Stephen Cobb, Blogger, Security Evangelist, and More
Stephen Cobb, AB, BA Hons., CISSP, MAWG, FCBLA
Hi, I’m Stephen Cobb–also known as scobb or zcobb or the dude in the hat–and this is my blog. Welcome!
I write a couple of other blogs, notably Celtic Curse, and Scobb’s Security Blog, but this blog (www.cobbsblog.com/blog) is my personal blog, where the topic of each post is whatever I feel moved to write about (and the opinions expressed are entirely my own).
Since I started blogging I have written over 1,750 posts, not all of them here. I have other online properties that I maintain, such as the blog and website for the civil rights documentary Dare Not Walk Alone, which I had the honor of producing with my good friend, Jeremy Dean, the Brooklyn-based artist, and Florida video entrepreneur Richard Mergener.
For the past three years I have also blogged on the Marketing Optimization Blog as part of my work for Monetate, a venture-backed startup that I started helping out when it had zero paying clients. Over that three year period I managed to average one post per week, as the company grew from 5 guys + 2 founders, to over 60 employees. The company went cash flow positive within 12 months of shipping product and now has scores of big name (paying) clients, from QVC, the eighth largest online retailer, to Urban Outfitters, PETCO, and a bunch more.
Now that Monetate is well on its way to being a huge success, I am also on my way, to San Diego, where I will be Security Evangelist for ESET, starting in September, 2011. This is a role in which I can apply all that I learned marketing at Monetate to further a cause that has long been dear to my heart: information security.
Speaking of things dear to my heart, a few years ago I started the Hemochromatosis Facebook page which now has over 1, 000 “fans” and is a kind of self-support venue. I started that page because my partner of 26 years was disabled by, you guessed it, hemochromatosis: the most common deadly genetic condition in America.
Fortunately, Cobbsblog can sometimes afford to be less serious, a place I can have some fun. For example, those letters below my picture stand for: Aging Boomer, Bachelor of Arts (with Honours), Certified Information System Security Professional, Middle Aged White Guy, and Fellow of the Color Blind Left-handed Association. BTW, you say it like this: ay-bee, bee-ay ons, sisp, more-guh, eff-see-blah. Of course, BTW stands for by-the-way. For even more information about me, gluttons for punishment may read on (all others should feel free to get on with their own lives).
My Life: Edited Highlights
I was conceived in the wake of World War Two, part of the boomer generation, a demographic phenomenon born of nature’s attempt to replenish the species after suffering 60 million deaths in less than 6 years. Like many boomers I grew up thinking I was special, only to find there were a ton of other people, my age or slightly older, who also thought they were special. (My therapist says I’m making progress in my efforts to get over this but I still have a tendency to point out the things that make me different–did I mention that I’m both left-handed and color blind?)
Professionally speaking, I’m a CISSP or Certified Information System Security Professional. For a while I was the CSE–as in Chief Security Executive–for the world’s largest supplier of wired and wireless broadband to hotels, conferences and business travelers.
These days I’m a security evangelist. In the past I founded several companies in the computer security and data privacy space. There was InfoSec Labs, a widely-respected security consulting firm. Then there was ePrivacy Group which created programs, standards, and products to protect email from abuse. We created Spam Squelcher, the first anti-spam router, which went on to become TurnTide, which was bought by Symantec and lives on in many of their network security devices. Over the years I did quite a bit to help email marketers increase response and conversion rates by protecting their trusted relationship with consumers.
Before all that I did a lot of writing for computer magazines (one year I put out 12,000 words a month, every month, for 12 months). And before that I wrote a bunch of books, mainly about computers, starting with a 700-page manual for a flat file database, complete with graphics and pivot tables (which I wrote for McGraw-Hill in just over 10 weeks).
Around the middle of the last decade I got involved in independent film production, affordable housing, spousal care-giving, and trying to find time to have a life. Unfortunately, the affordable housing turned into non-profit housing and then into serious-loss-making housing. (If you’re looking for the face of foreclosure in America, just look at the faces on this page.) Sadly, like a lot of people, I went deep into the red in 2008, all my assets wiped out, largely because of the scams and frauds and other immoral goings on documented here, here, and here.
Accents, Immigrants, and DNA
If you detect a strange accent in my writing, it’s because I was born in Coventry, England, home of the pedal chain bicycle, Triumphs, Daimlers, Jaguars, the Sky Blues football team, and the first naked feminist tax protestor (Lady Godiva). I went to King Henry VIII School, founded by the king himself. Then I attended the University of Leeds (where The Who recorded the Live at Leeds album). I was in the School of English at the same time as Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits and I roomed with Steve Donnelly, one of the world’s most prolific session guitarists. I spent a year as a graduate teaching assistant at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada (topic: Philosophy of Religion). In 1976 I emigrated to America and I’ve now been a U.S. citizen longer than the former governor of California.
Speaking of being an immigrant, one of my enduring interests is where I came from. Thanks to the efforts of my grandparents I had a head start on the history of the Cobb family of Kent. For a long time now I’ve been of the opinion that most of the Cobbs in the world are related, starting with the ones on my family tree, the one that I put online here. From that tree, and from Kent, many Cobbs branched out, headed for distant lands, like America, Australia, and New Zealand. They truly did go forth and multiply. But with whom? I found myself wondering where my mother’s family tree might lead. So as soon as DNA testing offered to shed light on this topic, I signed up. First getting my mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) tested in 2000, then my Y-chromosome a few years later. I recently submitted some DNA to 23andMe and will be sharing the results on this blog.
Was It Worth It?
So what is the thing I’m most proud of doing? I think it was backing the documentary Dare Not Walk Alone. One of the best moments of my life was when an elderly woman in a movie theater in Lithonia, Georgia, came up to me after a screening of the film, hugged me, and with tears in her eyes said: “God bless you for making this movie.”
I remember thinking, “Right, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, it will be okay. I did something worth doing.” However, I’m not one to take needless chances, so for the next three years I lived on a hill in a very rural part of upstate New York that did not have bus service. There were no broadband lines either, so I adopted one more cause: universal rural broadband access. I tried to do my bit for RuMBA, the Rural Mobile Broadband Alliance, including creation of a white paper that shows why satellite Internet service is no substitute for real broadband connectivity.
Now that we are moving to San Diego I will need to watch out for buses but will be able to relax watching YouTube videos and movies on NetFlix, something that is practically impossible when your only option for Internet connection is satellite.
When I do find time to unwind, I like to shoot targets and make things. In 2008, I built a heated cat house for our cat, Katty Kay. However, it did not meet her expectations and she left. But then we acquired a pair of American Bombays, pure black parlor panthers who are good at mousing and cuddling. A brother and sister, we named them Wug and Bink, respectively. Sister Bink took off for parts unknown, but Mr. Wugs is still around, and sometimes hangs out in the cat house.
I also shoot photographs as well. I took all the shots that appear in the top right of these blog pages. Many of them were taken with an iPhone and many feature Layla, our English Springer Spaniel. Layla is my daily exercise and my reason-to-get-up-in-the-morning. Here are two photos of Layla, the first is Christmas, 2004, when she first arrived in our life, and the second is several years older, enjoying the snow:
So, there you have a long and rambling collection of edited highlights, ending with a cute doggy photo. What more could you want? Maybe some more blog links?. I can’t promise to keep them all current, but here you go:
Comments on this entry are closed.