Nota Bene

I’m not a fan of red-eye flights heading east – for I can never get even a half-decent sleep on the plane. And if you’re flying around Southeast Asia, sometimes the turbulence gets so wild your whisky splashes out of the glass (can’t be having that, obviously). It was a few years ago when I figured out that daytime flights eastward are way nicer for someone who loves deep, quality sleep. But unfortunately, most airlines prefer flying west during the day, and east only at night. And since I don’t like throwing away hard-earned cash, private jets aren’t even on the table as long as scheduled commercial flights are available. So yes – I just have to put up with it…

Especially rough is when, like several days ago, it’s kinda between a night-flight and day-flight: our departure from Moscow was at 5pm, flying around eight hours to Shanghai, which means landing around 1am Moscow time – early morning local time. Who’s gonna sleep at that time? Especially since, starting somewhere above Kyzyl, turbulence kicked in big time. Grrr. Then, to top it all off – the weather in Shanghai was gray, wet and miserable ->

Still, things brightened up by the time we were coming in to land in Singapore; phew! ->

So what’s with all the ships? They’re all lining up to dock. Singapore’s one of the world’s key “sorting stations” for maritime trade. I guess it’s just a lucky spot on the map: everything on the route between Europe via India and heading to China/Japan and nearby countries (and the other way) passes through the Strait of Malacca and past Singapore.

Read on…

Ok folks… time to share my impressions of the places we stayed at during our January trip through Latin America…

Overall, everything was excelente! The only trickiness came on the Inca Trail: we had to spend the cold nights in sleeping bags in tents, but, given the lack of hotels up there, what else could we do? Still, the amazing huge meals we were served on the Trail made up the tents thing; but back to the excelente bits…

Naturally, in urban locations, we tried to stay in decent places – if there were rooms available: unfortunately, we only made the final decision to go on our LatAm-2025 trip about a month earlier, so accommodation wasn’t always available (also: permits to climb Huayna Picchu, next to Machu Picchu, were already sold out). The moral: book everything well in advance!

In both urban and even rural areas you can find quite decent places to stay. Here, for example, is the courtyard of our hotel in Cusco, in the Spanish colonial style:

Read on…

Part 0: Introducing Altiplano: first an appetizer-intro

Next up, southwest of the Uyuni Salt Flat – the Altiplano Plateau and the Bolivian section of the high-altitude Atacama Desert. We had only two days to explore these imposing landscapes, and to cram in the maximum amount of uncrammable experiences we had to switch to our now-familiar “tourism till you drop” mode. Even still, that turned out to be way too little time for such a vast territory – especially considering the slow pace on roads that barely qualified as such. To explore everything thoroughly and walk at a leisurely pace, you should really reserve at least three days. For there’s plenty to see: highland plains dotted with multi-colored volcanic cones, salt and freshwater lagoons with pink flamingos, bizarrely-shaped rock formations, hot springs and bubbling geothermal fields. A truly worthy destination! Let’s go!…

Our route went like this (the original’s here) ->

Read on…

Hi folks!

…And for us it was hi St. Pete!

But, why does everyone always complain about how gloomy and rainy this city is? Every time I’m there – it’s all bright sunshine and blue skies! ->

We’re still in the thick of our hot season – packed with conferences, expos, meetings, and all kinds of other work-related stuff – plus a ton of travel around the globe. Early last week we wrapped up our global partner conference in Istanbul, while on Wednesday to Friday we had our Kaspersky Future Conference up in St. Petersburg for our major enterprise customers. It was a totally new format for us – we’d never done anything on such a scale before – but it worked out great: zero teething problems, or, as we say in Russia, the first pancake wasn’t a flop!

It all took place in downtown St. Pete, at the Astoria Hotel:

We brought together almost 250 folks from 130+ companies, and there were nearly 30 talks (less than half of which were ours – most came from the guests). I took to the stage too and shared my predictions about the future of cyber-nastiness. Sadly, the outlook’s grim…

But if you’re thorough in setting up the right processes and protocols, you can bring the risk of cyberattacks down to practically zero – and finally get a good night’s sleep :)

On top of that, we ran several workshops on incident investigation and other topics in our field:

During breaks, people mingled in the main area – something like this:

We also picked up some pretty colorful terms from the talks:

• Not just “threats” – but “black swans”
• “Ripe tomatoes”: we all want to be ripe tomatoes, not green ones
• Internal DDoS attack during an antivirus update :)
• Talking to IT is like making a deal with the devil // from the cybersecurity POV
• “Underbelly scanner” :)

It’s clear that information-security folks aren’t exactly popular, for we tend to get in the way of business-as-usual. Hence the rebranding of infosec departments: “Information Security Department”: ISD -> “Idiotic Sabotage Department”! Oh yes – very drole. But!… If you don’t do security (well), it’s only gonna be worse – way worse.

One nice little perk for me: since we’d brought a whole bunch of guests to both attend the conference at the Astoria and stay there too, the hotel management treated me to a luxury suite – (huge thanks to them!) ->

Honestly, I really don’t need such fancy digs, but if they’re offering – why not? And folks often ask me to show off some unique hotels and other lodgings. So here it is – this is what the Rachmaninoff Suite looks like:

Not bad, eh?

Luxurious!

The third room? Half-bar-half-library! ->

Views from the room:

To wrap things up – a shot from one of the restaurants hosting our evening bashes:

That’s it for St. Pete – time to head home! But it won’t be long till I’m back on the road once again!…

One of the main reasons for my recent trip to Turkey was our annual global partner conference, which brought together 100+ business partners from 35 countries – from Chile to Japan. The weather outside was chilly (in Turkey!), but the event itself went off without a hitch!…

Let’s get started!…

Read on…

Turkey’s main city is Istanbul – there’s no doubt about that. But the capital of the country is Ankara, and that’s where we needed to go last week for a variety of important business meetings. Ankara Airport is a modest one but it all the same impressed us with its interior design – featuring even a pool (but without the fish). Ankara Airport also gave us an adventure unlike anything I’ve ever encountered in my highly active and lengthy travel experience!…

So here’s how it went….

Read on…

Privyet folks!

My February and March passed unusually quietly – without any particularly long trips. Was it fate preparing me for upcoming heroic feats? Fate or no – here those feats come: the rest of April, and both May and June, are shaping up to be quite eventful.

In the meantime I’ve had the chance to visit a few cool places closer to home. One of them was the Museum of the Special-Purpose Garage.

And it turned out to be a most curious place! It houses both vintage and more modern cars that over the years have been used to chauffeur around the top officials of the country – since 1921 to present day. So for fans of the history of Russian state limousines, this place is simply must-see. Or even if you just like checking out luxury retro cars – it’s a great place to visit:

Read on: A VIP-car museum in Moscow – I just had to go!

What exactly is artificial intelligence?

These days the term is slapped on practically anything software-driven that runs automatically. If it can do something by itself, people break into a cold sweat and are ready to swear eternal allegiance to it. In reality, the term “artificial intelligence” has different interpretations depending on the level of self-awareness across various layers of the population of our planet. For example, there are the rather primitive definitions in online encyclopedias, where AI, I quote, “refers to the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making”. This means, for example, that being able to play checkers or chess falls under the AI definition – even if the program can’t do anything else: no bike riding, no potato peeling, no pizza delivery routing…

However, the collective [un]consciousness believes that these IT novelties with “smart” features are indeed the very “digital brain” seen in Hollywood movies – capable of anything and everything, now and forever. It also believes that, soon, we mammals will have to go and hide in caves again – just like in the dinosaur era. Likely? I, for one, don’t think so…

The modern popular belief in an all-powerful AI – it’s all pure nonsense: about as ridiculous as ancient tribes’ terror during thunderstorms – thinking the gods were battling over their divine goals and motivations.

Neural networks, machine learning, ontology, generative AI, and other programming stuff – that’s the current level of “digital intelligence”; nothing more. These are programs or software-hardware systems designed to solve specific tasks – trained, steered, and fine-tuned by human experts. They’re not even trying to be universal – current tech just can’t handle that!

Read on…

Fasten your seatbelts – in every sense! We’re flying to an absolutely mind-blowing place – Salar de Uyuni, or the Uyuni Salt Flat in Bolivia!

The distance from La Paz to Uyuni by car is only 540km, but Google Maps claims the journey takes a whopping eight hours – for Bolivian roads are far from speedy highways. That’s why most tourists opt for a flight. Plus the view from the plane window is stunning; just be sure to sit on the right side.

Just after take-off you get a great view of El Alto (whose airport is at a dizzying altitude of 4061 meters!):

Then come colorful desert landscapes with volcanoes on the horizon:

And here it is – the salt flat! The opposite shore is a staggering 120km away – the visibility is incredible! The view of the lake is breathtaking…

Read on…

Next up on our LatAm-2025 trip, not far from Bolivia’s de facto capital, La Paz, there’s the unique tourist attraction known as Death Road. It’s around a 30-kilometer stretch of the “Old Death Road” (I’ll explain why it’s called that later) that runs through extremely dangerous yet breathtakingly beautiful mountains. And we were going to experience it on bicycles. And I reckon it’s worth flying to La Paz just for this bike ride alone…

Briefly – an overview…

First, I repeat, it’s breathtakingly beautiful:

Read on…