Daniel M. Skube

On Snapchat, I was served an ad titled something like "A 22 year-old micro-fleet mogul" which redirected to this page. While I love the headline, I find the salescopy lacking. I think the author approached the piece too much as a blog-writer, and not enough as a saleswriter. So I re-imagined it. How one 22 year-old student gets paid to own a Porsche Cayman! "They told me a college student shouldn't own six cars." Osama B., a full-time business student in Toronto, owns a fleet of six luxur...

Privacy activists have an alternative for every Google product except YouTube. YouTube defines the long-form, user-generated video market. Which is troubling for privacy-activists & general folk alike. One company exerts near-perfect control over the juciest portion of the world's media diet. Under pressure from the legacy media, company leadership favors the iron fist to the velvet glove. With a new terms of service, YouTube re-iterates it's right to not just demonetize creators, but rem...

For ~150 years, American schools were free from violence. This is amazing, considering schools offer no means of physical protection greater than a locked door. Since Columbine, this has changed. Police patrol hallways, tech companies search social media for red flags, and onlookers blame whichever scapegoat fits their political persuasion. If you're on the Left, it's the NRA. If you're on the Right, it's Big Pharma & video games. Personally, I blame the Department of Education for treati...

Cryptography yields an asymmetric advantage to those who use it. Asymmetric how? In a fraction of a second, your laptop can form a secure (read: encrypted) connection with your bank. But if an eavesdropper intercepted the communications, it could take - literally - billions of years before they decrypt the data. Libertarians love cryptography. Why? For the same reason they love guns: cryptography decentralizes power. Compared to the physical world, where goverments & mobs enjoy near-total ...

Who verifies the verified? PGP - by which I mean all variants, open- & closed-source - is powerful yet awkward software. By 'awkward', I don't mean using the command-line interface; CLI-literacy is attainable. By 'awkward', I mean that obtaining the true public-key of a stranger requires an inordinate amount of trust & hassle. Since there's been some recent controversy, let's pretend Bob wants to download Tor Browser. Bob isn't security-conscious, but he's trying. This month, he i...