Author: Jack Smith
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When Arcade Machines Go Online A modern pinball machine isn’t just flippers, bumpers, lights, and a very large box making expensive noises. It’s a connected computer with software updates, online score tracking, player accounts, remote management, and an Internet connection. Evert Brochez from Torius joins Jack to explain how pinball evolved from electromechanical machines into…
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Blame, Reorganize, Repeat There is an old management joke about an outgoing manager leaving three numbered envelopes for their successor. When the first crisis arrives: blame your predecessor. The second: reorganize. And when the third arrives… prepare three envelopes. We look at why this joke has survived for decades, and why anyone who has worked…
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Why Rebooting Your Computer Actually Fixes Problems “Have you tried turning it off and on again ?” became an IT cliché for a reason. Rebooting clears accumulated state, resets resources, and fixes a surprising number of problems.From Unix uptime bragging rights to mainframe IPLs and Windows servers nobody is allowed to restart, every system has…
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Software Testing Done Right – Where, When and What Should You Test? Testing software sounds simple enough. But what exactly should you test, where should those tests happen, and how do you decide which parts of a complex system need the most attention? Jack talks with Mooly Beeri about software testing from a developer’s perspective:…
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How a Mainframe Timer Bug Slowed an Entire Development Team One day, a busy IBM-compatible mainframe began slowing to a crawl. Hundreds of programmers noticed immediately — some even resorted to banging on the server room window when the system became unusable. The problems had started after a microcode upgrade, but there was no obvious…
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AI Shadow IT: Why Employees Are Quietly Building the Next IT Risk Artificial intelligence didn’t invent Shadow IT—it made it invisible. In this Jack’s Rant, Jack Smith explores how AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot and Claude have fundamentally changed the way employees solve problems. No servers under desks. No rogue software installations. Just a browser…
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How a Betting System Crashed at the Worst Possible Moment Every year, the Melbourne Cup pushes Australia’s betting infrastructure to its limits. In 1991, a known software bug turned one of the busiest days of the year into an IT disaster. As millions of bets poured in, CPU utilisation unexpectedly collapsed and the betting system…
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Why scambaiting videos leave security professionals with more questions than answers. Scambaiters like Kitboga, Jim Browning and Pierogi educate millions, waste scammers’ time, and undoubtedly prevent people from becoming victims. As a security professional, I genuinely appreciate what they do. But every time I watch one of these videos, I find myself asking the same…
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How a Missing VLAN Strategy Turned Smart City Infrastructure into a Cybersecurity Nightmare Smart cities promise better transportation, connected infrastructure, and improved services—but what happens when everything is connected a little too well? In this episode, our guest shares the story of a security assessment in a major metropolitan smart city where network segmentation had…
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Privacy, Identity Theft, Data Minimization, and Why Your Driver’s License Is Not a Bar Tab Deposit Opening a tab at a bowling alley shouldn’t require handing over your driver’s license or national ID card. Yet many businesses still ask customers to leave government-issued identity documents behind as collateral, often storing them in plain sight with…