This is how the world ends

The book is a grim lesson in how cyberwar is waged and underlined by long-held belief that privacy and the concept of secrecy is a fiction, that anything can be hacked…… Up until this book, the hidden market for zero day exploits has been covered in bits and pieces, but it’s Perlroth’s dogged reporting that breaks through the code of lies and silence and clearly lays out for the layperson the extent of the threat  

An excellent review of Nicole Perlroth’s fantastic book, This is How They Tell Me The World Ends by my former editor David Churbuck. Perlroth spent a decade as the lead cybersecurity, digital espionage, and sabotage reporter for The New York Times. If you have not read this book, you must do it asap.

Read article on David Churbuck


David & Mr. Bangs

This was a particularly hard week. Long. Cold. Rainy. Exhausting. A lot of sleepless nights. Nervous energy that sapped the body of its own spark. Four board meetings. More meetings and meetings. Some exciting times hanging out with friends, old, new and newest. The whole week was like a whirligig. There are holiday parties everywhere. I don’t want to attend them. I just wanted to sit at home, read a good book, listen to Miles and just let my mind wander. 


The man behind Forbes Digital Tool

David Churbuck, my former boss wrote about the real unsung heroes of Forbes.com and it made me misty eyed.

I want to say that two people are the true unsung heroes behind Forbes’ high valuation as it is about to be sold by the Forbes family and Elevation partners (most likely to a foreign buyer).  CEO Tim Forbes embraced the digital future with no reservations, immersed himself in it, and knew — as clearly as Adam and Om Malik and me and everyone else involved — that one day the online version of the brand would be bigger and more valuable than the printed one. He drove us, he made it happen. He wrote the checks, put up with our shenanigans and he told the nay-sayers to shut up and get on board.

Tim was just fantastic — and whenever I interacted with him, he was curious and believer in the


Mirror

New York is one place where I get a break from the routine and get some time to contemplate. Ironic, considering that New York City is the urban equivalent of Twitter – constant distractions, noisy and full of spectacles and spectacular. The obvious benefit: walking five miles a day results in me losing between 5-7 pounds per visit. But for me the opportunity to walk the busy Manhattan streets has two obvious benefits — a lot of alone-time and a chance to hone my skills to ignore the noisy-ness that is our online world.

It was one of these walks (which co-incidentally took me by the offices of Forbes.com) I got a chance to reflect on how I have changed as a writer. From a frantic newswire reporter to an online writer to a magazine writer and back to the frenzied world of blogs, it has been an evolution that