Since late February 2022, the world has been transfixed by Russia’s increasingly brutal invasion of Ukraine. Among other items, the conflict represents the largest of its kind in Europe since the Second World War. Along with hostilities, Russia’s invasion induced significant outflows of refugees fleeing conflict in targeted urban areas. Read more…
One of the penultimate, and more poignant, episodes of the television series Band of Brothers was “Why We Fight.” The episode highlighted how, although the members of the unit followed through the series faced multiple trials and setbacks, the discovery of concentration camps emphasized the necessity for continuing the struggle Read more…
A common social media refrain in technology circles is the complaint of becoming “too political” – that content producers should focus on technical or professional subjects while avoiding charged, politically-tinged areas. This sentiment has always rung somewhat hollow to me as the concept of the political can be viewed as Read more…
On 02 November 2019, Brian Batholomew (at the time of this writing, at Kapsersky Lab) posted a very interesting Twitter poll. To summarize (or in case the poll is removed), the question can be simplified as the following: if someone bought leaked data from the Shadow Brokers, would you still Read more…
Writing during the tumultuous years of the English Civil War, Thomas Hobbes sought to identify the means through which humanity proceeds through an anarchical, violent natural state (the “nasty, brutish, and short” state of Man) to attain ordered, governed society. In formulating an idea of how such a society (or Read more…
Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Etherium, etc.) is quite possibly the most damaging, least useful, most reprehensible technological development of the past 20 years – which is definitely saying something given the rise of “social media”. While cryptocurrency advocates continually espouse benefits such as transactional anonymity, increased access to financial services, and financial Read more…
A common theme in metaphysics (and to some extent epistemology as well) since antiquity is understanding the relationships (or differences) between “things” and how we perceive or observe them. Examples extend from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and forms through Kant’s Transcendental Idealism to modern scientific variations such as Heisenberg’s Read more…
Many public discussions on information security tend to identify or claim the existence of an “information security community”. On its face, this seems a rather innocuous term that merely designates a collective of individuals dedicated toward relatively similar goals or ends – yet when delving a bit deeper, the term Read more…
The concept of praise and blame – or moral responsibility more generally – is a central concept in ethics that features many responses. Of note in evaluating various approaches to the problem is the concept of human fallibility in the face of ethical decision-making. For Aristotle, humanity is intrinsically flawed Read more…