Ramblings & ephemera
I’m really proud to announce that my 3rd book is now out & available for purchase: Linux Phrasebook. My first book – Don’t Click on the Blue E!: Switching to Firefox – was for general readers (really!) who wanted to learn how to move to and use the fantastic Firefox web browser. I included a [...]
Posted on June 20th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: personal, tech help, technology | No Comments »
From Mike’s “That’s Not A New Hit Song You Just Downloaded — It’s Japan’s Nuclear Secrets” (techdirt: 23 June 2005):
While IT managers may not see the importance of security software for themselves, you would think they would be a little more careful with things like interns and contractors. Not so, apparently. Over in Japan, a [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Movie Plot Threat Contest: Status Report” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 May 2006):
In my book, Beyond Fear, I discussed five different tendencies people have to exaggerate risks: to believe that something is more risky than it actually is.
1. People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks and downplay common risks.
2. People have trouble estimating risks for [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Henry Chu’s “Bullied by the Eunuchs” (Los Angeles Times: 7 June 2006):
I was being hit up for a handout by one of this country’s many hijras.
They are eunuchs or otherwise transgendered people by birth, accident or choice. Something between male and female, they are shunned by Indian society as unclean. Many make a rough [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Movie Plot Threat Contest: Status Report” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 May 2006):
… you have to wonder why there have been no terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11. I don’t believe the “flypaper theory” that the terrorists are all in Iraq instead of in the U.S. And despite all the ineffectual security we’ve [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Identity-Theft Disclosure Laws” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 May 2006):
Disclosure laws force companies to make these security breaches public. This is a good idea for three reasons. One, it is good security practice to notify potential identity theft victims that their personal information has been lost or stolen. Two, statistics on actual data thefts [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Airport Passenger Screening” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 April 2006):
It seems like every time someone tests airport security, airport security fails. In tests between November 2001 and February 2002, screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns, and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. And recently, testers were able to smuggle bomb-making parts [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Zachary Slobig’s “Police launch eye-in-the-sky technology above Los Angeles” (AFP: 17 June 2006):
Police launched the future of law enforcement into the smoggy Los Angeles sky in the form of a drone aircraft, bringing technology most commonly associated with combat zones to urban policing.
The unmanned aerial vehicle, which looks like a child’s remote control toy [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “VOIP Encryption” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 April 2006):
There are basically four ways to eavesdrop on a telephone call.
One, you can listen in on another phone extension. This is the method preferred by siblings everywhere. If you have the right access, it’s the easiest. While it doesn’t work for cell phones, cordless phones are [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Will Sturgeon’s “Proof: Employees don’t care about security” (silicon.com: 16 February 2006):
CDs were handed out to commuters as they entered the City by employees of IT skills specialist The Training Camp and recipients were told the disks contained a special Valentine’s Day promotion.
However, the CDs contained nothing more than code which informed The Training [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “News” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 March 2006):
In the Netherlands, criminals are stealing money from ATM machines by blowing them up. First, they drill a hole in an ATM and fill it with some sort of gas. Then, they ignite the gas — from a safe distance — and clean up the money that [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “Microsoft’s BitLocker” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 May 2006):
BitLocker is not a DRM system. However, it is straightforward to turn it into a DRM system. Simply give programs the ability to require that files be stored only on BitLocker-enabled drives, and then only be transferable to other BitLocker-enabled drives. How easy this would be [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “The Eternal Value of Privacy” (Wired News: 18 May 2006):
The most common retort against privacy advocates — by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures — is this line: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”
Some clever answers: “If [...]
Posted on June 17th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Ryan Naraine’s “Microsoft Confirms Excel Zero-Day Attack Under Way” (eWeek: 16 June 2006):
Microsoft June 15 confirmed that a new, undocumented flaw in its widely used Excel spreadsheet program was being used in an attack against an unnamed target.
The company’s warning comes less than a month after a code-execution hole in Microsoft Word was exploited [...]
Posted on June 17th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Spare me the details (The Economist: 28 October 2004):
Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist who works for Intel, the world’s biggest semiconductor-maker, has been travelling around Asia for three years to observe how Asians use, or choose not to use, technology. She was especially struck by the differences in how westerners and Asians view their homes. [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram Newsletter (15 August 2004):
Here’s an interesting hardware security vulnerability. Turns out that it’s possible to update the AMD K8 processor (Athlon64 or Opteron) microcode. And, get this, there’s no authentication check. So it’s possible that an attacker who has access to a machine can backdoor the CPU.
[See http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=35446&threadid=35446&roomid=11]
Related posts
China’s increasing control [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Spare me the details (The Economist: 28 October 2004):
LISA HOOK, an executive at AOL, one of the biggest providers of traditional (“dial-upâ€Â) internet access, has learned amazing things by listening in on the calls to AOL’s help desk. Usually, the problem is that users cannot get online. The help desk’s first question is: “Do [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Ann Harrison’s Onion Routing Averts Prying Eyes (Wired News: 5 August 2004):
Computer programmers are modifying a communications system, originally developed by the U.S. Naval Research Lab, to help Internet users surf the Web anonymously and shield their online activities from corporate or government eyes.
The system is based on a concept called onion routing. It [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Peter Seebach’s Standards and specs: Not by UNIX alone (IBM developerWorks: 8 March 2006):
In the past 20 years, developers for “the same” desktop platform (“whatever Microsoft ships”) have been told that the API to target is (in this order):
* DOS
* Win16
* OS/2
* Win32
* WinNT
* WinXP
* and most recently .NET.
Of course, that list is from [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From Stephen Lawson & Robert McMillan’s AT&T plans CNN-syle security channel (InfoWorld: 23 June 2005):
Security experts at AT&T are about to take a page from CNN’s playbook. Within the next year they will begin delivering a video streaming service that will carry Internet security news 24 hours a day, seven days a week, according to [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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