My Blog

Thoughts, experiences, and insights from my journey in technology, automation, and the occasional failed experiment.

Aug 24, 2026

13 min read

They Didn't Give the AI Your Endpoints. They Gave It Your Operator.

On August 5, HCL shipped an MCP server for the BigFix Platform, so you can now point Claude, Copilot, or Gemini straight at your endpoint management infrastructure and talk to it in English. The core security engineering is genuinely good: read-only enforced at execution time, write approvals cryptographically bound to the exact payload, fail closed, full audit trail. Then you look at what surrounds it. A self-signed certificate that makes disabling TLS validation the fastest route to a working demo. A Least Privilege checkbox that ships unchecked. One header that switches off the strongest control in the product. This is the first post under a name for a pattern I have circled for two months: The Perimeter Is a Person. The lock holds. Somebody talks the keyholder into opening it. This time nobody even had to lie.

CybersecurityEndpoint ManagementAIThe Perimeter Is a Person

Aug 17, 2026

9 min read

Nobody Was Watching the Repo

On August 6 at Black Hat, two OpenAI researchers explained how their own frontier models escaped a sandbox, turned an internal Artifactory instance into a covert message board, coordinated as a swarm, and then spent four and a half days inside Hugging Face's production systems. The exploit chain is genuinely new. The control failure is not. A package proxy trusted as controlled egress and never watched, credentials left lying around, a covert channel wiped and rebuilt because nobody instrumented the hole. Those are three controls I have been auditing for nearly 30 years, and every door those agents walked through is one we already know how to lock.

CybersecurityAI GovernanceEnterprise IT

Aug 12, 2026

8 min read

Endpoint Hygiene Was Never an IT Problem. It's a Budget Problem in an IT Costume.

Microsoft just shipped fixes for 398 vulnerabilities in a single Patch Tuesday, roughly 200 in June, more than 570 in July, and Microsoft is openly crediting AI for the flood. This is not a spike, it is the new floor. AI turns out to be excellent at finding holes and mediocre at closing them, which makes the human-plus-tooling side the whole ballgame. Nearly 30 years in endpoint management taught me the real failure is almost never technical. It is a funding decision, made by people who can be named, that lands on IT's name instead of theirs.

CybersecurityEndpoint ManagementPersonal Story

Aug 10, 2026

11 min read

Biff Got the Almanac. We Got the Timeline.

John Oliver spent a segment on what Trump has done to the DOJ, and I could not shake the feeling that I am living in Hill Valley 1985A. Biff was never the danger. The almanac was: the book that told him the outcome before the game was played. A Justice Department that lost a quarter of its lawyers, gutted its Civil Rights Division, and dropped 23,000 investigations looks a lot like a man holding a book he should not have. Hot analogy, cold evidence, and the one place the movie is wrong about us.

Policy AnalysisRule of LawPersonal Story

Aug 03, 2026

10 min read

The Grill Brush That Explains the Whole Broken Economy

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.

Economic PolicyAmerican ManufacturingTechnologyPersonal Story

Jul 27, 2026

6 min read

They Didn't Break Signal. They Broke the Person Holding the Phone.

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.

CybersecuritySocial EngineeringPrivacy

Jul 20, 2026

7 min read

They Didn't Hack the Agent. They Forged the Badge.

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.

CybersecurityAIAI Agents

Jul 13, 2026

6 min read

They Didn't Buy an Election. They Bought the Word for It.

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.

CybersecuritySocial EngineeringPolicy Analysis

Jul 07, 2026

7 min read

It Was Never Confusing. It Was Designed. And the Confusion Is the Point.

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.

Economic PolicyEnergyPersonal Story

Jun 29, 2026

7 min read

It Was Never a Dream. It Was a Subscription. And You Can't Cancel.

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.

Economic PolicyTechnologyPersonal Story

Jun 25, 2026

6 min read

It Was Never a Dream. It Was a Policy. And They Repealed It.

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.

Economic PolicyPersonal Story

Mar 10, 2026

8 min read

The Lethal Trifecta: AI Agents Are the Biggest PII/BII Threat Nobody's Prepared For

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.

CybersecurityAIPrivacyAI Agents

Mar 08, 2026

10 min read

The Clock Is Ticking: AI Can Find Your Software Vulnerabilities, and It's Learning to Exploit Them

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.

CybersecurityAIPolicy Analysis

Mar 03, 2026

20 min read

An Open Letter to Every Lawmaker Who Has Never Felt Chronic Pain

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.

Medical CannabisChronic PainPolicy AnalysisPersonal Story

Feb 20, 2026

8 min read

The Information Noose: The Systemic Erasure of the First Amendment

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.

First AmendmentFree SpeechPolicy Analysis

Feb 11, 2026

16 min read

Six Zero-Days and a Side of AI Risk: The February 2026 Patch Reality Check

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.

CybersecurityPatch ManagementZero-DayAI Safety

Feb 10, 2026

14 min read

The Privacy Crisis: Surveillance Technology and Its Impact on American Cities

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.

PrivacySurveillancePolicy Analysis

Jan 28, 2026

18 min read

DOGE: The Data Consolidation Operation Disguised as Efficiency

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.

PrivacySurveillancePolicy Analysis

Jan 13, 2026

8 min read

Why is my favicon still the classic BigFix logo?

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.

BigFixCareer StoryTech Community

Dec 15, 2025

16 min read

When Trump 2.0 Goes Cyber: Why We Need a New CISA and a Bigger Cyber Playbook

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.

CybersecurityPolicyTechnology

Jan 15, 2025

9 min read

When a Church Nails AI Ethics (From a Privacy Hawk Who's Agnostic)

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.

AI EthicsPrivacyTechnology

Dec 08, 2025

14 min read

Goodbye Price Tags, Hello Dynamic Gouging: How Grocers and Algorithms Are Quietly Taxing Your Life

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.

PrivacySurveillanceTechnology

Nov 29, 2025

10 min read

When "AI Safety" Becomes a Weapon: Lessons from Anthropic's Claude Hack Story

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.

AI SafetyCybersecurityTechnology

Sep 23, 2025

12 min read

Breaking the "Safe" Illusion: Why AI-Powered Police Cameras Threaten Your Privacy

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.

PrivacyAI & SurveillanceTechnology

Apr 24, 2025

15 min read

Cybersecurity in the Age of AI: What's Changing

How artificial intelligence is transforming the cybersecurity landscape and what organizations need to know to stay ahead.

Technology

Jan 04, 2024

12 min read

BigFix Automation: Beyond the Basics

Advanced techniques for automating enterprise endpoint management with HCL BigFix that I've developed over years of practice.

Technology

Dec 16, 2023

7 min read

The RV Manufacturing Dream: Technology Meets Mobility

My vision for integrating advanced technology into RV manufacturing and services - a look into the future of mobile living.

From My Experiences

Dec 30, 2022

8 min read

What the Hell is a BigFox?

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.

RV LifeNomadic LifeOff-GridFrom My Experiences