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2026 Conference Talks for Charles Herring

Charles Herring 11 December 2022
Linkboard
New for 2026: abstracts on Coding with AI (lessons from building WitFoo's analytics platform with Claude Code) and Empathetic Processing and Temporal Link Analysis (research pathways for AI in cyber defense). The classics on CyberGrid, SECOPS-as-law-enforcement, and the Seven Unstable Conversations are still on the menu. Bio refreshed for the Chairman era and the New Zealand base

Trash Bags and Shoeboxes

Charles Herring 14 August 2026
Trash Bags
If you stuffed a year of receipts into trash bags and dumped them on your accountant every April, they would stop taking your calls. That is what our industry hands law enforcement, and then we wonder why nobody prosecutes cybercrime.

The Deterrence Delusion

Charles Herring 12 August 2026
Handcuffs on Keyboard
Ninety-two percent of business owners say they would call the police about a ransomware attack. Eighteen percent of actual victims do. The reason cybercrime feels unattributable is not physics. It is that we shred the evidence at ingest.

Hard-Earned Trust, Automated Away

Charles Herring 3 July 2026
Hard Earned Trust Lost to Automation
Someone stood up a slick "WitFoo Authorised Partner" store selling licences we never made, and the registrar's abuse desk answered with a form letter. A look at counterfeit partner programmes, the supply-chain risk they create, and what happens when we automate away the judgement that trust actually depends on.

Fish in a Box

Charles Herring 25 June 2026
Dragon 300 on launch from USS Kitty Hawk
Twenty years ago a young sailor quoted "Fish's second rule of troubleshooting" back to me, and I realised I'd been writing rules I never wrote down. This is the story of how we used AI to inventory, argue over, and ratify the norms that run WitFoo, from "The WitFoo Way" of coding all the way out to a thing we call Fish-in-a-box.
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