Thoughts, experiences, and insights from my journey in technology, automation, and the occasional failed experiment.
Destin Sandlin spent four years trying to build one grill brush entirely in America. The engineering was never the hard part. Monopsony, enshittification, and a broken knowledge chain were. I am trying to 3D-print a home on wheels in the same economy, so I took notes.
The State Department just put a $10 million bounty on two Russia-linked crews who talked Signal and WhatsApp users into handing over their backup recovery key. No exploit, no cracked encryption, just a fake support agent and a sense of urgency. The lock held. The person holding the phone did not. After nearly 30 years in this field, that gap is the whole job, and it is not closing anytime soon.
Second in a series on trust theft. A security firm never hacked anything. It forged a badge: merged a fake skill into a 36,000-star marketplace, ran an Instagram ad, and watched it spread to roughly 26,000 AI agents while every scanner called it safe. The payload was never in the package. It lived on a page the skill pointed to, swapped clean after the scan cleared.
The first in a short series about one pattern: nothing gets hacked, something gets trusted that shouldn't. Bernie Sanders sat down with WIRED, got asked why we call Russian billionaires oligarchs but call ours entrepreneurs, and accidentally described a social-engineering attack running at the scale of a whole democracy's vocabulary. A nearly 30-year cybersecurity veteran reads Citizens United, Super PACs, and the AI automation push as one unpatched exploit wearing three costumes.
A Car Coach Reports video gets the first half right: the corner gas station is not gouging you. Then it hands you a respectable lie, that it is all taxes and California. That is the next layer of the same con. Part 3 of the series is about who is holding the valve, and why they need you confused to keep holding it.
First they repealed the middle class. Now they're renting it back to you, one month at a time. Musician and analyst Benn Jordan calls it Leveragism. I've spent almost thirty years inside the software industry that pioneered the model, and I watched it spread from the server room to your driveway and living room. Here's where the keys are.
A. Mechele Dickerson went on The Daily Show to explain how America engineered its middle class through deliberate policy, then dismantled it the same way. I filed Chapter 7 on October 15, 2025. Here's what that looks like up close, and why my fall wasn't a moral failing but a predictable output.
Security researcher Simon Willison's Lethal Trifecta framework explains why virtually every AI agent deployment is already a PII/BII timebomb: private data access + exposure to untrusted content + the ability to communicate externally. All three conditions exist in your environment right now.
AI just found 22 vulnerabilities in Firefox in two weeks. It's better at finding bugs than exploiting them, for now. That gap is closing faster than anyone is prepared for.
I'm a 49-year-old chronic pain patient with a fused spine, a late-in-life AuDHD diagnosis, and nearly a decade of opioid dependency behind me. Medical cannabis gave me my life back. In return, my home state of Texas won't let me legally access it, federal law calls me a criminal for crossing state lines to get it, and the same government that approves pharmaceutical cannabis derivatives wants to strip my Second Amendment rights over a plant. I'm done being quiet.
The First Amendment was never just a suggestion; it was the sacred realization by the authors of the American Revolution that the government must not control the flow of information. Today, we are watching a systemic pincer movement where the billionaires buy the pipes and the Presidency squeezes the valves.
Microsoft just dropped the February 2026 Patch Tuesday bundle, and it is not a 'we'll get to it next week' situation. We're looking at more than 50 vulnerabilities, including six zero-days that attackers are actively exploiting in the wild.
ALPRs aren't just traffic cameras; they're corporate-owned surveillance machines systematically building detailed movement dossiers on everyday Americans. A critical analysis of how surveillance disproportionately targets marginalized communities.
DOGE wasn't an efficiency project. It was a power-and-data consolidation machine dressed up in budget cosplay. A technical analysis of how surveillance infrastructure was built under the guise of government reform.
Because it's a badge of honor, a conversation starter, and a nod to one of the best chapters of my career. The story behind a tattoo, community support, and the lasting impact of BigFix.
A year-long coordinated assault on U.S. cyber-infrastructure demonstrates why we need to restore CISA and raise the bar on cybersecurity. From policy prescriptions to practical solutions, here's what national resilience requires.
I didn't expect to find common ground with a church on AI ethics. But their four principles offer surprisingly practical guidance for responsible AI use, privacy protection, and maintaining human autonomy.
The classic price tag is dying, replaced by data-driven algorithmic price steering. As someone who worked on early digital shelf tags at America's largest grocery chain, I can tell you: it was scary then, it's much scarier now.
How 'AI safety' is being rebranded into a narrative weapon that centralizes control while the same systems remain fundamentally exploitable. A critical look at what really happened with Anthropic's Claude hack.
All across the U.S., cameras you barely notice are logging license plates and building a dossier on everyday movement. These aren't just traffic cams anymore - they're corporate-owned surveillance systems that threaten your privacy.
How artificial intelligence is transforming the cybersecurity landscape and what organizations need to know to stay ahead.
Advanced techniques for automating enterprise endpoint management with HCL BigFix that I've developed over years of practice.
My vision for integrating advanced technology into RV manufacturing and services - a look into the future of mobile living.
BigFox is the nickname lovingly given to our tiny home and is the amalgamation of BigFix & Arctic Fox. She's based on a fully-customized 2016 Northwood Arctic Fox 31D travel trailer.