Security Leader, Researcher, Developer, Writer, & Photographer
During a break over Christmas 2020, I rebuilt this site, moving from WordPress to Hugo . After more than 5 years of publishing with Hugo, I’d like to share what I’ve learned, what’s worked, what hasn’t, and why for once, I’m happy with the platform I’m using. This review builds on two recent articles, Five Hundred , a retrospective of 500 posts to this site, and…
A recent article, The Future of Cybersecurity Includes Non-Human Employees 1 , discussed the growing need to manage access granted to the rapidly expanding number of AI agents being deployed in companies. This is a deeply important topic, and particularly timely, as many are facing this challenge today. While I do want to address that topic, I also want to address how this is being framed. Aside…
Amongst the steady stream of marketing emails for gift cards and other last minute gifts in the days before Christmas, buried in the noise sent when people are least likely to see it, was a notice. It was an all-too-familiar “we take your privacy seriously, but” email. Perfectly timed to make it clear that privacy wasn’t that important. This wasn’t just my email address being leaked, this was…
I’m a big fan of Hugo as a publishing platform, it’s the framework behind this site, and is incredibly flexible - if you are willing to invest the time and effort to make it truly yours. It’s fast, versatile, and has robust theming support. However, it’s also a static site generator, so doing anything dynamic means doing some extra work (as you have to do it at build time).…
Twenty years ago, I started publishing articles and essays here, and I recently published the 500th post to this site. After writing 267,897 words here and investing 2,100 hours into this site, I’ve learned a few things, made some mistakes, and I’d like to share some of these insights with you. Whether you are a veteran of the blogosphere or questioning if you should dip your toes in…
The year was 2006 when I registered adamcaudill.com and set up WordPress to host this site. I had recently moved, started a new job as a software developer, and I wanted a new place to share thoughts, code, and the insight I was gathering along the way. I made the very first post . It will be 20 years, next month, since that first post, a short note from someone still finding his legs in the…
Over the course of my career, I’ve found that there are some principles that are key for people and teams to be effective. One of these is that everything should have an owner. Everything should have someone that is responsible. Everything should have a designated person whose job it is to care about it. This might a be bug or vulnerability reports in software, it could be routine processes,…
In a world where attention spans have been reduced to seconds, college students aren’t expected to read full books, AI is used to summarise anything more than a few sentences, and blogs have been largely replaced with microblogging platforms, is there still a place for long-form writing? In this essay I would like to explore that question; from how we got here to what hope we have for the…
Every person has rules that they apply to themself, red lines that they won’t cross. For me, signing my name to anything generated by AI is one of those. I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about why. I spend a lot of time writing. Some is on this site, though much more of my work isn’t public, is published elsewhere, not yet published, or ghost written for others. On this site, according…
For more than a year there has been a clear trend: unemployment in the tech industry was climbing. The number of people with an #OpenToWork badge on their picture was climbing. There was something worse though, something that I hadn’t seen before: several months later, they were still looking. Something was wrong. Something had changed. There are incredibly talented people with years or even…
What do we owe to each other? This is a classic question of moral philosophy, and a critical question that defines how society itself functions. It’s also a key question to understand what role each of us plays to make society successful. These words were started as society was entering a seismic shift, the COVID-19 pandemic had started, people were dying, fear ran deep, and the disease impacted…
Technology improves and advances ceaselessly, new tools are created and change how people work. Some are small and simple, making people somewhat more productive. Others revolutionise the way people work. These revolutionary tools may come along only once or twice in a generation, and when they do, they tend make people uncomfortable. They can make people question their role, their skills, their…
Can generative AI create art? Two years ago I took my first swing at answering that , at least from my perspective. 1 As AI systems become more advanced, this question, and the issues surrounding it have become of greater import. With a new release from OpenAI, it’s become a topic of great passion, and one prime to revisit for me. I would like to explore this topic more deeply than I did…
One of the many joys of being human, is that we constantly face questions about our existence, from the seemingly simple (why is the sky blue), to the labyrinthine (what is the meaning of life, does pineapple go on pizza). Thanks to growing up watching Star Trek, one of these that has fascinated me is the question of artificial life. Thanks to a character named Data, a character that’s both…
It has been 20 years since I first used machine learning to solve a complex business problem. The underlying problem was simple: the company was selling a new service and wanted to know who was most likely to buy it. We had millions of records, and each record had hundreds of fields. A vast amount of data, but no idea how to extract insight from it. Countless hours from various data analysts had…
In the world of security, everything comes down to trust; sooner or later you have to trust something . Often, this something is a human. While we are busy building advanced cryptosystems that will survive the heat death of the universe, sooner or later, digging down layer by layer, you get down to a human and their limited memory. While we may build software, hardware, and other systems to…
The latest vulnerability causing headaches across the world is CVE-2023-4863 , issued by Google Chrome and described as “ Heap buffer overflow in WebP in Google Chrome prior to 116.0.5845.187 allowed a remote attacker to perform an out of bounds memory write via a crafted HTML page ”. This same CVE is cited by a number of other vendors as they are impacted as well. But, is this really…
Generative AI 1 is changing the world, and is doing so faster than most of us could realise. While I don’t share the fear that it’ll destroy humanity (something we’re doing quite well at, without help), I do see that it’s having an impact on how we work, how we interact, and will have a growing impact on what jobs survive into the next generation. Just as switchboard…
Today is a red letter day in the history of Twitter, though not in a good way. Twitter has a long reputation of free speech, providing a platform for all that wanted it, easily connecting to the powerful, building communities, and organising against tyranny. This didn’t come without controversy of course; in the effort to keep the platform safe, more and more moderation was implemented -…
or: How an 18th century painter saved Warsaw from the Nazis, and how 3D scanners may save Ukraine While researching applications that use the iPhone’s LiDAR scanner or perform more pure photogrammetry, I came across an effort by Polycam - likely the largest player in this space - to help protect the heritage of Ukraine and its people: Backup Ukraine . This is an effort to recruit people in…