shoonmcgregor

These days there are many excellent degrees and certifications paths you can take, it is a bit overwhelming. I didn't have that many options when I when through my undergrad so I took a computer engineering approach - one that mixed software and hardware study.

Most systems you'll use in practice these days are controlled strictly by software systems but there are some systems that do have hardware components that are mysterious black boxes for most people.

I recommend checking out some relevant clubs at the university as well like Cyber defense clubs and the sort. I always like the approach of learning how to breach a system in depth before you consider how to secure one.

It's a tough call for me, personally... The fact that more people are talking about security and privacy and more companies are starting up to develop solutions to truly protect their customers is great - but it should never have gotten this bad.

We were all made so vulnerable by the tech giants and other entities capturing and correlating data on everything we do and every data breach moves us closer to a total collapse of any authenticity of the internet making our lives miserable as we try to recover from identity or financial theft, are devastated that our intimate conversations and content were leaked, or simply we have no idea what or who is real online anymore.

Thank you for that, we'll have to incorporate that style into our whitepapers soon.

I like the idea of anonymous exchange of content and communication - some people really need that and something better/faster than Tor is always a plus.

I haven't seen any group take off with yet, perhaps there's an opportunity there.

So watery and yet there's a smack of ham to it.

Privacy and security doesn't have to be just about being anonymous or invisible. The sheer number of apps, services and devices connected to the internet that have no security is staggering and the damage done after a major breach goes on for a lifetime.

I think the internet does have some fundamental flaws - the recent massive take down of major DNS servers from IoT devices was a rude reminder of that... but it's mostly the applications and services we use that have let us down. Sure, perhaps people share too much personal information online... the's not much you can do to stop that user behavior.

What you can do is protect the other huge percentage of users that want to share content with friends using public key cryptography technology we've known about for centuries (or more.) Web browsers should've had this several generations ago, social media should've had this from the very start, and every messaging/email system out there should have this built in as a default.

The common saying is "encryption is hard" - so was streaming video, tracking users across services and selling that data but that's working pretty well these days for the tech giants.