Search

Byline: Paul Venezia If you've read my blog over the past decade, you probably noticed that I stopped writing it last summer. After 12 years, I took a break that [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia The last time I had the occasion to interview Linus Torvalds, it was 2004, and version 2.6 of the Linux kernel had been recently released. I was [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia I walked into an apartment in Boston on a sunny day in June 1995. It was small and bohemian, with the normal detritus a pair of young [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia If you haven't seen the HBO show 'Silicon Valley,' it's worth the time. Along with many jabs at well-known tech companies, it's surprisingly accurate with regard to [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Much has been said in this space on the continued attacks on encryption by politicians across the globe. This demonization of the mechanism that holds the Internet [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia For whatever cosmic reason, some industries are sleazier than others. It's nowhere written that used car salesmen must come off as con men, but many do. Timeshare [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia No matter how much of a force a company might seem, all good things must come to an end. That's not to say that today's juggernauts will [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia As you may have noticed, I've been ruminating a lot about communications recently, specifically messaging and email. I'm not done. Messaging and email are the most ubiquitous [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia We live in a constantly connected world. We can contact anyone on or off the planet in a matter of seconds. We communicate using a wide variety [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Five years ago, I wrote a column about how the fax machine refuses to die. Five years is a long time in terms of technology, but only [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Setting universal standards has never been easy. Over the centuries, the world hasn't agreed on much of anything, from power outlets to politics. We must manufacture cars [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia At least Hillary Clinton's backward stance on encryption is somewhat in line with her actions. After all, it appears that she wasn't using encryption on her email [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia In case you missed it, Microsoft made a bunch of Linux-related announcements recently. First, we found out Microsoft was offering SQL Server running on Linux. Then at [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia No matter what you do in IT, one certainty persists: You will have questions. Very few tasks and zero projects come completely packaged and ready to go [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia It was a simpler time when Patch Tuesday was the most significant update cycle in technology. Of course there were patches and updates for other operating systems [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia The last few turns in the Apple/FBI fiasco have been illuminating and highly disturbing -- its becoming a war. Late last week, the Department of Justice filed [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia In the decades Ive been in deep IT, there have been a few constants in the sea of change. One of those constants is that the simpler [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Working in deep IT is a double-edged sword. We know a lot more about the tech that nontechies use daily, but this wisdom can come back to [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Choosing a small-business or remote-site server has always involved trade-offs. You cant spend too much, but you dont want to aim too short and deploy undersized hardware [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia One of the constants in the tech world is that the marketing and sales folks want to make hard things easy in order to net more sales. [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia I welcomed 2016 with a column about events that may come to pass -- or at least substantially grow in significance -- this year. That included a [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia For most casual users, the OS X command line, accessed via the Terminal app, is at least as murky and daunting as the Windows Command Prompt, to [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia A quick glance around an IT infrastructure of any size will reveal a rich mosaic of hardware and software management tools in use. They might be as [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Via Facebook, a friend invited me to a surprise birthday party for her sister last week, and I perchance ran into her a few days later. We [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Ive been spending quite a bit of time on embedded devices recently, as both a user and a designer. Its not my first rodeo -- I've designed [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia As we continue the march of Webifying everything, of BYOD becoming a pervasive part of professional life, and of more user tracking from websites at every level, [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia After a tumultuous 2015 in tech, 2016 promises to be much the same. The past year opened with wrangling over Net neutrality, and it closed with wrangling [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia This past year in technology has been quite the roller coaster. Of course, you could say the same for most years in the past few decades, but [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Last week, Lets Encrypt came out of beta. Lets Encrypt is a collaborative effort that provides free SSL/TLS certificates for use by anyone with a valid Internet [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia One thing you can say for traditional broadcast media: They scale really well. If you put an analog signal on the air or on a wire with [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia A little more than a year ago, I urged manufacturing companies testing the IoT waters to leave the work of bringing Internet connectivity to their traditionally unconnected [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia I paused a TV show last week as one of those lower-third ads promoting the local newscast was displayed. It screamed, 'Encryption preventing police from catching criminals, [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia If you have access to a system and network infrastructure testing lab, fully stocked with server and network hardware, consider yourself incredibly fortunate. The predominate corporate attitude [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Ive long been of the mind that server reboots should be rare events. Unless theres no other choice, giving a server the three-finger salute to try to [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Were not using Windows 95 anymore. Few Pentium I systems remain in production use, and the majority of the world no longer connects to the Internet through [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia In IT, we love redundancy and headroom: redundant power, redundant uplinks, redundant controllers, database replication, server clusters, more CPU and RAM resources, the works. For critical systems, [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Among the headlines in the tech press last week was news of a massive Linux botnet that was apparently crippling various sites on the Internet with 150Gbps [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia If you haven't heard, Apple has locked out root from various file system paths and core functions in Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan. The new sheriff [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia I happened across a post on Reddit by chance, asking about textfile manipulation. It was a fairly simple request, similar to those that folks in Unix see [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia I'm pretty sure we all know at least one person who is convinced that they're cursed by technology. Though they use laptops, smartphones, tablets, and other trappings [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia If you havent heard, we have this awesome new thing now called a cloud server. Though the name doesnt mean anything in particular, you can think of [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Theres a fine line between bravery and idiocy, and its usually determined by the outcome. Such is true in conflict and in IT. One of the major [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia I don't like automation -- I love it. I whisper sweet nothings, come 'round with flowers, and buy milkshakes for automation. I've even stood outside the window [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Back when Steve Jobs launched the first salvo in the war against Adobe Flash, declaring in no uncertain terms that the iPhone would never support the ubiquitous [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Some companies -- like Apple -- seem to think that older versions of their software simply vanish from the world when new versions are released. Not only [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia A few times over the past several weeks I've been reminded of how difficult it must be for vendors to maintain consistency in administrative or user interfaces [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Twenty years ago, getting a high-speed connection to the Internet involved having the local telco install a TDM circuit, such as a T1 or T3, then terminating [...]

Byline: Paul Venezia Last week I argued that requiring backdoors in strong encryption would result in the effective end of encryption and provide a veritable buffet of sensitive data to [...]