Hello, my name is Fab! I am a freelance journalist, podcaster and aspiring novelist. On this website, you can find my my thoughts on many different topics ranging from technology to politics and everything in between. There is also some software to discover that I have written.
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Latest Blog Posts
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My Last Email from Dvorak
While looking though my email archive this morning, I found this email by John C. Dvorak, where he replied to me sending some information to the No Agenda show. This was less than a month before his death. That signature made me laugh every time I saw it. What a character! 😄😭
SENT from my bakelite rotary phone
one letter at a time
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John C. Dvorak Has Passed Away
I just learned that John C. Dvorak has died on Monday. JCD had a heart attack earlier this year, but he was doing much better and I just listened to the last No Agenda episode he recorded on Sunday (episode 1887) this morning, so this comes as a bit of a shock.
I will miss John very much. He was one of my journalistic heroes. He almost single-handedly alerted me to all the bullshit that goes on in Silicon Valley and that it wasn’t an exception, but rather the standard modus operandi in that part of the tech industry. Calculated to mislead the public by generating a lot of overblown hype to sell more product. John stood up to this crap for decades. He was one of the journalists who, through his work, encouraged my natural scepticism and my inherent tendency to always ask questions when everyone around me would just accept something. He taught me that this is a good quality in a journalist — and every other human being for that matter — one that we want to encourage, rather than an annoyance that is to be chastised.
We need more people like John C. Dvorak in this world, not less. People who want to get at the truth of the matter, rather than placate other people’s emotional or financial needs. His tendency to always ask the next question, to never accept conventional “wisdom” and to just be the one stubborn old man in the room (even when he was quite young) who will always take the more unpopular — but probably closer to the truth — side of the argument will be sorely missed. This is a bad day. For tech journalism and for the world at large. Goodbye, John. I know that, wherever you are now, the powers that be over there are not to be envied. Give ’em hell!
John C. Dvorak (1946 - 2026) — journalist, podcaster, curmudgeon (Photo: No Agenda)
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Mikko’s SMP
Mikko Hyppönen, famed IT security researcher and longtime head of research at F-Secure, has been wearing an Omega Seamaster Professional original blue wave dial “Bond Watch” as a daily driver for 25 years now. His is a few years ahead of mine and the full-size version, and he’s rocking the original bracelet, but he’s basically my brother-in-watch. And, unsurprisingly, the man who coined Hyppönen's Law of IoT Security (“whenever an appliance is described as being ‘smart’, it is vulnerable”) likes his mechanical watch for the same reason I like mine, too:
I’ve been carrying the same watch for 25 years. It’s an Omega Seamaster Professional. This is not a smartwatch. No wifi, no bluetooth, no chipset. Can’t be hacked.
Mikko Hyppönen’s Omega Seamaster Professional (Photo: Mikko Hyppönen)
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