Writing

SecuritiAugust 2026Data securityResilience

When the Cloud Goes Dark

How Securiti and Veeam helped customers maintain continuity after the AWS UAE outage

In March 2026 drone strikes physically damaged AWS data centres in the UAE, and standard disaster recovery stopped working. Multi-AZ architectures protect against a facility failing, not against an entire region going down at once, and the zones sit close enough together that one large physical event takes all of them. Worse, EBS snapshots live in S3 in the same region, so the backups went dark alongside everything else. This is an account of what happened, why the textbook resilience playbook was not enough, and how recovery ended up depending on cross-cloud data visibility that already existed and on getting documented customer consent before any data crossed a border.

OktaOctober 28, 2022IdentityMFA

The Need for Phishing-Resistant MFA

Why traditional two-factor stopped being enough

Credential phishing moved on from static fake login pages to reverse-proxy frameworks that sit between the victim and the real site. The attacker relays the whole exchange in real time, so the second factor is completed legitimately and the session cookie is captured on the way back. SMS codes, authenticator apps and push notifications all share one blind spot: none of them can tell a real domain from a convincing fake. This walks through an adversary-in-the-middle attack step by step, sets it against NIST SP 800-63B, and compares authenticators from passwords up to hardware keys.

Still in circulationSeptember 2005PDF12 pages

An Introduction to Critical Reasoning

Written in 2005 while teaching critical reasoning for the GMAT, and handed out to students who kept asking the same question: how do you take an argument apart when you have ninety seconds and no idea what the topic is. It covers what logic can and cannot do for you, the difference between a premise and an assumption, and the habit that matters most, which is finding the conclusion before you read anything else. There is a diagramming method for reducing a paragraph to its skeleton, and worked examples built from arguments that were topical at the time.

It is twenty one years old and reads like it. The examples are dated and the formatting is a Word document that went through Ghostscript. It also still draws steady organic search and gets linked from test preparation forums, which I did not expect and have stopped trying to explain.

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From an older blog called One more Joker on the web. Left where they are, comment threads and all.

Older technical posts are kept in the archive.