that time i wrote something in 2015

This has been a good year and a bad year and an everything in between year. I wrote some stuff too. Here are some of my bylines to prove to the world that I’m not a complete failure.

On the technology/business side:

There was a small conference where all the Important Internet People joined together and discussed the future of online governance. Weirdly enough, I got to attend too.

I talked with a woman who built a software company to track sex traffickers.

A man who is very much smarter than me has a (CIA-funded) company that analyzes every piece of data on the open internet. For some reason this guy let me interview him and write about his organization.

I learned that a well-known plublisher-platishing-plablogging website (which is definitely not the website hosting this self-promotional content right now) laid off a bunch of people and I wrote about why and how.

Also, privacy:

Some people are suing Facebook and other companies over how they collect your photo data, and I looked into what this means for all of Facebook’s users.

I got to learn about the future of wearable technology and how some cool looking garments can trick surveillance.

A designer built a font to obfuscate words that trigger the NSA’s potential terrorist list, and he was cool and talked to me.

I did some reporting on the surveillance tool StingRay and how it’s pretty fucked up.

And now for some culture and other fun things:

I answered a question that’s been nagging me for over ten years: Is it possible to sail across an ocean atop a duck boat?

I found out about an age-old Naval hazing ritual that’s been adopted by ocean scientists.

Do you have questions about coffee? Well I probably (hopefully) answered them because I spent dozens of hours testing devices and writing about it.

I also looked into the original Manhattan surveyor bolts and how you (yes you!) can still find them to this day.

In short, I wrote some and learned a lot. I hope this continues in 2016.

Namaste.