“my-url-is from SXSW2003” by tantek is licensed under CC BY-NC

If you do not own and define your truth someone else will.

Integrity matters in CyberSecurity.

Rather than handing off your truth and spillng yarns across social media you should own your story. Instead of allowing large multinational companies to shape your tale you you should craft your story. In place of an algorithim choosing the friends and strangers worthy enough to see your post you should share your story.

In no time in human history has all our knwoeldge flowed through just four or five companies.

Does that make you feel safer?

Reducing Friction

Sure the faceless homogenized UX of modern social media provides greater access. Handing off the DevSecOps of the backend and client side UI does add security across the CIA triad of confidentialy, integrity, and availability, but friction matters.

By creating what Ursula Franklin calls prescriptive technology modern social media platforms have erased all the friction in publishing conent to the web. This homogenizes the experience, the art form, and concentrates ownership.

Reducing friction, or what we call publishing with social media, also ceded control to corporations who will always place their profit margins over your content. By law corporations have a legal obligation to their fiduciary share holders and not to your overall well being as human with an identity and story to tell.

You need to own that identity and story.

My URL is

You need to answer the question, My URL is.”

You get the joy of growing with your skills. You get to make the web your own.

Kinda like how it used to be. In fact the folks who knew all the lyrics to this year’s Super Bowl show, many of them got their first taste of “code” changing CSS in MySpace. CSS, cascading stylesheets tell websites how to look. You used to be able to control your online style and not just get forced into market tested defaults (for a cool story of early Hip Hop and the web read up on Chamillionaire). We all know Tom spits NWA lyrics in the shower.

Yet at the same time friction comes with pain. Having some server space, either in your house or in the cloud, with a domain does come with dangers to your self and Internet health. You are putting yourself out there and requires accesss and authroization to a place online. If you build a website you have to assume attacks. Most Internet Service Providers and cloud host mitigate attacks but they can’t make up for bad passwords.

I also worry about Intenet Health when people have tools such as Installotron and CPanel. Many of the open source tools provided by Cloud Hosts may not get updated, require manually updating from terminal, or need to have account creation policies customized. A ton of spam and other malware gets spread by apps. For example I use an open source PHP wiki dokuwiki. At the time allowing account creation was the default. After watching my traffic spike and storage increase I had to manually go into my config file and delter all the users, read a bunch of documentation, and change a file to remove access. Many people may not know how do this but can still install these tools.

For my apps I have moved off a LAMP stack and now use Reclaim Cloud. I love it and highly recommend it. I also like knowing that by taking advantage of the K8 infrastructre Reclaim Hosting handles almost all the DevSecOPs for me (still can’t make up for bad passwords). By having each app in its own container I do not have to worry as much that all my sanboxing pollutes the web with attack vectors.

I need to migrate all my web properties…but friction…and manual until it hurts…

The Othello Way

I used to love playing Othello with my grandfather. The game, where you jump and flip each others chips and count colors to see who wins had a slogan, “Minutes to Learn, Lifetime to Master” or something like that (80s a bit ago).

We need open web tools like this. I kinda think micro.blog does this for me. Sure many use it for the intentional community but micro.blog also makes for an “othello” kinda MySpace.

You don’t need to know any code and can just type, upload photos, and reply. Yet if you want to change the CSS you can. It is built using a Hugo blog engine so you can do a ton of stuff depending on your skill level. Want to build a plug in or mobile app and you can. Have a podcast. Done. Newsletter done.

A reader where you can add the blogs from anywhere on the web without corporate control. Done. If those blogs use IndieWeb building blocks you can even interact from right inside the reader.

I also get to protect my data. All of my posts go to the Internet Archive and get backed up to GitHub as well. If I want to leave micro.blog I can just point my Domain somewhere else.

I Own my digital Infrastructure

A Domain of One's Own

I have long supported giving students a URL and server space. I see it now as more critical than ever. Not only must we point youth to a different path where their lives do not get algorithimically categorized and sorted for the highest bidder but we need a new generation of cyber experts.

If you can keep a WordPress site on a LAMP stack secure, managing a Security Operations Center, a SOC, be a walk in the park.