As much as I love putting out these articles, it feels impossible sometimes to find the time. I’m writing this from an Air Canada jet flying from Toronto to Seattle. Why you ask? Turns out one of my companies — Lockdrop, just placed first in the 2021 FIDO Alliance Developer…

Driving progress through pricing One area that’s always fascinated me about AWS is how they use pricing to drive positive action from their customers. Typically this is most apparent in how AWS incentivizes customers to adopt or migrate to the latest generation EC2 instance types. The value proposition for the customer is clear, for…

In the Toronto area when the COVID-19 pandemic hit last year (spring 2020) one of the consequences (benefits?) was that all businesses where employees could reasonably work from home ended up being forced to do so. This had an interesting effect on restaurants and the food service industry. In the…

TL;DR: Yes. Do I recommend it? No. Do you need actual experience in the subject matter area? Of course. Do the exams still validate knowledge? Yes! Even with our best of intentions, life sometimes gets in the way and things don’t go according to plan. If you’re like me, there’s…

Those in my orbit for the past couple years know that I’ve been working on scaling a bootstrapped startup — Lockdrop Inc.. The phrase “Aiming to launch next week!” is something they’ve heard from my mouth far too many times (if you’re a startup founder, you know how it goes)…

The other day I was thinking about how I could possibly explain the differences between encryption-in-transit and end-to-end/client-side encryption and show the importance of the latter and the realistic weaknesses of the former. Cue Scarlett Johansson in the movie Lucy (2014).

Back in August of this year, Christopher Mele of The New York Times wrote an article entitled “ Data Breaches Keep Happening, So Why Don’t You Do Something?”. …

(with On-Access Scanning) — But I thought Linux (and Macs) aren’t affected by Viruses? Often people ask is Antivirus necessary on Linux systems? The answer is it really depends. Some may need it for compliance purposes, for example some QSAs (PCI DSS) would consider Linux these days to be “commonly affected by malicious software”. …

While it’s fresh… Today, I wrote and passed the AWS Certified Security — Specialty exam (SCS-C01). While the experience is still fresh in my mind, I want to solidify my thoughts into a format that others can digest. Hopefully this article will help others prepare for this exam, find value in, and achieve…