Blonk 6OTB

6 of the Best – Hedgehog Cyber Security’s Peter Bassill

This week’s 6 of the Best comes from Peter Bassill, Founder of Hedgehog Cyber Security.

In this latest edition discover a Ray Mears and George Orwell tussle, a controversial musical choice and island hopping on a 38 foot yacht.

Best Holiday

Best holiday would have to be my honeymoon. Just my Isabella and I on a 38 foot yacht sailing around Croatia’s national marine reserve, island hopping, wine tasting and exploring some amazing local food. For 10 days we went well and truly off of the the beaten track, staying in coves with literally an inch of water beneath the keel, swimming with dolphins and generally having the most awesome time in the world. It was fun to get away from the day to day of the security business, and being so far removed from digital communications meant that the phone didn’t ring once.

Best Book

Best book is split between Ray Mears – My outdoor life and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four. If only Orwell had named the book Two Thousand and Four he would have been perfectly on the money. Nineteen Eigthy-Four is set in the year 1984 when most of the world population have become victims of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and propaganda. Sound familiar?

Rays book is an excellent read, covering his life in the outdoors and how it has influenced him in what he does. A truly humble writing and well worth the read.

Best Album

Best album is easy, Iron Maiden’s Powerslave from 1984. A year when mobile phones were brick shape (and weight) and you had to go to HMV to get your music. A controversial choice. This is the album that sent Maiden around the world on the legendary World Slavery tour, which I would have loved to have seen.

Best Sporting Experience

GT and Prototype racing should be up there in number one spot for best sporting experience, but in fact it was racing in the grass roots level Monoposto series, in old formula fords, battling with the venerable Joe Venor and finishing 2nd in the championship. Joe and I had one epic battle at Oulton Park in Cheshire, where in the space on one lap we swapped positions a startling 24 times and went through the Knickerbrook chicane wheel in wheel. It wasn’t until the end of the day, sitting in the paddock together having a laugh, we found out that the TV cameras pretty much focused on us for the entire race. Some of the “professional” drivers even accused us of having too much fun.

Best Film

Without question the best film is Hackers. While there is a lot of what I call Hollywoodisation in the film, it does give a small insight into the true hacker culture and while the plot is insanely far-fetched, it did talk to issues that we are experiencing in the present day. For example, who would have ever thought you could mess with a ballast control platform for a super tanker? Well, done that. I do miss the days where connectivity was not constant. We are moving towards a darker time in the history of the internet where censorship and control of what is being seen is paramount in governments minds. Nineteen Eighty-Four anyone?

Best App

My best app would have to be C0nDr. An app I wrote way way back in 1999 for performing security assessments and now almost 20 years after originally writing it, I still use it on a daily basis. Of course it has grown, morphed and changed with the times. Originally written in Perl (parts of the perl remain to this day) it is now mostly PHP and Python.

If you would like to participate in 6 of the Best, please email Craig Davies – [email protected].

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