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Lucky 13th Anniversary of Ride the Lightning Blog!

July 16, 2020

July 31st celebrates the 13th anniversary of Sharon Nelson’s Ride the Lightning blog. Ride the Lightning (RTL) is an award winning cybersecurity and electronic evidence blog written by Sensei President Sharon Nelson. In 2015 the ABA Journal named Ride the Lightning to the 9th Annual Blawg 100 and to its Hall of Fame. Since 2003, the ABA Journal started following lawyers who “blawg.” They featured the blogs in an online Blawg Directory and maintain a Blawg Hall of Fame.

Sharon’s famous first blog post was titled “Can you please prove my wife is having sex with aliens coming through our computer?”.

Excerpt:

I’ve really got your attention now, haven’t I?

Believe it or not, we have indeed been asked to prove human/alien adultery. However, having thrown out that teaser, I’m going to save it for a future post (no spitballs, please).

First, I want to thank my ankle-biting blogging friends for nipping at my heels for so long that I finally succumbed to the inevitability of becoming a fellow blogger. Without the encouragement of friends like Jim Calloway, Tom Mighell, Reid Trautz and Dennis Kennedy, I might never have ventured into the blogosphere. So, thanks boys, and I’ll stand the next round when we meet again.

There really didn’t seem to be anyone doing on-the-ground computer forensics who was blogging, so there was a vacuum waiting to be filled. I hope, through this blog, to help folks understand more about electronic evidence, and to avoid the worst of the “geekspeak” that makes it seem so incomprehensible.

You might wonder about the title of the blog – why “Ride the Lightning?” I got that phrase from the inestimable Robert Heinlein, who once cautioned the U.S. government, after the atomic bomb had changed the world forever, that it must “ride the lightning and ride it well.” Heinlein foresaw the remarkable proliferation of nuclear knowledge and the speed at which that knowledge would increase. “Ride the lightning” struck me as a fitting analogy for the ED world – a world that did not exist at all mere decades ago. ED assuredly does move at the speed of lightning – certainly the technology does, with the law limping behind, doomed never to catch up with the blitzkrieg that is the electronic era. Those of us who live in this world 24X7 do indeed “ride the lightning.”

Read the entire first RTL blog that started it all.

We at Sensei are very proud of Sharon and love reading Ride the Lightning!