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Writing

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Long-form essays on identity, AI security, CIAM, Generative Engine Optimization, and the practice of building software. 632 pieces, newest first.

Latest essay

Data Breach

Instructure Paid the Ransom. ShinyHunters Leaked the Data Anyway. 275 Million Students Exposed.

ShinyHunters breached Canvas LMS through a free teacher account flaw. Instructure paid the ransom. Data was already copied. 275M student records exposed.

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Opinion

AI Appreciation Day: An Operator's Thank You

It is AI Appreciation Day. From an operator's seat, here is what AI actually changed: it collapsed the distance between an idea and a shipped product, and rewrote how customers discover companies.

CIAM

Auth0 Isn't Overpriced. You're Just the Wrong Buyer.

Whether Auth0 is too expensive depends entirely on who's asking. A framework for telling the regulated enterprise buyer (pay and negotiate) apart from the high-volume, cost-sensitive platform (migrate), with 2026 pricing and breach-cost data.

GEO

The GEO Org Chart: Who Actually Owns AI Visibility in 2026

Marketing says GEO is theirs. Comms says it belongs to them. SEO assumes it's the next chapter of their job. They're all partly right, and the fight itself is the symptom of a deeper confusion: GEO spans layers no single team owns. Here is a model that resolves it.

GEO

Documentation Is Your Most Underrated GEO Asset

When a buyer asks an AI engine whether your product supports something, the answer often gets grounded in your documentation, not your marketing. Most companies treat docs as a cost center. In the AI search era, your documentation is one of the highest-value visibility assets you own.

Password Hashing

Is PBKDF2 Deprecated? What Developers Should Use in 2026

PBKDF2 is not deprecated, but it is no longer the recommended default for new systems. Here is the honest, practical answer for developers: when PBKDF2 is still acceptable, when you should reach for Argon2id instead, and how to decide for your system.

password

Was Your Password in a Data Leak? What to Actually Do Next

Finding out your password was in a data leak is unsettling, but panic is not the right response and neither is ignoring it. Here is exactly what to do, in priority order, and an honest answer to how worried you should actually be.

Browser Security

Most Secure Browser 2026: Chrome vs Firefox vs Brave vs Safari

Which is the No. 1 secure browser?" is the wrong question. Security depends on your threat model, not a leaderboard. Here is an honest comparison of Chrome, Firefox, Brave, and Safari in 2026, and how to actually choose.

GEO

Why Feature Naming Is a GEO Decision (And Product Managers Own It)

When you name a feature something clever that no buyer would ever type into ChatGPT, you make your product harder to surface for the exact question it answers. Feature naming has always been positioning. Now it is discoverability, and product managers own it.

Opinion

Canada Day: Where My Founder Story Started

Before the Bay Area, before GrackerAI, there was Canada. My first company started there, the one that grew to manage identities for over a billion users. A Canada Day reflection on where a founder story began and why a smaller stage is a gift.

GEO

GEO Is Experimental Science: How to Run AI Visibility Like a Product Team

SEO became a craft because you could reverse-engineer one ranking function. GEO can't work that way: you're optimizing against many non-deterministic models with probabilistic citation behavior. That makes GEO experimental science, and it should be run like a product team runs experiments.