The First Year of Public Exposure

The siege of Château Gaillard between September 1203 and March 1204 is a good example of determined attackers exploiting a weakness in the defenders’ threat model. As the story has it, a French soldier clambered up the latrine chute and let in his compatriots to take over the castle.

The Practical Challenges and Tribulations

An independent information security blog on the other hand presented two kinds of challenges.

  1. First off, would I have enough to say to sustain a steady cadence and to keep my audience engaged?
  2. Secondly, creating something out of nothing requires patience for the long game in order to bring my ideas to the attention of a larger audience.

A House DJ and Guest Stars

That is why I decided to create an independent forum where I am the “house DJ” warming up the crowd and the stars of the show are the guest bloggers who offer their insight on their areas of expertise. I did not know whether I would be able to get people to write for the blog, since it is a time consuming effort and you as a blogger will not get compensated for it.

Write for Us as an Invitation to SPAM Me

Even if the signal to noise ratio of inbound submissions has been quite poor, the ones that have made the cut have been nothing but excellent. What I mean by this is that SEO is both a curse and a blessing.

The Editor Hat

Having published 14 write-ups in a year has also meant that I have had to get acquainted with my role as an editor. This has been quite an involved process, since most of the bloggers are not native English speakers or writers. Don’t get me wrong, editing eight longer pieces of writing has taught me a lot about the art and has motivated me to dig deeper into topics, which I might have otherwise just glanced over and moved on.

Publishing Cadence

This work has also meant that Public Exposure has settled in on a steady cadence of one post per month, each published on a given Patch Tuesday. Originally, I naively thought that I could publish one post every fortnight, but luckily I have decided to focus on quality over quantity. I can only marvel at professional writers such as Cory Doctorow, who spew out interesting, informed content almost on a daily basis.

My Ugly Babies

Publishing six pieces of my own writing in a year, may not seem much at a glance. I have, however, been focusing on publishing my research into known vulnerabilities and exposures, an endeavor which in itself consumes quite a bit of time to begin with.

Happy Birthday PE!

In any case, let’s pop the cork on a bottle of bubbly for our one year old and hope she will learn to walk and run, since her creepy crawly phase seems to have come to an end.

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Lari Huttunen is a polyglot linguist with an avid interest in defensive cyber security. Read more at: https://public-exposure.inform.social/author/lari-huttunen

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Lari Huttunen

Lari Huttunen is a polyglot linguist with an avid interest in defensive cyber security. Read more at: https://public-exposure.inform.social/author/lari-huttunen