It is rare when my two primary gigs — technology and finance — intersect in some philosophically satisfying way but it happened recently when Goldman Sachs was being charged with civil fraud by the SEC and I was speaking the same day at the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference (POSSCON) in Columbia, South Carolina.  Just minutes before my time to speak I realized that what I had to talk about was trust — the T-word — a word which has very different meanings in each of these realms.

Trust is present or it is absent. Grab a nerd and he’ll tell you that even the absence of trust is a measure of trust and that particular […]