About

Daniel Miessler

My name is Daniel Miessler (\mē'slûr\) and I'm from Newark, California, located on the south east side of the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm in my thirties and work in the field of Information Security.

Site Concept

I started this site in 1999 as a platform for experimenting with web technologies, and today it serves primarily as my blog and the home for my study and writing resources.

The site is a representation of my own self-assigned life purpose; it is an attempt to model the world in the most accurate way possible, and to do so without bias or fear of unpleasant truth. I seek to develop, articulate, and perpetually improve a model of the world that allows me to explain any given phenomenon, e.g. the popularity of religion, the nature of emotion, the nice guy paradox, what matter is made of, and what your preferred orientation of the toilet paper roll says about you. I seek to build models that help me conceptualize all these things under a single, non-conflicting view.

This being the case, I thrive on information that breaks my model and/or supports another one. Nothing is more exciting than being shown how and/or why another way of viewing the world is superior to my own. This is why I spend a great deal of time looking for people with arguments that either 1) differ from my own view yet fit the data better, or 2) refine or improve my own understanding of a position I already hold.

In short, I absolutely thrive on conversation that leads to the improvement of my understanding of the world, and I have no problem with being wrong since it necessarily leads to an improvement of my model. My pride primarily rests with being right after the debate, not before or during it.

The site's subtitle 'In Search of Intervals' is a reference to Einstein's work. In his Special Theory of Relativity he found that the perception of how far away something was, or how fast it was moving, was relative to an observer. He was able to define something called an "event", which took place within space-time rather than space and time independently.

An "interval" is the relationship between two such events, and the beauty of the measurement is that it remains constant regardless of observer! That's what struck me about the whole theory, and this is something most people don't get: the theory isn't about claiming everything is relative to an observer; in fact it's about stripping away the subjective and finding the truths that are not relative to an observer. It's absolutely stunning, and I feel this is a worthy model for approaching the search for understanding.

Life View

In terms of familiar and popular religious concepts, I am an atheist. I believe something similar to the modern scientific description of the Big Bang took place, and after that point a number of variables were presented into the world. We, and everything we know of and interact with, are the result of the interactions between those variables. We do not have free will. Even if there were to exist true randomness at the quantum level (which I doubt), one shouldn't confuse a lack of pure determinism with us having control.

There are, however, constructs that are too pleasing and too necessary for me to abandon--even when faced with the fact that we are essentially just playing out what was destined to happen since the beginning of the universe. These include love, friendship, and the concept of personal responsibility--the latter of which serves as the foundation for our systems of morality and justice.

This is a problem for me, as it presents the first and ultimate source of cognitive dissonance. How do you punish people who are simply unsuccessful combinations of variables? How do you appreciate love when you know it reduces to the coldness of a chemical interaction? I have an answer: relax your logic and rejoice in your mortal nature. Cherish friendship and love as if they truly were as magical as they feel.

Morality

I believe reason and compassion are the two primary qualities for human success. And if I were to embrace any sort of well-defined list of principles (which I find mostly unnecessary) it would have to be that of Secular Humanism, which focuses on the following tenets:

I think any system of morality should attempt to reduce suffering and increase happiness, and this is a good metric for evaluating most moral questions. The difficulty comes with the question, "what happens if the thing that makes one group happy makes the other suffer?". The answer, once again, is to rely upon reason and compassion. Mutually beneficial arrangements manifest themselves when these two concepts are respected.

Technology

One technology I find interesting is the semantic web, which is a way of adding computer-interpretable meaning and context to content found on the Internet. I'm also intrigued by several related technologies, such as RSS/Atom, OPML, microformats, RDF, apml, and xmpp. You can read more about these standards/protocols/technologies at dataportability.org.

On the information security side, my primary interest lies in risk management strategies that focus on understanding an organization's data based on its business, and then mapping the storage flow of said data through an organization. To me this is the starting point for applying controls, and it's known in the industry as a data-centric approach. As a point of interest, my preferred definition of security (including Information Security) is as follows:

The process of maintaining an acceptable level of perceived risk.

My reasoning for using this definition can be found here.

I am partial to OS X on the desktop and Gentoo Linux on my LAMP servers. I favor ASP over Java and while I tend to prefer OS X and Linux, I have significant respect for a number of Microsoft offerings.

Activities

Here are the primary ways I spend my free time.

Music

Here's a decent sample of my favorite types of music.

Humor

laughing_kittens
Image from icanhazcheezburger.com

I like to laugh, a lot. Here's a sample of my style of humor, which is shared by many in the creative class: Python, Family Guy, Pulp Fiction, LOLCats, XKCD, Dilbert, Robot Chicken, Arrested Development, Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office (British > American and Gervais is king), etc. I'm also fond of some less common stuff, like laughing babies (link), Charlie the Unicorn (link), and Benny Lava (link). If this list resonates with you, and you know of something else I may not have seen, do let me know.

Random Stuff

  1. I'm mostly fluent in Spanish. I had five years in high school, have a nearly perfect accent, but have a poor vocabulary due to lack of practice.
  2. My initials are DRM, which is most unfortunate in technology/freedom circles.

Contact

Feel free to contact me if you have a question, a comment, or if you just want to say hello. Until then, I hope you find something here worth your time.: