If you recall, I reported earlier that cybersecurity consultant and human peanut Chris Smith stole and repurposed the title of my book, Surviving ISO 9001, for his own use. Smith published a book entitled Surviving ISO Compliance after I warned him he should change the title.
Smith, who cosplays as a hedgehog, burrowed underground and hid, instead, blocking me on LinkedIn and cutting off all email communication. Figuring he was safe from me, seeing as how he’s on the other side of the ocean, Smith appeared happy in his burrow. Unfortunately for him, we live in the 21st century and no longer require monthslong trips via clipper ship to send messages from one hemisphere to the other.
So Smith and his cybersecurity company CSC2 — a name he also stole, the original belonging to a different UK cybersecurity firm — were the proud recipients of an official cease and desist notice from my UK attorneys. Yes, Oxebridge has lawyers over there, too.
Smith didn’t respond, but it’s moot. His book has disappeared from the UK market on Amazon, and his company has been shut down entirely. The CSC2 website is dismantled, and Smith announced he took an honest job with cybersecurity firm Reply. In short, Smith went form running his “multi award winning” one-man consultancy to being a tiny cog in a 10,000+ employee company. You get to decide if that was a step up or down.
A quick check of Smith’s LinkedIn profile shows he’s had a whopping six jobs since 2019 alone, so — in the words of Bill Murray — he’s got that going for him, too.
His book still appears on the US Amazon site, but I am not too worried. I bought and, God help me, read it. In short, Smith knows about as much about ISO as I do about being a hedgehog. It’s a godawful thing, with its only redeeming quality being the fact that it’s short.
In the meantime, some other shitbird wrote a book called Surviving ISO 13485, suggesting I may be playing whack-a-mole with the copyright infringers. AS a result, the working title of my next book is Fucking ISO 9001, since no one is going to infringe on that. I am pretty sure that wouldn’t even hurt my sales, given how well Surviving ISO 9001 has done
Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 35 years’ experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and helps establish certification and accreditation bodies with the ISO 17000 series. He is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the writer and artist of THE AUDITOR comic strip, and is currently writing the DR. CUBA pulp novel series. Visit www.drcuba.world
