Sarah Palin resigned providing for an inadvertent early holiday present. Now, as she goes off in search of a speech writer (she REALLY needs one), we would like to wish a very happy July 4th to our American cousins from all of us at Liquidmatrix Security Digest (well, the Canadian part of the gang).
Enjoy!
Hmm. Wondering if there is an impending scandal about to break in the Palin camp.
Nope, not 300. This is our 3000th post.
Damn.
I have to admit that I’m pleasantly surprised with the growth of Liquidmatrix Security Digest over the last few years. I’m grateful to have seen it grow and evolve over time. Now we have five writers and an ever growing reader base. It pains me to think that four years ago I almost shuttered the site for good. My wife kicked me in the ass and told me to keep it going. Then soon afterward Jamie kicked me again and said “you should really turn the site into a blog”.
The rest is history.
Liquidmatrix Security Digest is just that, a digest. We pick through the daily detritus of “news” and bypass the annoying press releases about machines that help in “compliancy” and will save your “cyber” ass. The Intern works diligently to pull together the daily security briefing of the news highlights. We try to share as much of the marrow as we can. This isn’t a paid operation. This is a rag tag collection of security folks that try very hard to give back to the community.
Now we have shwag (thx myrcurial) and plan to start churning out some t-shirts later on.
I’d like to take a moment to go all PBS on you and ask, if you’re so inclined, if you’d consider making a donation so that we can improve our service and offerings.
Thanks to all of our readers and subscribers that help to make this a worthwhile endeavour.
Thanks for reading!
Note: If you’re heading to Notacon this week be sure to find Jamie (@myrcurial) (who will be speaking at 1 pm on Saturday CHECK IT OUT) and hound him for some Liquidmatrix stickers.
And a “3000″ suggestion from @shrdlu
Yup, the sticker order came in.
We ordered from 123stickers.com — the same company that is used by Johnny Long for the I Hack Charities stickers.
These are the beta-test stickers for the big giveaway batch that we’re having made up for DEFCON this summer.
If you want some stickers, get in touch and maybe we can work something out. I’m probably going to send an envelope to each of the regional #sectwits and let them distribute.
Also, please don’t hesitate to visit the shwag store over there… helps to fund this little adventure!
Click more if you want to see closeups of all of them.
So you may have noticed that in addition to Dave and I there have been some other names showing up here as authors on Liquidmatrix.
Notwithstanding the long service of The Intern (our daily news hound who really does do the job that neither Dave nor I want to do), we’ve added a few more voices to the conversation here.
A few days ago, you may have encountered postings by Matt Johansen an aspiring Information Security Professional who has just recently finished his education and is attacking the job market with gusto.
Today we’re proud to add a very well known Information Security Pro and general all around awesome guy Quine (sometimes known as Zach Lanier) to the authorship team here and you’ll see his first few postings cropping up over the next few days.
You can expect more changes out of the Digest over the next few months – more and better features added to our (hopefully award winning) daily updates on what matters to security folks trying to make a difference in the trenches.
What we need more of now is some feed back from YOU. Please drop us a line any time, we’d be happy to hear what you’ve got to say. Comment, email, twitter, RFC 1149, whatever works for you.
Thanks for reading, please read some more!
Tags: new authors, administravia, @securityintern, @mattjay, @quine
So, James and I got to talking over lunch last week that Liquidmatrix was in need of an updating. This is quite literally the result of a firewater fueled marathon updating process that lasted well into the wee hours.
Now, there are bugs in site that I’m playing whack-a-mole with for the time being. We’d be very interested to hear your impressions of this new design.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled lives…
The good folks over at IT World Canada have posted a list of “must read” sites as chosen by Canadian IT execs. And, low and behold, we here at Liquidmatrix made the list. Thanks to Brian at CMS for the nod.
Now, they gave me credit but, there are a couple other folks here at the Security Digest that make this thing work. James Arlen, resident instigator and the “Intern” who works like crazy of to bring you the news wrap up every morning.
And congrats to our friend Chris Hoff who was also made the list.
So, thank you very much.
Of course you realize that this will only encourage us.
Sometimes motivation becomes an issue. Exercise and diet may be all ship shape and work might actually not suck and still you can find it hard to get excited about things. Just over a week ago I was in Washington DC for Shmoocon. That was a motivator. But, now I have a motivational hangover.
I swear I’ll actually post pics from the con sometime today. I got into the office this morning all raring to go. No meetings and a free hand to do something technical when I saw it.
The wall.
There it was looming over my desk ready to fall on me. Someone get a spatula and a sponge. This is gonna be messy.
So, I started to do some root cause analysis. I’ve been reading “The 4-Hour Workweek” which does little to inspire me for my day job. Not that I loathe it. Just the idea of sitting on a beach making money while listening to waves roll in is rather appealing. The other half of the analysis was a comment that was in the moderation queue from a halfwit that, based on his resume, I would have hoped for better. James will be handling the reply to him but, it was that the commenter demonstrated a complete absence of sense. Maybe the combination of the two ganged up on me with a sock full of oranges.
Who knows? I find that as I write this I’m already beginning to feel an uptick in my mood.
Beaches and douchetards make for an ugly combination on a Monday Tuesday morning.
What do you do to help get your motivation into high gear?
To the proud constituents of the Liquidmatrix Army:
I call upon you this day to take note, not since the dark ages of October 2006 has there been such a glorious day for our proud people.
Much as was said by El Jefe, our glorious leader (shall he reign forever), it’s time to grow up and own it.
As you may have noticed in recent times, I’ve been… shall we say… the anti-recluse.
If you were paying attention, you would’ve seen me here:
And of course, no one could possibly forget seeing me here:
And with such public excursions, the swiftest reconnaissance squadron known to any – the Liquidmatrix Army – would have also noticed me (or my evil twin half-brother) in a few other places.
Upon the sage advice of El Jefe, I did a funny (and potentially cripplingly foolish) thing.
In submitting an abstract for a speaking engagement, I did the unthinkable and just like Superman (III),
strangled that grey-hat hacker Myrcurial and completely outed myself in what has been amongst the info security (and control systems security) best held non-secrets.
So howdy everyone, just call me James.
And don’t worry, I’m not changing – I’ll be the same acerbic person you’ve all come to know and (love|hate) – I do have a reputation to uphold after all. 
It’s a long weekend for me and I’m taking some time to catch up on posts that I’ve been meaning to get done. Also, I’ll be mucking about with our database but, it shouldn’t be so that anyone will notice. Mind you…
Have a great weekend folks. Check back for a (belated) wrap up from Last Hope.
In the meantime here is an amusing piece from Bruce Schneier on why people shouldn’t listen to him.
Sorry for the lack of updates today. Our backend database cluster decided to fall on its sword this morning and we’re cleaning up the mess. We’ll be updating content again tomorrow first thing. Unless of course I happen to I feel froggy after work then I’ll tackle some updates.
Thanks for the emails. All is well.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
