Latest Blog Posts

• 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)

  ---

• 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)

  ---

• Cockroaches Caned

  Speaking of the cockroaches … this is getting out of hand:

  Supporters of India's youth-led “cockroach” movement were caned by police on Monday as they sought to march on parliament in the capital, New Delhi, despite authorities denying permission for the protest. The months-old movement and the planned protest are seen as the biggest public challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his third term in office, drawing millions of supporters on social media before broadening its appeal.

  A police decision to forcibly move hunger-striking activist Sonam Wangchuk to hospital on Saturday has galvanized the movement, with thousands of supporters arriving through the night at the protest site of Jantar Mantar in the heart of New Delhi for the march on the opening day of parliament's monsoon session.

  → Police cane “Cockroach” movement youth protesters marching to parliament in New Delhi, The Jerusalem Post

  ---

• The Cockroach Janta Party

  Today I learned that there is a Cockroach Janta Party in India. I first thought this was an Asmongold reference, since he is also known as the “Roach King” among his viewers.

  Abhijeet Dipke has barely slept in the last 72 hours, fielding waves of messages on social media after a casual joke took an unexpected turn. The 30-year-old, a recent graduate in public relations from Boston University in the United States, finds himself leading a sweeping satirical political movement — the so-called Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), where “janta” means people in Hindi — being joined online by thousands of people with each passing day.

  On Friday, the Supreme Court of India’s chief justice, Surya Kant, said during an open court hearing that “parasites” were attacking the system, and equated the youngsters “who don’t get any employment and don’t have any place in a profession” to cockroaches. “There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment or have any place in the profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, RTI activists and other activists, and they start attacking everyone,” he said.

  Kant later clarified his remarks, saying his comment related to some people acquiring fraudulent degrees and did not target India’s youth, whom he called “the pillars of a developed India”. Yet, his remarks drew considerable ire, mainly from Gen Z internet users, as they battle large-scale unemployment, inflation and bitter religious divides after 12 years of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government. As outrage escalated across social media, Dipke posted on X on Saturday: “What if all cockroaches come together?”

  He followed up on his joke and the desperately frustrated emotions behind it by setting up a website and social media accounts for the Cockroach Janta Party — a play on Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) — on Instagram and X.

  (This story is from May, I just now learned about this party, though.)

  ---

→ See all blog posts or subscribe to the blog's RSS feed