What happens when you don’t start a software project looking at it from the user’s perspective?

This happens:

I tried once or twice to press this point when I was serving my brief stint in the security world. Unfortunately I didn’t have much clout with the big names of SELinux, because I’ve never been a “real” [...]

On November 1st, Bruce Schneier published his essay “The War on the Unexpected“. It made the rounds online, and it well deserved the attention. I won’t start copying in bits and pieces of that text, because you really owe it to yourself to read the whole thing. 
I didn’t link to the essay at [...]

The following phone conversation just occurred:
Elizabeth: Hello?
Phone Scamming Scumbag: [Spoken smoothly and officially.] Hello, we are conducting market research today. Are you over the age of 18?
E: Yes.
PSS: What is your income level: over 15,000 a year, over—
E: —I’m sorry, I don’t feel comfortable telling you my income level. What is the [...]

Dear Guy That Signs All His Email With a PGP Key,
Before sending any more email, please consult the following brief checklist:

Do the recipients of your email have access to your public PGP key?
Do the recipients of your email give a damn about who wrote your email?

Hint: if you cannot answer yes to at least one [...]

Over at Jon Rentzsh’s Red Shed, there was a bit of a discussion begun recently about using virtual machines as a sort of antivirus mechanism.
Since Jon doesn’t include a comment form with his posts, and since I reckon he’d rather not become the middle-man for an extended discussion, I wanted to post my additional comments [...]