NotPetya: First Strike in a Cyber War?

The law of international conflict is clear on when and how a state may invoke a state of armed conflict between sovereign nations. For example, in the US, the power to declare war is reserved for Congress, regardless of the President’s position as head of the US Armed Forces. It also dictates the reasons for …

Twitter and the Right Not to Be Blocked

What follows in pure conjecture, and in no way constitutes legal opinion. It merely outlines one of many possible outcomes. An article in the New York Post on June 6 reported on a potential legal case aiming to force President Trump to unblock users he has blocked from seeing or tweeting to his timeline, either directly …

“No Thanks, We’re Too Busy,” or Pay Back Technical Debt?

We have all heard this refrain. I bet many of you can even hear yourselves saying it. Over my many years in IT, I have often heard this from coworkers, bosses, and clients. I have even said it a few times myself. But what if we just stopped and listened? Who knows where that conversation could …

Privacy: It Is Such a Personal Thing, Part 1

This is the first in a series of articles that outline the legal position on an individual’s right to privacy with regard to personal data held across the world. There is an implicit assumption that every individual has the right to privacy. In fact, you could say it is a human right. This right to …

Like Cloud and Virtualization, Serverless Computing Is Still Someone Else’s Computer

Today, serverless is all the rage. In the beginning, we had the server. Then along came virtualization, and things were good. We saved money. We could purchase less tin but run more servers. We could easily see the benefits of moving in that direction: lower power requirements, less hardware needing cooling down in our computer …

VMware Leaves the Data Protection Market

Back in April, VMware announced the end of life for its vSphere Data Protection (VDP) product. This little nugget was once again hidden in a blog post, in which VMware stated that moving forward after vSphere 6.5, it would be helping to consolidate backup and recovery by realigning its focus on its Storage APIs. Now, before you go into full panic mode, you …