From David Foster Wallace’s “Introduction” (The Best American Essays 2007):
Here is an overt premise. There is just no way that 2004’s reelection could have taken place—not to mention extraordinary renditions, legalized torture, FISA-flouting, or the
passage of the Military Commissions Act—if we had been paying attention and handling information in a competent grown-up way. ‘We’ meaning [...]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Kim Zetter’s “New Malware Re-Writes Online Bank Statements to Cover Fraud” (Wired: 30 September 2009):
New malware being used by cybercrooks does more than let hackers loot a bank account; it hides evidence of a victim’s dwindling balance by rewriting online bank statements on the fly, according to a new report.
The sophisticated hack uses a [...]
Posted on October 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Jim Giles’ “The inside story of the Conficker worm” (New Scientist: 12 June 2009):
23 October 2008 … The dry, technical language of Microsoft’s October update did not indicate anything particularly untoward. A security flaw in a port that Windows-based PCs use to send and receive network signals, it said, might be used [...]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Brian Krebs’ “Glut of Stolen Banking Data Trims Profits for Thieves” (The Washington Post: 15 April 2009):
A massive glut in the number of credit and debit cards stolen in data breaches at financial institutions last year has flooded criminal underground markets that trade in this material, driving prices for the illicit goods to the [...]
Posted on June 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Bruce Schneier’s “The Psychology of Con Men” (Crypto-Gram: 15 November 2008):
Great story: “My all-time favourite [short con] only makes the con artist a few dollars every time he does it, but I absolutely love it. These guys used to go door-to-door in the 1970s selling lightbulbs and they would offer to replace every single [...]
Posted on June 27th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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These come from a variety of sources; just Google the law to find out more about it.
Parkinson’s Law
“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
Source: Cyril Northcote Parkinson in The Economist (1955)
The Peter Principle
“In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
Source: Dr. Laurence J. Peter and [...]
Posted on June 22nd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Joe Clark’s “The extreme Google brain” (Fawny: 26 April 2009):
… Susan Pinker’s The Sexual Paradox, which explains, using scientific findings, why large majorities of girls and women behave almost identically at different stages of their lives – while large minorities of boys and men show vast variability compared to each other and to male [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From “Twins Suspected in Spectacular Jewelry Heist Set Free” (Spiegel Online International: 19 March 2009):
Saved by their indistinguishable DNA, identical twins suspected in a massive jewelry heist have been set free. Neither could be exclusively linked to the DNA evidence.
German police say at least one of the identical twin brothers Hassan and Abbas O. may [...]
Posted on April 26th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):
Worse, the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steven Weinberg’s “Without God” (The New York Review of Books: 25 September 2008):
But if the direct conflict between scientific knowledge and specific religious beliefs has not been so important in itself, there are at least four sources of tension between science and religion that have been important.
The first source of tension arises from the [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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Kissing
Interviewing for a new job without your boss’s knowledge
Visiting a therapist
Praying
Inspired by Patrick Keefe’s “Camera Shy” (Legal Affairs: July/August 2003).
Related posts
iSee: online map of CCTVs in Manhattan
In Britain, you can see footage of you captured by CCTV
Tracking via cell phone is easy
The NSA and threats to privacy
Surveillance cameras that notice aberrations
Posted on April 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: law, politics, security, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off
From Catey Hill’s “Massive ATM heist! $9M stolen in only 30 minutes” (New York Daily News: 12 February 2009)
With information stolen from only 100 ATM cards, thieves made off with $9 million in cash, according to published reports. It only took 30 minutes.
“We’ve seen similar attempts to defraud a bank through ATM machines but not, [...]
Posted on March 18th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Mark Gibbs’ “New Zealand gets insane copyright law” (Network World: 20 February 2009):
A law was recently passed in New Zealand that has created what many consider to be the world’s harshest copyright enforcement law. This insanity, found in Sections 92A and C of New Zealand’s Copyright Amendment Act 2008 establishes – and I am [...]
Posted on March 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Damien Carrick’s interview with Nicholas Johnson, “The psychology of conmen” (The Law Report: 30 September 2008):
Nicholas Johnson: I think what I love most about con artists and the world of scammers is that they’re criminals who manage to get their victims to hand over their possessions freely. Most thieves and robbers and the like, [...]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Bill Gertz’s “Outsourced passports netting govt. profits, risking national security” (The Washington Times: 26 March 2008):
The United States has outsourced the manufacturing of its electronic passports to overseas companies — including one in Thailand that was victimized by Chinese espionage — raising concerns that cost savings are being put ahead of national security, an [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From “Storm Worm botnet cracked wide open” (Heise Security: 9 January 2009):
A team of researchers from Bonn University and RWTH Aachen University have analysed the notorious Storm Worm botnet, and concluded it certainly isn’t as invulnerable as it once seemed. Quite the reverse, for in theory it can be rapidly eliminated using software developed and [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Kelly Jackson Higgins’ “The World’s Biggest Botnets” (Dark Reading: 9 November 2007):
You know about the Storm Trojan, which is spread by the world’s largest botnet. But what you may not know is there’s now a new peer-to-peer based botnet emerging that could blow Storm away.
“We’re investigating a new peer-to-peer botnet that may wind up [...]
Posted on February 8th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Mark Danner’s “Words in a Time of War: Taking the Measure of the First Rhetoric-Major President” (Tomgram: 10 May 2007):
[Note: This commencement address was given to graduates of the Department of Rhetoric at Zellerbach Hall, University of California, Berkeley, on May 10, 2007]
…
I give you my favorite quotation from the Bush administration, put [...]
Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Jake Adelstein’s “This Mob Is Big in Japan” (The Washington Post: 11 May 2008):
Most Americans think of Japan as a law-abiding and peaceful place, as well as our staunch ally, but reporting on the underworld gave me a different perspective. Mobs are legal entities here. Their fan magazines and comic books are sold in [...]
Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Sam Hiser’s “Achieving Openness: A Closer Look at ODF and OOXML” (ONLamp.com: 14 June 2007):
An open, XML-based standard for displaying and storing data files (text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations) offers a new and promising approach to data storage and document exchange among office applications. A comparison of the two XML-based formats–OpenDocument Format (“ODF”) and [...]
Posted on February 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
