David Cowan, General Partner with Bessemer Venture Partners, and frequent investor in security technologies, blogged how he phished movie tickets from unsuspecting kids at a movie theater in order to convince his wife that lots of work remained in the security space. It’s a very funny read that also, more seriously, illustrates very well that…

Amen! Thanks for putting it so nicely and quotable! This is indeed one of the mega-trends of our age, and I’m really hard-pressed to still find domains where that is not true yet (speaking about the US, other countries are different). Some examples off the top of my head: News: news organizations vs. bloggers. Healthcare:…

First there were the semantics, and then there are ways of rendering semantic information using things like HTML, or so established wisdom says. That’s why we have XSLT (to transform XML into HTML, for example, not the reverse), code and documentation generators (from UML, or from Java source code), and things like address book applications…

You simply must read this if you like pranks … in this case, with a serious security background. (via BoingBoing) This prankster started signing his credit card receipts in all sorts of unusual ways (scribbles, heiroglyphics, grids, etc.). The employees handling the transactions didn’t care one whit. They didn’t even look at the signatures. I…

Every year, I’m getting an invitation to an automotive-related conference organized by VDI, the main engineering organization in Germany. It’s written in English; well, it is written in something that probably wants to be English, but every year, its English is so bad that one immediately think that it must be a parody. Sadly, it…