contact page for details.


Site

This site started as a place for me to record my thoughts/rants, talk about music I like, but mostly write about Linux and open source solutions I’ve discovered or created. The name was a sarcastic commentary on the lack of anonymity online, which has become somthing I’ve been trying to improve. This site dates from 2005, and has been run on a number of different CMS platforms. From PHP Nuke, Typo, Drupal, Wordpress, Octopress, Jekyll, Hexo and now Hugo. In leaving Wordpress I took the big leap of migrating all of my (then) 491 posts into Markdown. Now I can move them anywhere since they’ve broken free of the database. I consider it future-proofing my blog.


Colophon

  Gandi domain name registration and DNS service
  Gimp an open-source raster graphics editor used for image editing
  Github hosted git for source control in an open environment
  Hugo a fast and modern static website engine
  Let's Encrypt a free, automated, CA for SSL certificates
  Netlify site hosting and deployment with continuous integration
  Vultr (ref link) worldwide cloud servers starting at $5/month
  Vim the Unix editor with a more complete feature set

Causes I support

TOR      Americans United for Separation of Church and State

="EFF"      Muckrock

Planned Parenthood      HRC