I’m currently in Amsterdam, speaking at O’Reilly Security, so I watched the election happen very late at night. (Yes, I voted, in advance, by mail (as does everyone in Washington state).)

TL;DR: I think it’d be possible to set up a small community on the Internet that works like a lab full of PhD students. This would enable us to have shared community on long research projects (even when not working on projects together), sounding boards, peer review, and collective mentorship, which are all good things one can find in a PhD setting. I’m wondering who else might be interested in such a program.

Note: The following is deliberately tongue-in-cheek. Please do not leave comments to explain to me how elections “actually” work. I know how they work.

I’m pleased to finally announce that work I did with James Arlen and Lee Brotherston at Leviathan Security Group is seeing the light of day. We wrote three whitepapers on the “Value of Cloud Security”—more specifically, on the security challenges faced by so-called data localization laws (that require that all data about a country’s citizens be kept within the country). While it’s easy to oppose these laws on the basis that many of them come from known-censorious regimes (e.g., Russia), we found that the security implications of forced localization laws are disastrous.