Thinkst Blog

A quick note to Welcome Jameel Haffejee ( email ) to Thinkst. Some of you might remember him as "the guy who did the Power Shell talk at Zacon2" .. (The talk was cool, but (in truth) I remember him as the guy that sponsored the coffee!) Jameel has signed up as a Developer and future world-denter, so you should be reading more of him here soon.. Hello World!

In the movie Sneakers, there is a defining moment when Robert Redford rearranges Scrabble tiles to figure out that 'SETEC ASTRONOMY' is actually an anagram. With this in mind, I give you: SETEC CONFER MOAN (Yo!) ( Click for full size ) I'm not saying that InfoSec Conferences are bad (although many a battered liver would disagree), but what i am saying is that we don't seem to be improving our security posture at the same rate as we seem to be growing our conferences. Something is not right here. Now some people have argued that this is because conferences favor "breakers" over "builders", but I personally think that this is a red herring. If a builder with half a brain watches an interesting talk on breaking, he will no doubt start pondering useful defensive techniques. I think the problem instead is simply one of too much information. The buildup to every major conference these days includes press releases and tantalizing tweets promising Cyber Ar...

On January 6th, Apple launched their Mac App Store. Pundits have taken pretty polarizing views on the store, with some hailing it as a boon to indie developers (since they can (trivially) publish to a world stage without worrying about credit card transactions) while others say that this is yet another way for Apple to exert big brother type control. I think it's a healthy dose of both. As I mentioned in the past, Apple does have an amazing ability to create markets (and in the process, value) where there previously were none. Sure there were app developers before the iPhone App Store, but the question is: " How many smart phone apps did you buy before you got your iPhone? ". I had several smart phones before my iPhone, but never bought an app for any of them. Of course this does put Apple in an enviable position, with identities, credit cards and eyeballs of millions of customers. A little while back I released iTried , a simple utility that uses the built-in iSight came...