Strategy is the process of imagining possible futures and how they come about, then “pruning” back the lines of causality to try to infer what actions will get you there. It’s an active process that stresses a person’s creativity and analytic skills. The hardest part, I believe, is coming up with (and eliminating) endless hypotheticals of everything that could go wrong right now for any given now. This, however, is the essence of strategy.
This is another story in the “things I am tracking but I am not sure what they mean, yet” file. Unfortunately, we won’t (probably) know for a year or two; there are still a lot of shoes to drop.
[Edit: I wrote this monday afternoon. Since then there have been new developments, which I will comment on at the bottom. The bit about hypothetical Mossad spies inside Kaspersky Labs was kidding, when I wrote it, I swear.]
Once upon a time, there was an old mother pig who had three little pigs and not enough food to feed them. So she hit on the idea of sending them off with a little capital (she kept 40% of the equity and a seat on the board) to go build successful websites and get rich and famous and support themselves.
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Warning: Sexual practices, bodily fluids
There’s an old USENET dictum: “never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes.” (corollary: yeah, but the latency’s killer)
There’s a small bit of kerfuffle around the new iPhone facial recognition feature.
But sometimes the format lends itself well to snappy comebacks.
New databases are being assembled for ‘tone’ surveillance. What’s that? It’s not Miss Manners.
I’m naturally suspicious of governments, and the suspicion seems to be mutual. Since I’m not trying to do any harm, that annoys me more than a bit: they want to treat me like a criminal, even though I mostly want to be left alone to live out my life without being interfered with by their wars, walls, economic collapses, and oligarchs. Is that too much to ask?
This is another example of credulous/bad reporting about my field. Whenever I see the press utterly fail to “get” something to do with computer security, I assume they’re equally lazy and wrong about every other field that requires more understanding than “who made Kim Kardashian’s shoes?” (because they are labelled)
If you haven’t seen the Talking Heads True Stories you should. [amazon] But that’s not what we’re going to be talking about today. I just needed a title for the blog posting, and that got me thinking.