The post Saturday picdump for Saturday, August 22 appeared first on Global Nerdy.

This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:

When the event will take place

What the event is

Where the event will take place

Who is holding the event

This week’s events

• Monday, August 24
• Tuesday, August 25
• Wednesday, August 26
• Thursday, August 27
• Friday, August 28
• Saturday, August 29
• Sunday, August 30

Monday, August 24

Tuesday, August 25

Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. at Hidden Springs Ale Works (Tampa): It’s time for another TampaTech Taps & Taco Tuesday! It’s a friendly, casual get-together of Tampa Bay’s tech scene for conversations, great drinks, and (of course) free tacos!

Find out more and register here.

Wednesday, August 26

Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. at KForce (Tampa): It’s “Power and Perils of AI Aided Coding”, organized by Tampa Java User Group, with Tampa Bay AI Meetup! Dr. Venkat Subramaniam returns to Tampa to give another one of his amzing, engaging, and amusing talks on becoming better developers.

Find out more and register here.

Thursday, August 27

Thursday at 6:00 at Florida Avenue Brewing (Seminole Heights, Tampa): The Tampa Bay New-in-Tech meetup is hosting a “meet and greet”! Whether you’re brand new to Tampa, transitioning into tech, an experienced professional, entrepreneur, or simply curious about the local tech scene — come say hello!

Find out more and register here.

Thursday at 6:30 at Wild Rover Brewery (Seminole Heights, Tampa): It’s time for another Lean Beer for All Things Agile!

This long-standing Meetup group is all about promoting knowledge sharing and networking among professionals with a passion for Agile Product Development. Whether you’re a Scrum enthusiast or just curious about Agile practices, this is the perfect platform to exchange experiences, network, vent, and foster your Agile knowledge. All this while drinking beer together!

Find out more and register here.

Friday, August 28

Saturday, August 29

Saturday morning at 10:30 at Luna Lux (St. Pete): When you’re often the only one in the room, being your authentic self takes deliberate work. A sustainable personal brand starts with knowing who you are, how you want to be perceived, what you’re working toward, and how to communicate your value. Navigating a tech career takes its own kind of blueprint, whether you’re a junior engineer, a seasoned VP, or a founder.

This brunch is for Black women in tech across the Tampa Bay area. We’re gathering to build a collaborative, high-trust circle where you can speak honestly, feel heard, and walk away with strategy.

Find out more and register here.

Sunday, August 30

About this list

How do I put this list together?

It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.

In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.

What goes into this list?

I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:

• • Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
  • Tech project management / agile processes
  • Video, board, and role-playing games
  • Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
  • Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
  • Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
  • Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms

• Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
• Anything I deem geeky

The post Tampa Bay tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events list (Monday, August 24 – Sunday, August 30) appeared first on Global Nerdy.

Published fortnightly, Reachability Watch covers the volume of new network-exploitable CVEs, the handful that clear a CVSS 8.6 bar, whatever KEV actually caused damage that period, and a running tally so the trend line becomes visible over time.

The drawing features this edition’s highlighted KEV. More formally known as CVE-2026-72898, it’s what I call “BYOK: bring Your Own Key,” because that’s essentially what the exploit does. You hand Metabase’s password-reset endpoint an extra user-id key it never asked for, nobody strips it, and it rides all the way into the SQL query.

Read it here:
https://netfoundry.io/reachability-watch/reachability-watch-cve-kev-tracker-2026-08-14/

The post A new “back of the envelope” drawing for NetFoundry’s new “Reachability Watch”! appeared first on Global Nerdy.

The synth in question is pictured above: an FM-1 desktop synth made by a company called M-VAVE. For a mere US$79, it emulates the Yamaha DX7, the most 1980s of all the 1980s synths…

…but now in a package that’s slightly smaller than a VHS cassette.

I’ll post a review later, but since I have to run, I’ll post this guy’s review instead:

The post My new synth arrived: The M-VAVE FM-1 appeared first on Global Nerdy.

At this moment in time, I can’t think of a better way to promote an energy drink and a beer than by what Liquid Death and Garage Beer did: harnessing the pop culture power of worries about AI data centers’ water usage (with an inspired solution), ’80s ballads, and Jason Kelce.

I love how the ad brings all sorts of people together; even Juggalos (who along with the furries, will show us the way to a better future)!

The post If you watch only one ad today (good luck with that), watch this one! appeared first on Global Nerdy.

Since that I posted that first article on August 16, 2006 to Global Nerdy, it’s been…

• 20 years
• 2 blogging platforms (Blogware, then WordPress)
• 11 million pageviews
• Almost 5,000 articles (this one will be number 4,989)
• 2 cities/countries:
  • Toronto, Ontario, Canada 2006 – 2014
  • Tampa, Florida, U.S.A. 2014 – present

…and of course, one helluva blogging adventure!

The name

I didn’t come up with the name; at least not directly. It was generated by a program I wrote, The Duke of URL, which demonstrated the “namespinner” API made by Tucows, where I was working as their developer advocate. You enter some keywords into the app, and it presented you with a list of suitable and available domain names.

One of the available domain names it presented was globalnerdy.com. The name was a little ridiculous; it sounded like the sort of thing made by whoever comes up with names for Japanese role-playing videogames. But it was kind of catchy and I decided to go with it.

The eras

To close (I’d love to write more, but today’s a busy day for me), some photos from this blog throughout the years…

The post Global Nerdy is 20 years old today! appeared first on Global Nerdy.

• Allen Bargi: Working With AI Feels More Like Leadership Than Coding
• Google: Introducing Gemini 3.7 Flash

• Mun logadan: Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
• Netlify: Choosing an AI model: one prompt, 11 models, very different results
• jdagostino: No, We Have AI At Home — Chapter 1: A Box Of Scraps

• opensauce.it: Cloudflare’s AI psychosis
• Jason Brown (loktar00): Qwen3.8-27B – Release Day Demos
• Wonkhe: We can’t afford to turn away from computing degrees

• Machine Learning Street Talk: [VIDEO] The Real Reason Huge AI Models Actually Work (Prof. Andrew Wilson)
• Joshua Barretto: Why I remain a skeptic
• Tim O’Reilly: The Apache Lesson for AI

• Cal Newport: On AI Coding and Its Discontents
• Borislav Nikolov (jackdoe): My anti AI computer
• Google: Why Go is an Ideal Language for AI-Assisted Software Engineering

and finally, the folks at Honest Government Ad do an ad for AI Data Centers:

The post AI linkdump for Sunday, August 16 appeared first on Global Nerdy.

An example of Claude’s watermarking

Ed. note: In case you’re not familiar with Indian food, a paratha is a kind of flatbread. I don’t blame the dog one bit.

The post Saturday picdump for Saturday, August 15 appeared first on Global Nerdy.

you can always catch the recorded version on YouTube on Monday on the This Week in Tech YouTube channel.

This will be my fourth appearance on This Week in Tech for 2026. Here are my other three episodes…

January 4, 2026 with Dan Patterson, Sr/ Director of Content @ Blackbird.AI:

June 7, 2026 with Jeff Jarvis and Father Robert Bellecer:

The post I’m on “This Week in Tech” this Sunday, August 16! appeared first on Global Nerdy.

I spent the morning and early afternoon of 813 Tech Day at Hotel Haya in Ybor. I’m still thinking about the Fortifying the Digital Frontier: Cybersecurity at the Forefront of Fintech Innovation session, largely because of the twist that host Michael Hall introduced, which made it different from every other “Cyber is important, yo!” panel I’ve sat through. About two-thirds of the way in, he stopped running the panel and turned it into a consulting engagement. On stage, for free, for a random attendee. And it worked!

Read on, and you’ll see.

A show of hands

Michael started by asking everyone who runs a company or product that touches money, customer data, or both to raise their hands.

Some hands went up, which wasn’t surprising.

Then he asked: “Keep them up if you have a single person whose actual job is nothing but security.”

All hands down.

And that moment was the panel in summary. A room full of people founding or working at companies (or hoping to found and work at them) handling money and PII, and essentially zero dedicated security headcount among them. To be fair, a number of them were solopreneurs. Still, Michael’s follow-up question was  an important one: “So what are you going to do about cyber warfare?”

Introducing the panel

The panel had unusually good coverage of the problem space: economic development, defense-grade compliance, offensive security, and someone who actually runs a bank.

They were, from left to right onstage:

• Alexei “Alex” Chirokikh, CTO of Waterfall Bank, with a couple of decades of building core banking platforms across a dozen-plus countries
• Aaron Butler, founder of BlackHack Society, who builds security and compliance programs for SaaS companies and had just flown back from DEF CON the week before
• Candace Williams, Associate Director of Cybersecurity Leadership at Raytheon, Tampa-based, and author of No Experience Required: Your Cybersecurity Career Kickstart Guide
• Paul Sohl, CEO of the Florida High Tech Corridor, which spans 23 counties, three research universities (USF, UCF, UF); he’s also a retired Navy Rear Admiral

The gap between passing the audit and actually defended

Michael’s next question was a good one: “What’s the widest gap between how secure fintechs think they are and how secure they actually are?”

Alexei’s answer was the cleanest formulation of the compliance trap: compliance does not equal security. You can check every box and still be wide open. His diagnosis of why startups get this wrong:

“We identify the target, then we fire, and then we aim.”

Speed first, aim later. But in banking, “later” can be expensive in ways founders don’t model. He mentioned that for an average-sized bank, a single day of downtime can put the bank’s license at risk.

Candace, coming from the defense side, made it concrete with the ATO, the Authorization to Operate. You bring in an assessor, they verify you’ve got your asset labeling and your SSO and your password policy, and you get the shiny gold star.

And then what?

“Are you updating your AV definitions after you have the ATO? Are you patching on a specific cadence? Are you continuously monitoring the controls you got a check box for?”

Compliance is a still-frame snapshot. Security is the whole movie. Everyone optimizes for the snapshot because that’s what gets audited, but forgets about the movie.

“Too small to matter” is not a security posture

Michael asked Aaron to scare the room, and to Aaron’s credit, he skipped the horror stories and reached for stats.

An attacker can get into essentially any internet-facing machine at almost any company inside an hour. Depending on whose telemetry you’re reading, that number is more like a few minutes. Someone in the audience called out CrowdStrike’s breakout-time figure, which is measured in seconds now.

Aaron’s framing:

“A breach is inevitable. Not if, but when. Your worst day is my every day. If it’s going to rain, you bring a raincoat, not an umbrella.”

That’s why “we’ll deal with it when it happens” isn’t a plan.

What AI did and didn’t change

Aaron summarized it well:

“AI lowered the skill floor for attackers and accelerated the execution timeline. It did not invent new attack classes.”

Phishing, smishing, and credential reuse: these are the same failure modes we’ve had for a couple of decades now. Attacks are just cheaper, faster, and automated now. All this means that your unpatched, password-shared, over-permissioned environment didn’t get more vulnerable; it just got found sooner.

He also had a nice riff on password policy whiplash. We spent years pushing everyone to 15–16 characters, guidance loosened again, and meanwhile the real-world state of the art is that password123 became password12345.

Alexei’s defensive take was the one that fintech founders in the room needed: his bank is doing “baby steps” on AI. Instead of a tool, the first step an AI policy and an AI strategy with actual guardrails. Because the failure mode isn’t anything as melodramatic as a rogue superintelligence, but something more mundane, such as an employee pasting client data into a public chatbot:

“Yes, you can get the answer. But now you’ve already lost that client data. It’s somewhere, and you don’t know who can get it.”

He also noted, matter-of-factly, that some of the adversaries in this space are state-funded. A small bank in Tampa versus a government-backed team is not a fair fight, which is precisely why the guardrails have process over motivation; policy and architecture over vigilance.

The compliance question founders actually care about: Which one pays?

When Michael asked which single compliance framework a founder should chase this year to unlock the most enterprise revenue, Aaron flagged it as a contentious opinion and we got the most useful ninety seconds of the panel:

• SOC 2 Type II is the one. Depending on your market, it can move your ability to capture revenue by somewhere between 5% and 40%. Nearly everyone selling to enterprise ends up needing it anyway.
• HIPAA is self-assessed. Draw your own conclusions about how rigorously that’s happening across the industry.
• PCI DSS: If you’re doing payments and processing, you can largely offload it. Stripe already has it. Use their pipes; as a startup you can’t afford to build that infrastructure yourself.
• Then there’s the practitioner’s trick: security people maintain crosswalks that map controls across frameworks. Do SOC 2 first and you’re roughly 70% of the way to ISO 27001. Do them in order and stop paying for the same control four times.

Candace added the necessary caveat: the right framework depends on your industry, and in defense you don’t get to choose; there are non-negotiable requirements.

Alexei pointed out that PCI DSS matters for finance the way HIPAA matters for healthcare, so “which framework” is downstream of “which industry.”

Candace’s advice for taking this to a board is deceptively simple: explain it in their language…

• Bad: “We need to implement AC-2.”
• Better: “We sell Cracker Jacks, here’s the system that keeps the Cracker Jack business running, here’s why this control protects it.”

The panel turned into a live advisory board

This is the part I’ve never seen at a conference.

An audience member who’s a consultant mentioned he’s got a client (transfer agents, handling bank relationships and a mountain of shareholder PII) who wants to point an agentic AI system at their overflowing email inbox.

The debate: should they be cloud-based, or reverse twenty years of industry momentum and go back to on-prem so they can hot-swap open-weight models without token costs and keep everything whitelisted?

Michael stopped the panel, brought the consultant to the front, declared the panelists a pop-up advisory board, and made them answer.

The responses split about how you’d expect from their backgrounds:

• Alexei: Going on-prem relocates risk rather than eliminating it. It also means you’re now defending on two fronts: not just outsiders, but also insiders! You’re paying for infrastructure, security, and people. The “cheaper” assumption usually doesn’t survive contact with the invoice. When Microsoft ships patches every week, that’s a vendor doing work you’d otherwise be doing yourself, maybe badly.
• Aaron: Go hybrid, on the grounds that nobody has a crystal ball about second- and third-order downstream constraints, and hybrid preserves optionality for next year.
• Candace: Her world is mostly on-prem and air-gapped, so that’s where her instinct goes, insider threat and hiring burden included.
• Paul: He’s a retired Rear Admiral, so he followed the Navy adage “A ship’s a fool to fight a fort” and declared the question outside his expertise and deferred to the other panelists. In my opinion, that earned him even more credibility.

Michael then asked for the consultant’s contact info so they can follow up in 60 days and report back to the room on what he actually decided. That’s the accountability loop conferences never close. I’ll keep tabs on this and let you know how it turned out.

After that, they did it again, this time with an attendee trying to break from defense-sector BDR work into commercial cybersecurity account management. They brought her to the front and gave her a live career consult.ation.

Candace’s advice was to stop being invisible on LinkedIn and start advertising the specific role she wants.

Aaron also had good cybersecurity-specific advice:

“Cybersecurity is one of the most arrogant professions on the planet. If you’re the one person they want to have a beer with afterward, you’ve already won.”

(I work in cyber. He’s right. In this field, being able to communicate humility is a cheat code.)

And finally, in a fit of audience participation, and after quickly consulting NetFoundry’s careers page (I work there and love it!), I stood up and asked her “How about starting with a Sales Development Rep role that works with Account Management? We have an opening at NetFoundry.”

She said “yes,” and Michael yelled “Joey’s got to get her the job!”

(She and I chatted afterward. Our conversation will be ongoing, and I guess I’ll have to follow up with Michael in 60 days…)

Tampa Bay resources you should know about

Paul’s whole reason for being there was to make people in the room aware of resources they might not have tapped:

• The Florida High Tech Corridor spans 23 counties from Tampa Bay to the Space Coast, and deliberately plays Switzerland across all of them; there are no favorites among universities.
• USF’s Bellini College of AI, Cybersecurity and Computing is teaching ethics at the beginning of the degree rather than bolting it on senior year, on the theory that security is fundamentally a judgment-call discipline, not a checklist one. Elizabeth Nelson is the Corridor’s point of contact at USF.
• SBIR/STTR grants are available from eleven different federal agencies, it’s non-dilutive funding, and the Corridor can help you go after it and match on top of it.
• Don’t forget places like Embarc Collective, Tampa Bay Wave, and spARK Labs!
• Florida’s structural advantage is dual-use! The military and commercial sides are unusually well connected here, and the biggest buyer in the world is a short drive away.

Closing round: What’s the one thing you can’t get wrong?

Michael went down the line and asked each panelist for the single thing a founder walking out with one weekend and a small budget can’t afford to get wrong:

• Paul: Take the first step. Just do something. Anything.
• Candace: “Culture eats cyber strategy for breakfast.” If your people haven’t internalized cyber hygiene, none of the rest matters. Her running metaphor all afternoon was brushing your teeth: you don’t deliberate about it, you just do it. Security should feel like that.
• Aaron: Get business insurance, make sure it has carve-outs for cybersecurity, and make sure those carve-outs cover AI-driven attacks. That’s the one I hadn’t heard before and the one I’d act on tomorrow.
• Alexei: Hire the right people. (Michael made him clarify for the audio: right people.)

My four take-aways from this session

1. Compliance is a snapshot, security is a movie. If your controls aren’t monitored continuously, your ATO or SOC 2 report describes a company that existed on one Tuesday.
2. The framework question has an actual answer: SOC 2 Type 2 first, offload PCI to your payment processor, use a crosswalk so you’re not re-implementing the same control in four vocabularies.
3. AI didn’t create new attacks; it created new attackers. The skill floor dropped. The people who couldn’t do this eighteen months ago can do it now, at scale, cheaply. Your threat model didn’t change; your threat volume did.

Take-away number four is so good that I wanted to separate it from the rest:

4. Turning a panel into a pop-up advisory board bit was brilliant! Michael took real attendee problems, put them in front of a panel of experts, made them answer in public, and asked them to follow up in 60 days. This moved what the panel said from the rhetorical to the practical.

Let’s see more of this, please, and nicely done, Michael!

The post “Culture eats cyber strategy for breakfast”: Notes from 813 Tech Day’s Security Panel appeared first on Global Nerdy.

This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:

When the event will take place

What the event is

Where the event will take place

Who is holding the event

This week’s events

• Monday, August 17
• Tuesday, August 18
• Wednesday, August 19
• Thursday, August 20
• Friday, August 21
• Saturday, August 22
• Sunday, August 23

Monday, August 17

Event name and location	Group	Time
Venice Area Toastmasters Club #5486 Online event	Toastmasters District 48	7:30 AM to 9:00 AM EDT
Business Networking Meeting Online event	Christian Professionals Network Tampa Bay	11:30 AM to 12:30 PM EDT
Online: UE5 – Create a Third-Person Game 6 parts Class Series – Part 6 Online event	Orlando Game Developers Meetup	4:00 PM to 5:30 PM EDT
OrlandoPreneur Monthly Startup Happy Hour! Blue Martini Lounge	OrlandoPreneur Startup Happy Hour: Connect, Learn & Grow!	5:30 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
Speakeasy Toastmasters #4698 Online event	Toastmasters District 48	6:00 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
ACE Advanced Toastmasters 3274480 Online event	Toastmasters Divisions C & D	6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Games at Barriehaus Trinity Barriehaus Beer Company, Trinity	Advance 3 Spaces Neurodivergent Social Gaming	6:00 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
Sarasota Blood on the Clocktower Clocktower meetup	Board Games and Card Games in Sarasota & Bradenton	6:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
MTG: Commander Night Critical Hit Games	Critical Hit Games	6:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT
Toast of Lakewood Ranch Toastmasters Club Lakewood Ranch Town Hall	Toastmasters District 48	6:30 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
North Port Toastmasters Meets Online!! Online event	Toastmasters District 48	6:30 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
Lakeland (FL) Toastmasters Club #2262 GFWC United Women’s Club of Lakeland	Toastmasters Division E	7:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Let’s Talk Toastmasters Online event	Toastmasters Divisions C & D	7:00 PM to 8:30 PM EDT
Monday New Port Richey Games! Old Tavern Games	Blood on the Clocktower Tampa Bay	7:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
Hidden Gems Night, Presented by A Duck! Online event	Nerdbrew Events	7:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
Members as far back as 2008 can access their photos none	School is closed- Light Study PRO – A Photography Workshop	7:00 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
Virtual Event: Hiawassee Book Club Online event	Library Book Clubs – OCLS	7:00 PM to 8:30 PM EDT
The Magic of Being Creative Online event	Philosophy for Everyday Life – Talks and Classes in Florida	7:00 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
DigiMondays Sunshine Games | Magic the Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!	Sunshine Games	7:30 PM to 9:30 PM EDT
Weekly General Meetup Online event	Beginning Web Development	8:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Where is Bitcoin Going? Online event	Bitcoiners of Southwest Florida	9:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
Return to the top of the list

Tuesday, August 18

Wednesday, August 19

Thursday, August 20

Friday, August 21

Saturday, August 22

Event name and location	Group	Time
NATIONAL TOOTH FAIRY DAY — Saturday, August 22, 2026 Saturday, Aug 22 · 4:45 PM to 9:15 PM EDT	Tampa (Citrus Park Area) Games Meetup Group	9:52 PM
YouTube Content Creators Online event	YouTube Content Creator Meetup Group	9:00 AM to 10:30 AM EDT
Saturday Chess at Wholefoods in Midtown, Tampa Whole Foods Market	Chess Republic	9:30 AM to 12:00 PM EDT
Come and hang out. Panera Bread	Windermere Writers Group	10:00 AM to 12:00 PM EDT
Saturday Gaming Nerdy Needs	Brandon Boardgamers	1:00 PM to 6:00 PM EDT
Youth Dungeons & Dragons Saturdays (Ages7-12) At Conworlds Emporium Saturday, Aug 22 · 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM EDT	Tarpon Springs Community Fun & Games	1:00 PM
FREE Fab Lab Orientation Faulhaber Fab Lab	Suncoast Makers	1:30 PM to 2:30 PM EDT
D&D (5e) @ Game-o-Storus (FULL) Game-o-Storus	St Pete and Pinellas Tabletop RPG Group	1:30 PM to 5:30 PM EDT
Board Brews Zephyrhills Brewing Company	Nerdbrew Events	5:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
Warmachine Journeyman League Battlebrush Games	Battlebrush Games: Paint Minis & Play Warhammer/Warmachine	5:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Community Hang-out Night Online event	Nerdbrew Events	6:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Yu-Gi-Oh Evening Tournament Sunshine Games | Magic the Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!	Sunshine Games	7:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT
Tampa Fright Club Presents: Insidious: Out of the Further! AMC Veterans 24	Tampa Fright Club	7:35 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
Saturday Night Park Quest Gaming Celebration Station	Tampa Bay Meetup (20’s & 30’s)	8:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT
Return to the top of the list

Sunday, August 23

About this list

How do I put this list together?

It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.

In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.

What goes into this list?

I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:

• • Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
  • Tech project management / agile processes
  • Video, board, and role-playing games
  • Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
  • Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
  • Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
  • Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms

• Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
• Anything I deem geeky

The post Tampa Bay tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events list (Monday, August 17 – Sunday, August 23) appeared first on Global Nerdy.

Here’s a video that isn’t from the place where I work (NetFoundry), but from someone works in a different part of AI security. Yet somehow they ended up at the same question that we at NetFoundry ask: How confident are you that your current tools can defend against the new threats brought about by AI?

The video features an interview that took place at the recently-concluded Black Hat 2026 in Las Vegas, and the interviewee is Daniel Bardenstein, CEO of Manifest Cyber.

While NetFoundry focus on identity-based security, Manifest’s focus is on the AI supply chain:

• Manifest’s approach to security is knowing what’s actually inside the models and software you build and buy. They’re paying particular attention to provenance: training data you didn’t source, open-weight models pulled from a public hub, what’s “under the hood” of your agents.
• NetFoundry approaches AI security from the other end: what’s outside the models and software you build and buy, and what’s allowed to reach it. We’re about machine identity, service-to-service access, and attack surface.

Watch the video; it’s got some notable stuff, including:

• Open-weight adoption is about to accelerate, and the reason is control. Bardenstein argues that with a frontier model you have zero control over the system prompt, the training data, or what some provider (or government) decides to change under you. With an open-weight model, you control the whole chain: prompt, data, deployment, guardrails. If you’re already self-hosting models behind OpenZiti, this is the security-side justification for it, from someone who isn’t us.
• The Hugging Face incident he describes is darkly funny. A lot of people say that the risk with AI models is that they’re non-deterministic, but the HF situation happened because the sandboxing was weak and guardrails  (which really means “ordinary software security”) were missing. Then, when HF pointed its own AI at the forensics, its guardrails read the request as “too cyber” and refused to help,. HF had to fall back to an open-weight model.I’m going to start saying this regularly: AI fails like software because it is software!
• “AI has its own supply chain and you inherit it.” Every model off a public hub and every third-party dataset is a dependency you didn’t build and can’t fully vet. Bardenstein notes public datasets have shipped with everything from PII to, in documented cases, outright illegal content nobody caught until after training. As the people on the Antiques Roadshow TV show will tell you, provenance is important.
• The Log4Shell framing is the one I’d steal (in fact, I’m doing that right now). Bardenstein built Manifest after the Pentagon Log4Shell vulnerability (a.k.a. CVE-2021-44228) scramble. The issue boiled down to a simple, embarrassing question: “Where is this one piece of code running across everything I’ve built and bought?” Even having seen what happened five years ago, if you told a CISO a model or dataset was poisoned, they’d likely not be able to tell you where it’s deployed, who owns it, or which vendors are affected without a lot of phone calls, emails, spreadsheets, and gnashing of teeth.

Bardenstein’s observations are pretty much the mirror image of our recently-published 2026 State of Secure AI Access report, where we observe that:

• 99% of CTOs/CISOs at orgs with 1,000+ employees admit they lack full visibility into their AI deployments.
• 54% named new AI-specific services like MCP servers and LLM gateways as fresh attack surface.
• 8% think their identity systems are sufficient for non-human workloads.

Pair our observations with Bardenstein’s supply-chain point and the full failure mode is bleak. An agent you can’t identify, running a model you didn’t vet, reaching services over credentials nobody rotates. That’s three unknowns stacked on top of each other.

My read (not Bardenstein’s or NetFoundry’s report’s) is that giving an agent its own OpenZiti identity solves the “reach” half of the problem. You know what the system or service can talk to and every log line means something.

What it doesn’t do is handle the composition half, or to put it another way, it doesn’t account for what’s inside the thing you just handed an identity to.

Two separate disciplines that happen to share a root cause: You can’t govern what you can’t see, whether “it” is a network path or a model’s provenance.

• Watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZewRqZwfOM
• Download NetFoundry’s 2026 State of AI Access report: https://info.netfoundry.io/lp-survey-august-2026

The post Watched a Black Hat interview on AI supply chain security and it’s NetFoundry’s report’s findings, but from the opposite direction appeared first on Global Nerdy.

813 Tech Day happens in Tampa this Thursday, and whether you plan to attend (I’ll be at the Hotel Haya and Sapphire events) or observe from afar, keep this word in mind: Scenius.

What is scenius?

Scenius is a portmanteau of the words scene and genius, and it was coined by musician, music producer, and visual artist Brian Eno to describe the extreme creativity that groups, places, or “scenes” can generate.

Eno came up with the term as a way of countering the pervasive myth of the Lone Genius: the idea that innovation comes from a small, select set of Chosen Ones:

“Just as genius is the creative intelligence of an individual,” he says in the video, “scenius is the creative intelligence of a community.”

Here’s Eno’s expanded definition of scenius, courtesy of Eno:

“Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”

…I thought that originally those few individuals who’d survived in history – in the sort-of “Great Man” theory of history – they were called “geniuses”. But what I thought was interesting was the fact that they all came out of a scene that was very fertile and very intelligent.

So I came up with this word “scenius” – and scenius is the intelligence of a whole… operation or group of people. And I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture, actually. I think that – let’s forget the idea of “genius” for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.”

Historical examples of scenius

Here are some examples of scenius, where the collective smarts, creativity, and passion of a group of people coming together to do great things is greater than the sum of its parts:

• The Lunar Society of Birmingham: a dinner club run between 1765 and 1813 in Birmingham, England, and attended by industrialists, scientists, and thinkers who changed science and engineering forever. Their regulars included Boulton and Watt (steam engines and their applications to manufacturing), Erasmus Darwin (biology, inventions, and grandfather of Charles Darwin), Keir (industrialist, chemistry, inventions), Priestly (chemistry, philosophy), Small (Thomas Jefferson’s professor at the College of William and Mary), Stokes and Withering (early heart medicine), Wedgewood (industrialized pottery, pretty much invented modern marketing, including the concepts of direct mail, money-back guarantees, self-service, free delivery, buy one get one free, and illustrated catalogs), Whitehurst (geology).

• 

  The Sex Pistols’ 1976 gig. It was attended by a mere 42 people, but those people went on to revolutionize music through their work in British alt-rock: Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley (The Buzzcocks) organized, Tony Wilson and Martin Hannett (Factory Records and The Hacienda), Morrissey, Mark E. Smith (The Fall), Paul Morley (NME magazine, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, The Art of Noise), Mick Hucknall (Simply Red), and Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner, and Peter Hook (Joy Division, New Order). This gig was so consequential that it has its own Wikipedia entry!

• Kool Lady BlueThe Roxy, New York, 1980s.

  

  It started as a roller rink in Chelsea, but thanks to parties organized by Kool Lady Blue and Michael Holman, it became the place where hip-hop legends like Afrika Bambaataa (as in Planet Rock), Grandmaster Flash (The Message, White Lines), Jazzy Jay, Grand Wizzard Theodore spun records, the Rock Steady Crew dance-battled, and Fab 5 Freddy hosted.

  

  A then-NYU student named Rick Rubin was there networking, and in a couple of years before he’d co-found Def Jam. A young Madonna performed there before her career took off, and Run-DMC and New Edition played some of their first shows on that stage.

  The Roxy also attracted people from New York’s art/punk scene, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry (who ventured into hip-hop with 1980’s Rapture, which was the first rap tune to make it to #1 on the U.S. charts; it also mentions Fab 5 Freddy), and to complete the scenius circle… John Lydon of the Sex Pistols.

• Silicon Valley: Your iPhone and Android are direct descendants of the scenius that was born when the “Traitorous Eight” left Shockley Semiconductor to form their own company, Fairchild, and the “Fairchildren” who then left Fairchild to form their own companies, and so on, creating a cross-pollenating scene that we now know as “The Valley”.

What conditions does scenius need?

Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired and former editor and publisher of the Whole Earth Review, wrote that the geography of scenius is nurtured by several factors:

• Mutual appreciation: Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
• Rapid exchange of tools and techniques: As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
• Network effects of success: When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
• Local tolerance for the novelties: The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.

Here’s what Austin Kleon, a writer and artist whose ideas have been adopted by the tech community, has to say about scenius:

Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals—artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers—who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals: it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.

What I love about the idea of scenius is that it makes room in the story of creativity for the rest of us: the people who don’t consider ourselves geniuses. Being a valuable part of a scenius is not necessarily about how smart or talented you are, but about what you have to contribute—the ideas you share, the quality of the connections you make, and the conversations you start. If we forget about genius and think more about how we can nurture and contribute to a scenius, we can adjust our own expectations and the expectations of the worlds we want to accept us. We can stop asking what others can do for us, and start asking what we can do for others.

How do we grow Tampa’s scenius?

The short answer is: By showing up and participating in events like 813 Tech Day!

While the elements of scenius are in place for Tampa Bay’s tech scene, there’s still some way to go before Tampa can match places like Nashville (whose tech scene is bigger than you might think) never mind places like Austin, Charlotte, Indianapolis, and Raleigh.

The success or failure of Tampa’s tech scenius depends on us, the Tampeños who work in tech, creative, and related industries.

I’m originally from Toronto. While it has one of the hottest tech scenes in North America today, it wasn’t always that way.

While the city did launch some initiatives to change this, what truly made the difference was Toronto’s own tech community stepping up and organizing. We held events of all sizes, from regular meetups and user group meetings at pubs and lecture halls to independent conferences like Mesh, RubyFringe and FutureRuby to tech “camp” events to big corporate gatherings put on by the likes of the Canadian subsidiaries of IBM and Microsoft. We built places to get together, from hackerspaces such as Hacklab.TO (where I met Chris Olah as a young teenager; he’d go on to co-found Anthropic)…

…and Site3 coLaboratory to the MaRS Centre. In my work as a developer evangelist for Microsoft, I’ve met many students at Toronto’s fine universities and colleges, and they’re eager to crank out the ‘wares, both hard and soft, and they’re bright as all get-out. We built a great community bound together by cooperation, a strong social media scene and good old-fashioned face-to-face meetings. We got stuff done, and the stuff we did traveled far and wide. We built Toronto’s tech scenius, and it put the city on the map.

Can Tampa do the same? I believe so; it’s just up to us.

And now, 813 Tech Day!

Thursday, August 13, or 8/13, is 813 Tech Day. Brought to you by the folks behind Tampa Bay Tech Week and 727 Tech Day, it’s one day of sessions, discussions, workshops, get-togethers, and networking for Tampa Bay’s tech community, held in Tampa.

There’ll be value in what the presenters show and what the panelists say, but the real gold will be in simply showing up and meeting other people you might not have otherwise met and gaining ideas and inspiration you might not have otherwise had.

Or, as the saying goes, 80% of success is showing up. (In fact, you might want to read this recent article of mine about how showing up paid off for me.)

So show up at 813 Tech Day!

Want to know more about 813 Tech Day?

• Check out the official site
• Check out my writeup of 813 Tech Day, complete with event calendar

Recommended reading/viewing

Here’s another video with Brian Eno talking about scenius:

Genius Vs Scenius: You Don’t Need To Be Extraordinary To Create Extraordinary Things:

Here’s Austin Kleon’s talk, Steal Like an Artist, which has some elements in it that would later lead to him writing about scenius:

Also by Austin Kleon:

• Scenius
• Maps of scenius

Other writing:

• Bruce Sterling in Wired: Scenius, or Communal Genius
• You don’t have to be a genius to be part of a scenius
• Scenius, Inspiration, and Invention
• Scenius is the gateway
• You don’t need to be a genius to have impact. Just find a scenius.
• Conjuring Scenius

The post Tampa Bay’s “Scenius” and 813 Tech Day appeared first on Global Nerdy.

We then asked how confident they are that their current tools can actually handle the new risks, and 15% said “very.” 15% is very slightly less that the odds for rolling six on a 1d6. More specifically, among the CISOs, whose entire job is to be the professional pessimist in the room, that figure dropped to 10%.

That’s the current situation: Universal pressure, near-universal doubt.

If you just want to get to the report, it’s here. But if you’d like to know more, read on…

Disclaimer and where the survey comes from

I work at NetFoundry as a developer advocate, and NetFoundry commissioned this report. So yes, this is a vendor survey, and you’re correct to raise an eyebrow. (I’d be worried if you didn’t).

In our defense, we did the thing you’re supposed to do: the survey itself was run by an independent research firm (Global Surveyz), the respondents were 200 US-based security and technology leaders at companies with 1,000+ employees, and it was fielded this past May and June.

I’m going to try and separate what the survey found from what I think it means. The first category is data. The second category is me, a guy on the internet, having opinions, which won’t always be the same as NetFoundry’s Marketign department (it happens). I’ll flag which is which.

The number that reframed the whole thing for me

Of everything in here, this is the one I keep coming back to:

Security leaders are nearly 10x more likely to worry about securing machine-to-machine workloads than human access to applications.

Specifically: 69% said machine workloads (service-to-service, API-to-API, agent-to-whatever) are where they’re least confident today. Just 7% said human user access. The remaining 24% said “both equally,” which I read as “please don’t make me pick.”

That tracks perfectly, and it’s a compliment to the last decade of security work. Think about what we spent the 2020s doing. COVID sent everyone home, remote access became the whole ballgame, and the industry poured an enormous amount of money and brainpower into VPNs,  Zero Trust access, and all sorts of security measures for a world that was suddenly more online that ever. It worked, and hman access to applications is, comparatively, a solved-ish problem. We got good at authenticating people. (I should know; it was during that time that I worked at Auth0!)

The issue of identity

The catch is that all of that machinery is built on one quiet assumption: that the thing connecting to your app is a human being with a unique identity. You authenticate the person, then you grant the access.

Agents and models don’t work like that. They don’t have identities the way humans do. So the tooling we built for the last problem doesn’t cleanly transfer to this one, and the volume is going the wrong direction, fast. Machine traffic is now growing several times faster than human traffic year over year. We got really good at guarding a door that fewer and fewer of the visitors are actually using.

A few more stats worth your attention:

• 100% agree their attack surface is growing. Not a plurality. Not a strong majority. Everyone. The average projected increase was 14% over the next 12 months, and that figure only counts AI deployments already underway or planned. 14% is probably the minimum.
• 93% are concerned about the new risks AI introduces, but only 15% are highly confident their current tools can handle them. That’s the gap I opened with. When the level of concern and the level of confidence are that far apart, something structural is going on.
• 99% admit they don’t have full visibility into their own AI deployments. That remaining 1%, which would have to be one respondent? I would like to buy that person a coffee (or beer! or bourbon!) and ask them a lot of questions.
• 90% are worried about shadow AI, the unsanctioned tools employees adopt on their own because the approved options don’t cut it. This is not a technology problem, it’s a human-nature problem. I will neither confirm nor deny my own contributions to the shadow AI at previous organizations, but in my defense, I was getting things done! When a tool is genuinely useful, people use it, memo or no memo.
• Only 8% call their current identity systems “very sufficient” for non-human workloads. 85% are now actively evaluating or exploring new approaches. That second number is the tell. When five out of six organizations are shopping for a new approach at the same time, that’s teh surest indicator that the industry is collectively coming to the realization that the existing tools weren’t built for this.
• Oh, and it’s slow. 55% cited risk and compliance review as a top contributor to delays in the network changes AI deployments need, and those changes add an average of 8 days from request to implementation. And that’s now, while AI-specific scrutiny is still warming up.

My read (this part is me, not the data)

In this section, I’m switching from reporting to speculating.

I think almost every number above traces back to one root cause: machines don’t have real identities. They have internal names so that developers and devops people can talk about them, but when it comes to having reasonably canonical identities like we humans do (full name, usernames, an email address, a government-issued unique ID number), we haven’t really created these for machines.

In the absence of machine identities, we have workarounds. On the less secure end, we have IP addresses; on the (relatively) more secure end, there are shared secrets, API keys, long-lived service-account credentials. As with most workarounds, they quietly rot. The credentials we give machines tend to carry more permission than they need. They rarely get rotated. After a while nobody’s entirely sure which agent a given key even belongs to, or why it exists.

Once you’re in that world, everything downstream gets harder. Visibility is hard because you can’t tell one agent’s actions from another’s. Access control is hard because a secret isn’t an identity, it’s some piece of data that happens to belong to a robot (and all too easily duplicated). Auditing is hard for both of those reasons at once. The identity gap is the root problem of most of the other security problems in the AI age.

NetFoundry — who are made of some very smart people, a few of whom are literal greybeards! — obviously has opinions about how to close that gap, and the report gets into them. That’s the vendor part, and you can take it or leave it.

But strip the logo off and the underlying observation stands on its own: we spent a decade giving humans strong identities and largely ignored the machines, and now the machines are the fastest-growing thing on the network. That bill was always going to come due. It’s just arriving faster than most people planned for.

The stat I want ask you about

That 14% attack-surface increase feels low to me. If you’re actually running agents in production right now, watching them spawn sub-agents and reach across cloud boundaries and pick up new tool integrations every sprint, does 14% over a year match what you’re seeing, or is it wildly optimistic?

(That’s a genuine question, not a rhetorical one. I’d rather hear it from people living it than trust my own gut.)

Read the full 2026 State of Secure AI Access report!

Download it here. (You have to provide a little info to get it.)

The post Security leaders we surveyed feel pressure to secure their AI, and almost none of them feel ready appeared first on Global Nerdy.

Here’s the text:

This strategy presentation was developed using AI assistance (Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini) for:

• Research: Market trend analysis and competitive landscape review
• Editing: Grammar, clarity, and flow optimization
• Ideation assistance: Testing ideas and generating new ones, because no matter how creative you are, it’s impossible to come up with a list of things you’d never think of.

The main contents — including strategic insights, tactical recommendations, specific positioning, and any em-dashes (option-shift-minus on Mac, alt + 0151 on Windows, Google “em dash” and copy and paste it on Linux) — were developed based on analysis of the interview materials and 15+ years of experience in the industry.

I suppose I should also include something about being too much of an egomaniac to let a word prediction machine outshine me. My relationship with LLMs is sort of like the relationship between Dr. Niles “Chief” Caulder (who formed the Doom Patrol) and Batman, as pictured in Batman/Superman: World’s Finest (2022), issue 2:

The post How I explain how I use AI in my presentations appeared first on Global Nerdy.

We recently celebrated the 727 area code, which covers Clearwater and St. Pete with a one-day, multi-event celebration of the area tech community, and on August 13th, we’re doing it again for the Tampa side of Tampa Bay. It’s being put together by the good people behind Tampa Bay Tech Week (with HyLo Innovation and W3RTech).

Are you in or near the 813 area code? Do you build systems or software for a living, or do you want to? Then you’ll want to mark Thursday, August 13 on your schedule and free it up for 813 Tech Day.

The essentials

• When: Thursday, August 13, 2026
• Where: Tampa. It’s a venue-hop (details below)!
• Cost: Register on Luma → https://luma.com/rf58ieh3
• Vibe: Panels, hands-on workshops, a lot of open networking, and an evening that keeps going

813 Tech Day happens in different places at different times!

813 Tech Day moves around Tampa, and it’s both a feature that lets you see places you might not have seen before and a way for you to get your steps in:

• Look, I’m a night owl and a musician, so I’m not likely to be at the Sweat in the City workout event at the start of the day (I tend to work out after my 10 a.m. standup with my NetFoundry teammates). But if you like early morning workouts and want to do one with the Tampa tech scene, go!
• Many sessions in the first half of the day happens at Cres Community in the Wellswood area (Rome Ave., south of Hillsborough), a very comfy-looking business event space.
• There’s also a big morning session at Hotel Haya in Ybor City, where the 813 Tech Day AI Meetup & Co-working event will take place. I’ll be there.
• Then, in the afternoon, the sessions move from Cres Community to Hotel Haya.
• Finally, in the evening, things get social at The Sapphire Tampa.

Why go?

Because this is basically a hometown game. 813 Tech Day crams the whole spread of Tampa Bay tech into one day and three venues, and the afternoon block at Hotel Haya is the real flex: cybersecurity in fintech, telecom/IT infrastructure resilience, and manufacturing workforce AI, back to back to back. Fortifying the Digital Frontier and Hyper-Connected Tampa are exactly the kind of conversations I show up for uninvited (don’t worry; I was invited). Zero-trust networking and infrastructure that doesn’t fall over are, not coincidentally, my day job.

The morning’s no slouch either. At Cres Community, there’ll be an AI-and-workforce panel, a founder mental health session that more conferences should be brave enough to program, and a healthtech partnerships talk that’ll be catnip if you’re anywhere near that space. If you like things more freeform, the 813 AI Meetup and Coworking event is happening at Hotel Haya, where I’ll be.

813 Tech Day wraps up at a place I’ve been meaning to check out: The Sapphire Tampa (a pretty stylin’ looking place in an unexpected location on Boy Scout Road) for  a networking happy hour and a closing night that, judging by past Tech Week events, does not believe in winding down early.

I’ll be around all day; come say hi! I’m the one with the accordion energy and strong opinions about cybersecurity, AI, zero-trust networking, and the future of computing.

Grab your spot: luma.com/rf58ieh3. For more info, check out 813techday.com.

See you in the 813!

The post Tampa Bay Tech Week presents 813 Tech Day on 8/13! appeared first on Global Nerdy.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I5cVH6WPwas

The post Saturday picdump for Saturday, August 8 appeared first on Global Nerdy.

This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:

When the event will take place

What the event is

Where the event will take place

Who is holding the event

This week’s events

• Monday, August 10
• Tuesday, August 11
• Wednesday, August 12
• Thursday, August 13
• Friday, August 14
• Saturday, August 15
• Sunday, August 16

Monday, August 10

Tuesday, August 11

Tuesday at 10 a.m., online: Computer Coach presents Resumes In The Age Of AI, a resume session that explains the hiring processes companies use today and discusses questions such as:

• How is AI being used to review resumes?
• What still matters to recruiters?
• Are resume keywords really that important?
• Can AI help you write a better resume?
• Which resume “rules” still apply, and which ones don’t?

Find out more and register here.

Wednesday, August 12

Thursday, August 13

Thursday, August 13 is 813 Tech Day!

Are you in or near the 813 area code? Do you build systems or software for a living, or do you want to? Then join us for this day full of events, learning, and networking.

Check out my writeup as well as the official 813 tech Day site.

Friday, August 14

Saturday, August 15

Event name and location	Group	Time
August Book Club Saturday, Aug 15 · 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM EDT	Tampa Bay Women’s Book Club Meetup Group	5:15 PM
Saturday Chess at Wholefoods in Midtown, Tampa Whole Foods Market	Chess Republic	9:30 AM to 12:00 PM EDT
AMA w/Robert Henning: Building Better Games w/Godot Aug 15th @ 10.30 AM EST Online event	Orlando Unity Developers Group	10:30 AM to 12:00 PM EDT
Book review : Decomposition Book by Sara Van Os	Cocktails and Convos	11:30 AM to 1:30 PM EDT
Welding basics	Makerspaces Pinellas Meetup Group	12:00 PM to 2:00 PM EDT
Electronics Soldering: Lesson I MakerSpace PRO	Makerspaces Pinellas Meetup Group	1:00 PM to 2:00 PM EDT
Youth Dungeons & Dragons Saturdays (Ages7-12) At Conworlds Emporium Saturday, Aug 15 · 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM EDT	Tarpon Springs Community Fun & Games	1:00 PM
FREE Fab Lab Orientation Faulhaber Fab Lab	Suncoast Makers	1:30 PM to 2:30 PM EDT
D&D (5e) @ Game-o-Storus (FULL) Game-o-Storus	St Pete and Pinellas Tabletop RPG Group	1:30 PM to 5:30 PM EDT
Games on Tap @ TBBF Thirsty Buffalo Brew Factory	Advance 3 Spaces Neurodivergent Social Gaming	2:00 PM to 4:00 PM EDT
The Borrowed Life of Frederick Fife by Anna Johnston New World Tampa	Tampa Book Club – Award-Winning Books	3:00 PM to 5:00 PM EDT
Playing Nintendo Games (Nintendo Switch and Switch 2) Online event	Nintendo Meetup Central Florida	3:25 PM to 5:25 PM EDT
Game Project Therapy (Virtual) Online event	Tampa Games Developer Guild	4:00 PM to 6:00 PM EDT
Divorce Appreciation Cards Against Humanity Game Windermere	Cards Against Humanity Orlando Game Night	5:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
Parrish (Bradenton) Game Night (3rd Saturday of each Month 5 – 9 PM) Hawk’s House	It’s All Fun & Games Bradenton, Parrish, Sarasota, & St Pete	5:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Board Brews Zephyrhills Brewing Company	Nerdbrew Events	5:00 PM to 10:00 PM EDT
Warmachine Journeyman League Battlebrush Games	Battlebrush Games: Paint Minis & Play Warhammer/Warmachine	5:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Game Night, August 15th – Good Times! IHOP	New Port Richey Game Night	5:30 PM to 9:30 PM EDT
Community Hang-out Night Online event	Nerdbrew Events	6:00 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Yu-Gi-Oh Evening Tournament Sunshine Games | Magic the Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!	Sunshine Games	7:00 PM to 11:00 PM EDT
AniKawaii cosplay rave The Bricks Ybor	Tampa 20’s and 30’s Social Crew	8:00 PM to 11:59 PM EDT
Return to the top of the list

Sunday, August 16

About this list

How do I put this list together?

It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.

In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.

What goes into this list?

I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:

• Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
• Tech project management / agile processes
• Video, board, and role-playing games
• Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
• Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
• Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
• Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms

• Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
• Anything I deem geeky

The post Tampa Bay tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events list (Monday, August 10 – Sunday, August 16) appeared first on Global Nerdy.

Clint (who among other things, does all sorts of OpenZiti development and co-hosts Ziti TV with me) recently posted a video, OpenZiti 2.0: A Management API With No Open Port.

It’s a quick but deep dive prompted by a great question over on our Discourse forums: “What’s the service configuration for the hosts part when using identity?”

Short answer: there isn’t one. No host.v1, no tunneler hosting it.

The core idea: in 2.0+, the controller is the hosting app. Give it an identity and it binds the service itself. There’s no separate tunneler, no host config. That’s the whole trick behind darkening an API you’d normally have no choice but to expose.

What the demo does: starting from a fresh 2.0.2 quickstart, Clint splits the controller’s APIs across two web listeners. The edge client and OIDC APIs stay on the public listener (0.0.0.0:1280). The management API gets no internet-facing port at all! It’s bound to the controller’s own Ziti identity and reachable only over the overlay by identities authorized to dial it. Then he proves it three ways: over loopback, with the ziti CLI over the overlay, and with a plain curl through ziti-edge-tunnel.

Before you try this in your own lab:

1. The intercept hostname has to be in the listener’s server cert. Recreate the server cert to include the intercept name (management.z in the demo), or the ziti CLI won’t connect over the overlay.
2. The edge-oidc snag. The moment you split listeners, edge-oidc’s auto-binding will bite you. It’s tracked in openziti/ziti#4185. If you’d like confirmation you’re not losing your mind, there’s a matching Discourse thread from folks whose ziti edge login broke on 2.0.0 right after a split.

Resources:

• Watch it on YouTube
• Command gist with every command from the demo, copy/paste ready
• v2.0.0 release notes, with more on binding controller APIs with an identity

[ This article also appears in r/OpenZiti. ]

The post [Video] OpenZiti 2.0: Securing the Management API With Zero Open Ports appeared first on Global Nerdy.

Read the article here: https://netfoundry.io/devops/api-gateway-security/

It’s written by Tod Burtchell, Associate Director Service Planning & Development in Management & Operations Platform (long title, dude!), whom I had the pleasure of meeting at a planning meeting last week.

Most API security spend goes into inspecting inbound traffic (WAFs, rate limiting, an API gateway parked out front), and all of it inspects traffic that has already arrived at your infrastructure. The exploit is already inside the door even before the door can do anything.

The general gist of the article leans on NetFoundry CEO Galeal Zino’s earlier article, Squaring the Circle: How to Make Public APIs Private, where he describes APIs as “snowflakes”. They’re snowflakes in the sense that they’re always changing, and each change quietly opens a new attack vector that signature-based defenses haven’t seen yet.

The tl;dr: Hardening the front door is one thing, but why not remove it instead? Picture and API with outbound-only connections, no listening ports, and identity-and-auth before anything connects. As a result, the API stays usable for the people who should reach it and is simply invisible to everyone else. OpenZiti is the open-source plumbing underneath if you want to see how it actually works.

I thought I’d make another “back of the envelope” diagram showing the difference between the usual way of building APIs, and the OpenZiti-powered outbound-only approach.

Once again, here’s the article: https://netfoundry.io/devops/api-gateway-security/

[ This article also appears in r/NetFoundry. ]

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