[ This is a lightly edited internal post we’ve made public.] Last week we had booths at DevConf Joburg, and DevConf Cape Town. They’re two ZA events run by the same crew with the same speakers, two days and 1400kms apart. The organisers set a bar in ZA for putting on polished and well-run events. Where the average event is in an old venue with limited food and chaotic organisation, DevConf is punctual, classy, and efficient. Francois & Victor (Jhb), and Leighton …
Tag: navel-gazing
Most security products are terrible. For years our industry has managed to get by because our products were mandated by someone or some regulation, and users were trained to accept that security and usability were necessary trade-offs. This was just the prevailing truth. One of the reasons we always promote hacker-led companies is because hackers delight in challenging accepted truths. We think this applies as much to product design as it does to smashing the stack. In a few months, …
We gave 2 talks at Troopers15 this year. Marco & Azhar talked about Sockpuppets and Censorship 2.0. And i gave a somewhat hand-wavy talk titled: “The hard thing about the hard things“ (Some pretty smart people seemed to like them, so its probably worth a quick watch) …
Our ITWeb Security Summit keynote this year covered the Snowden Leaks from a South African point of view. Our talk was based on ideas we articulated in an op-ed piece for Al Jazeera last year, titled: “Silicon Valley, spy agencies and software sovereignty” ITWeb has already uploaded the video (Go ITWeb!) – Below you can grab a version of the video, with the slides added as an overlay (if nothing else, it makes the nasal voice more bearable) …
Early last year we presented at 44con with a talk titled: “Penetration Testing considered harmful today“. 44con have just released the video so we figured it was worth a quick recap (for anyone not willing to tolerate the whiny voice!) The original slides (in PDF) are available (here) The central thesis of the talk is that penetration testing has established itself as a necessary activity for securing a network and is now pushed forward by a multi million dollar industry despite …
The Internet lit up last week with news of Intel’s purchase of McAfee. Every analyst (and his dog) has chimed in on what it means, from “Anti Virus on a chip”, to just “a national security disaster“. I think it has a subtler implication that bodes well for developing nations. – In the ongoing competition between hardware and software, hardware just flinched. Watching Intel spend almost a years worth of profit on McAfee made me think of Professor Clayton Christensen …