Nota Bene

Hi folks!

Our Kurils (and environs) expedition this year took place only this summer. Wait… but summer only ended a mere two months ago, yet it seems eons since we were there. So much has happened since – including the temperature of a morning hitting zero degrees.

Anyway, the videos from the trip are finally ready. There was plenty of editing to do, as I’m sure you can imagine, but it’s now all completed. And now I want to share said videos with you, dear readers, if only to brighten your gray October days – and perhaps moods…

All righty, here we go; first up – Ebeko!…

This was a tough one – traversing the island of Paramushir, up and then back down an active and regularly ash-emitting volcano – but the toughness (also stemming from plenty of river wading) made it all the more exciting and adventurous! This day also turned out to be the only day of the whole expedition when the weather was nice and sunny! Well, most of the day anyway: toward evening it grew foggy – and fairly stayed that way (save for a few short episodic clear spells) for a full two weeks!

Read on…

Oh good Lord in heaven – I’m 57!

Indeed, it was a +1 year for me last week. As always, I’m like… “where did that go?!”. However, today, no self-congratulatory birthday banter, for I always prefer to keep things low key. Instead, let me show where I hid myself (far!) away for my b-day this year so as to maintain that desired level of low key…

Before I tell you, can you guess where I was? ->

Any ideas?… ->

Getting warmer (while it appears to be only getting colder where these pics were taken)?…

…And snowy:

After having become a touch nostalgic while looking back at some of my previous birthdays, I figured this year’s was just as suitably celebrated in grandiose fashion, or, at least – in a grandiose setting…

For those who haven’t worked it out yet, this year I was in Altai. First we flew to Gorno-Altaisk Airport, and from there we took a helicopter to Lake Teletskoye.

There’s the Katun river, down which we’ve often rafted. Never seen it so low though (as it gets in fall) ->

Still no less magnificent:

Here a some rapids – called “Dollar” due to the shape of the river – on the lower Katun ->

Already wintery up in the mountains:

Mountain pass:

Lake Teletskoye! ->

Its environs – also awesome:

Autumnal scenes:

The lake is enticing, but it’s simply too cold for a dip:

We were staying at Altay Village – a five-star resort made up of luxury cabins. Nice. I’d show you my photos thereof, but I’m afraid I don’t have any: I was too busy low-key birthdaying :)…

The rest of the photos of autumnal Altai are here.

Our spot of business in Riyadh done, it was time for some fun – on the Edge of the World…

It sure was worth the two-hour drive, and we made it in time for the headliner: taking in the sunset from the top ->

The perfect vantage point for the vastness of the desert. Undeniably must-see…

Read on…

As experience shows, the brighter the sun shines somewhere – the more photos are taken…

So when in the capital of sunny Saudi Arabia, a great many pics are taken. Even more if you get to the top of a skyscraper here…

And we got up to the top of Kingdom Centre, one of the country’s tallest buildings, which weighs in at more than 300 meters high ->

Read on…

Question: what does the monumentally massive Putorana Plateau have in common with… the Indian Ocean? Rather – some of the islands located in it ->

Yes – for example, Mauritius (been) and Réunion. Well, I have a theory – a hypothesis – about how they may be connected to Putorana…

Under Réunion (a French colony department), there currently happens to be situated a hotspot – a small area under the (Indian) lithospheric (tectonic) plate where the underground magma for some reason comes real close to the surface of the plate. When the hotspot punched through the plate, Réunion came into being (this is millions of years ago, of course). And that’s how plenty of other islands and archipelagos and atolls in the Indian Ocean were created, including Mauritius and Maldives. The plate slowly moved (for millions of years) over the hotspot, and every dozen million years or so – another punch-through and another new island!

Ok. That’s the islands covered. Now for some land-based volcanism to continue the theme…

Read on…

My recent tales from the Putorana side wouldn’t be quite complete without a mention of the hotel camp/hostel we stayed at while there, so here’s a quick post about just that…

It’s called Derevnya Neralakh (Neralakh Village) (named after the river it sits beside).

Read on…

Having had a Putorana warm-up, then gone over the history of how the Putorana Plateau came about, it’s now time for a closer look!…

The weather was excellent, the chopper was all set, and the day ahead promised to be a busy one. Into the helicopter we pile, and off we fly!…

Read on…

The Putorana Plateau is one of the most breathtakingly beautiful places in the world, that’s for sure. That is… in good weather (just like Kamchatka and the Kurils). I keep writing that – “in good weather” – all the time of late. I should abbreviate it: GW. So yes – in GW, the landscapes here are simply mind-blowing:

Read on…

Norilsk business and places of interest: done. But up here in the Far North, there’s actually another place of interest to the adventurous (and well-heeled) tourist, albeit 300 kilometers to the east, and only accessible by helicopter (told you!), and that is the Putorana Plateau.

Briefly, the Putorana Plateau is simply… a magnificently marvelous mountainous area! It’s not quite Kamchatka, of course, but it still gets a full five Ks as per my (KKKKKaspersky Tourism Awesomeness Categorization System) classification. Oh yes: top marks (there is no KKKKKK). Just to remind: 5K = unique, monumental and complex. Not bad for a region you might think is only good for extreme cold and nickel and copper extraction )…

5K it is, but that doesn’t immunize it from downsides…

Downside one: the weather. It’s practically never good around here. Very much reminiscent of Kamchatka or the Kurils.

Read on…

Naming products and services – and also their many different functions and features – in the infosec domain is, in a word, tricky. Why? Complexity…

Cybersecurity: it’s not a one-dimensional object like, say, a boat. There are different sized boats, different types of boats, but a boat is mostly always a boat. But in infosec, a modern system of enterprise cybersecurity does a great many technically complex things, and the question arises: how can it all be labeled simply and catchily (if that’s at all possible) so as to be reasonably easy to understand? And how can you differentiate one security system from another? Often it’s difficult explaining such differences in a long paragraph – let alone in the name of a product or service. Like I say: tricky.

Maybe that’s why Kaspersky is still associated by some with “antivirus software”. But actually, detecting and neutralizing malware based on an antivirus database is today just one of our security technologies: over a quarter century we’ve added to it a great many others. The word antivirus today is more of a metaphor: it’s known, understood, and thus is a handy (if not too accurate or up-to-date) label.

But what are we supposed to do if we need to tell folks about complex, multifunctional protection for enterprise IT infrastructure? This is when strange sets of words appear. Then there are all the abbreviations that come with them, whose original idea was simplification (of those strange sets of words) but which often just add to the confusion! And with every year the number of terms and abbreviations grows, and memorizing them all becomes increasingly… tricky! So today, let me take you on a brief excursion of all this gobbledygook  some of these complex but necessary names, terms, descriptions and abbreviations – so that, hopefully, we achieve the thing the abbreviations themselves struggle with: bringing clarity.

Read on…