Crisis meeting with a managing director and his accountant “watchdog”. We are in his meeting room, his territory in a mid-sized company. The situation is tense, facts no longer matter. My counterpart’s decision-making style has long been shaped by a lack of governance. As in a close-quarter firefight, the tone becomes louder, more forceful. Read more

Some time ago, in my post “From Mistrel to Heretic”, I wrote about my journey to digital independence. I received several questions about my tech stack afterwards. A fair question I’m happy and willing to answer: I rely on free solutions with GNU/Linux Debian2 as foundation. Read more

The Portable Document Format (PDF)1 is a great example of how an originally brilliant concept for displaying print documents has been ruined over decades. Initially conceived as successor to PostScript, it has degenerated into a universal container format. Text, images, vectors, scripts, fonts, form data, even complete 3D models there’s hardly anything, that can’t end up in a PDF, including Doom. Read more

Not only since my seven security tips1 have I been getting questions about why I prefer to keep Windows and an Active Directory2 offline. That may sound inflexible, and in an era of AI-generated cybersecurity slop3 I may look like an outsider. So in today’s blog post I provide more context, explain the technical background, and lay out how ransomware works. Read more