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This is off topic, but this post from Daniel Miessler is a great example of how I want to reorient my world view. Basically, I’ve done most things I could have wanted to do in a life already. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have more to do. It doesn’t mean I don’t still have goals, because I do. What it means is that if things were to end suddenly tomorrow, and I had even the shortest time to reflect, I would smile knowing that there wasn’t some other big thing I needed to be happy. I already am happy. Anything past this point is just greedy. I’ve already lived a remarkable life, and now I want another 50 years of it? Seems rather selfish when you think about it. That is real gratitude. From where I sit, I still feel I have a lot to contribute and so much more to learn. And I’m not one to call my life to date ‘remarkable’, but I have done some cool stuff. I’m with Daniel – I don’t want to be greedy. This kind of gratitude is hard for a lot of us, as culture has us striving to move on to the next hill – before we are over the current one. In the rush to always get something else done, I find it helpful to sometimes just sit and appreciate where I have already been. That helps me get excited for whatever is to come. Both the positives and the negatives. Everything is a learning experience. Today I’m grateful for the opportunity to keep learning. Photo credit: “Gratitude changes the way we look at the world” originally uploaded by BK Share:

A few years ago I had to stop competing. The constant need to win – whatever that even meant – was making me unhappy. Even when things were going well, I found some reason to feel like a loser. So I got off the hamster wheel and put myself in positions where I wasn’t really competing against others. I am always trying to improve, but I stopped doing that in terms of others. Set a goal. Work toward it. Adjust as needed. The only time I even sort of compete now is my annual golf trip. Except for four rounds that weekend, I don’t play golf. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the game, but it just takes too much time. So every year 9-11 buddies and I go to a nice resort town and play a tournament Ryder Cup style. There is a draft and this year we used Potato Head dolls to represent the players. Mine was a riot, as you can see in the picture below. The captains negotiate handicaps and set the line-ups, and we play. The winners make some beer money and the losers… well, there aren’t actually any losers – we are hanging with buddies on a ridiculous beachfront property and playing golf every day. Since I’m not a good golfer, I am usually the high handicapper. But it’s not like that helps me much. At multiple points over four days, my game falls apart. I typically shoot between 120 and 130, usually losing the match. Except there are no losers, right? But this year was different. I missed last year’s trip so I hadn’t picked up my clubs in 2 years. I went to the new TopGolf near my house the day before the trip to hit some balls, and I was hitting solid and straight. But I entered the weekend with zero expectations about playing decent golf. Without those expectations I was calm on the course. I just enjoyed being outside in a beautiful place. I had a few beers. OK, maybe more than a few. I kept my ego in the bag and swung nice and easy – even as some of the gorillas in my group hit 50-60 yards past me. I shot pretty well the first day (111) and with my handicap we smoked the other team. Huh. The next day I was playing a heads-up match. I shot a 101 and closed out my opponent on the 13th hole, which is apparently pretty good. Strange. My game didn’t fall apart. What’s going on here? By this time I had a pretty sizable lead in the overall. The other guys on the trip started talking about how evidently I’m a golfer and wondering if I had secretly taken a crapload of lessons. Then I actually believed maybe I was a golfer, and I wanted to win. I started feeling bad when I hit a bad shot. Predictably my game fell apart and I shot 61 on the front. Then I remembered that I don’t need to win, I just want to be credible. That is the key. It’s about not getting attached to the outcome and just having fun instead. So that’s what I did. Suffice it to say I shot 44 on the back and had a grand old time. I finished up Sunday with a 117 and took home the overall. That means I will be one of the captains next year – a place I never thought I’d be. I lost the final day match, but my team won the cup as well. So I won by not needing to win. What was the difference? Without sounding corny, it’s all the mindfulness work I’m doing. I used body awareness and scanned my body for tension points before every swing to make sure I was relaxed. I visualized a good shot, not skulling the ball into the water hazard. I recognized that my increasing desire to win was causing tension, which resulted in bad shots. I had a short memory, so when I hit a bad shot I’d just let it go. Then I’d hit a good shot. Or not. I’d look up at the sky and be grateful that I was on the course. Then drink another beer. At some point during the trip I made the connection. Golf is mostly a mental game, as is most of life. The work I’m doing to be more mindful translates directly – even to my golf trip. Controlling my own self-imposed expectations and decreasing the pressure I put on myself allowed me to compete without stressing out. Being able to maintain that for four days was a real victory. Winning the golf trophy is besides the point. At least for me… –Mike Photo credit: Incite Potato Head uploaded by MSR The fine folks at the RSA Conference posted the talk Jennifer Minella and I did on mindfulness at the conference this year. You can check it out on YouTube. Take an hour and check it out. Your emails, alerts and Twitter timeline will be there when you get back. Securosis Firestarter Have you checked out our new video podcast? Rich, Adrian, and Mike get into a Google Hangout and.. hang out. We talk a bit about security as well. We try to keep these to 15 minutes or less, and usually fail. October 6 – Hulk Bash September 16 – Apple Pay August 18 – You Can’t Handle the Gartner July 22 – Hacker Summer Camp July 14 – China and Career Advancement June 30 – G Who Shall Not Be Named June 17 – Apple and Privacy May 19 – Wanted Posters and SleepyCon May 12 – Another 3 for 5: McAfee/OSVDB, XP Not Dead, CEO head rolling May 5 – There Is No SecDevOps Heavy Research We are back at work on a variety of blog series, so here is a list of the research currently underway. Remember you can get our Heavy Feed via RSS,

Ever tried to count to a billion? Don’t bother. The average human lifespan is about 2.5 billion seconds, so you’d waste half your life trying. But that may help put into perspective Databrick’s latest announcement that they were able to sort 10 trillion records in four hours with the Spark platform. That’s three times faster than the previous record, with one-tenth the number of server nodes. Or perhaps you noticed that Amazon added full JSON support to DynamoDB, so you can easily inject JSON directly into the cluster. Or maybe you saw that Data Torrent now supports analytics on the incoming data stream. Or perhaps you were pleased to see ParStream’s distributed approach specifically geared to the Internet of Things. None of these individual events is all that newsworthy. But the scale and pace of innovation across hundreds of different NoSQL platforms is. I hAve said many times here that NoSQL is the database of the future, but I don’t think I have stressed enough that no matter what you want to do with a database, there is a flavor of NoSQL designed for your use case. And even if it’s not a perfect match, the flexibility and customization possible with most NoSQL platforms can make it work. Size, scale, and speed – at cost unimaginable just a few years ago. What does this have to do with security? I no longer speak to customers with a single Hadoop installation of 20 or so nodes. The number of nodes is climbing, and the number of NoSQL databases running in parallel at customer sites is climbing as well. The size of these clusters is beginning to break our security recommendations from the last few years. In some cases security goals require an architectural shift. In other cases I am at a loss to provide recommendations – I am not certain that security controls exist to accommodate the size and velocity of some clusters. Hang on to your seats because it is getting interesting in the world of NoSQL security. Butterflies. Not that you care, but there are a lot of butterflies in Phoenix this year. And my wife and I have planted a huge number of shrubs that attract butterflies, so we are fortunate to have swarms of them in the yard the last three weeks. Yellow ones, green ones, black with patches of amber and brilliant blue dots, giant black and yellow ones, some orange, and others orange with black spots. Dozens or even hundreds of them in the back yard on any given day. Colors that match New England fall leaves, but this is living art with a delicacy hard to imagine until you see them defying the breeze. It is one of the most beautiful sites I have ever seen. If only I could capture it on video … On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Rich in TidBITS #1: You Are Apple’s Greatest Security Challenge. Rich in TidBITS #2: Apple and Google Spark Civil Rights Debate. Favorite Securosis Posts David Mortman: An Example of Gratitude. Adrian Lane: The photo in Mike’s post on Competing made coffee spurt through my nose, I laughed so hard, but my favorite this week is Rich’s post on Physicality because he totally nails my experience and tribulations with writing! Other Securosis Posts Incite 10/15/2014: Competing. Favorite Outside Posts Rich: Rethinking the Security “Con”. Great rant by Shack about security conferences. There are too many, saying the same stuff. I like his suggestions toward the end, especially having everyone share 5 things they learned. That would be awesome. Mike Rothman: Before the Startup. With so much money flowing into everything ‘cyber’ we have lots of folks who want to start companies. They should read this post. It is a different counterintuitive world. It’s like riding a roller coaster. Every day. That doesn’t mean don’t do it, but go in with your eyes open. David Mortman: Homebrew Incident Response. Adrian Lane: Wake up to a POODLE puddle. Kudos to Martin for coming up with a list of links of everything you need to know about POODLE attacks, and my favorite vulnerability logo for this issue! Research Reports and Presentations Leveraging Threat Intelligence in Incident Response/Management. Pragmatic WAF Management: Giving Web Apps a Fighting Chance. The Security Pro’s Guide to Cloud File Storage and Collaboration. The 2015 Endpoint and Mobile Security Buyer’s Guide. Analysis of the 2014 Open Source Development and Application Security Survey. Defending Against Network-based Distributed Denial of Service Attacks. Reducing Attack Surface with Application Control. Leveraging Threat Intelligence in Security Monitoring. The Future of Security: The Trends and Technologies Transforming Security. Security Analytics with Big Data. Top News and Posts Alleged Dropbox hack underlines danger of reusing passwords Laura Poitras on the Crypto Tools That Made Her Microsoft, Adobe Push Critical Security Fixes Government Set Up A Fake Facebook Page In This Woman’s Name What you need to know about POODLE/SSL 3.0 vulnerability Apple Pay Setup, Functionality Leaked in New Screenshots Blog Comment of the Week This week’s best comment goes to Anonymous, saying something about buying Viagra on the cheap. That’s great news – it means blog comments are working again. Thanks for testing, spammers! Share: