Category Archives: personal

So if you are on the UK Security and Payments scene: Jonathan Care / @ArashiYama is in hospital

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I visited Jon last night and he was very with it, sitting in a chair and messing with his iPad, covered in spots and bruises and with a pair of cannulas (cannulae?) hanging out of him while wired to a drip.

Medically, something has gone wrong with his immune system which is now attacking his own blood platelets; this is a bad thing because without platelets your blood essentially drops out of you. From what I understand the first half of last week was very very bad indeed but as of yesterday he just looked like he’d caught measles whilst battling ninjas using mad judo skillz.

It’s some form of idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura but – geeks be advised – he’s not interested in having diagnosis by google thrown at him when he has a bunch of actual doctors on hand to deal with his specific condition. They are paid more than Wikipedia editors, they can earn their salaries. :-)

If you’d like to visit him (Camberley area) then send a message to his beloved PinkyFluff who will schedule you in – I am certain that Jon would love to see you all at once but Lilly has other ideas about that; also: be advised that she’s been doing a Herculean task of hospital visiting for the past few days and herself deserves props for massive hard work.

Jon’s also available on Twitter; and if you want to help, he needs platelets – stats: should be: 400, was: 1 – so do please go look at http://www.blood.co.uk/

Jon’s likely to be staring at the walls for several days yet.  It’s curious that Steve Lord has equally been through shit of late; and for some reason people think security is a easy profession…

A New Role for Muffett: Facebook

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Back in June 2011 I joined Surevine - a company of great people whom I cannot commend highly enough* as a excellent working environment, as promoters of open source, and of people who care about software and security and about doing both right. I am pleased to have helped cause some beneficial change at Surevine – including, but not limited to, security awareness, operations architecture and obtaining ISO27001 certification.

All this said: I’ve been offered a really exciting prospect which I’ve decided to pursue.

Thus: I shall shortly be joining Facebook as a software engineer and will be working out of the London/Covent Garden office.

What happens after that will be interesting in a whole variety of ways. :-)

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* If you’re a UK-based security geek or Java developer then go look Surevine up. Send them a resume. Say that “Alec’s blog sent you”; I get no money for this, it’s just a really great company that deserves good people.

A souvenir for any Sun Microsystems Security Geeks of a certain age

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So, one year the powers that be gave us no almost budget to go to USENIX, but a huge bunch of us did anyhow; we wanted to have a Sun BoF (“beat the dutchman“) but had no signage.

So we stole the Microsoft signage, turned it back to front, covered it in cards and Post-It notes from all of the Engineers saying what they would be talking about, and had more people turn up than turned up at the Microsoft BoF.

The back of the sign is peppered with thumbtack holes.

Photo by alecmuffett • Instagram.

Craig: “Are you a libertarian or something, because I’m not sensing any clear political philosophy behind your position?”

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Alec: “No, I’m not a libertarian. I’m from the Internet. I’m here to help.”

Haz.

1995, USENIX Security: Marcus Ranum pulls out a Hasselblad, a ringflash and asks me to sit for a portrait

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ranum-portrait

Pose is as the photographer wanted. Do what the man wants, he has the camera. My print arrived in the post a few weeks later.

Subsequently he did a whole pile of other security geek portraits; where they are I don’t know, but the one of Bob Morris Sr is epic, and spattered around the web in several places; the one of Morris Jr is far from bad, likewise.

Ranum’s stuff is more radical, nowadays.