Month: July 2015

Security Practices

We report on the results of 2 online surveys — 1 with 231 security experts and 1 with 294 MTurk participants­ — on what the practices and attitudes of each group are. Our findings show a discrepancy between the security practices that experts and non-experts report taking. For instance, while experts most frequently report installing software updates, using 2-factor authentication and using a password manager to stay safe online, non-experts report using antivirus software, visiting only known websites, and changing passwords frequently.

Watching Sandra Bland

The Texas state trooper threatening to use his Taser on Sandra Bland (a driver he’d pulled over for the infraction of failing to signal when she changed lanes), shouting “I’m going to light you up!” Without the Garner video, there would have been eyewitnesses but no seemingly incontrovertible testimony. Without the camera on Officer Brian Encinia’s dashboard, most of us might never have heard what happened to Sandra Bland. The existence of such evidence helps in investigations and prosecutions; it’s supposed to be a deterrent to both bad behavior on the part of the cops and false allegations of police abuse. But it does not guarantee either better behavior or justice. A grand jury declined to indict the police officers in the Eric Garner case. More broadly, it puts us in a strange, morally exigent position: we can’t say we didn’t see, we never knew; we have no plausible deniability. The videos keep coming out.

Jamestown

Yesterday, the Jamestown Rediscovery and the Smithsonian Institution announced that they had identified the remains of Capt. Gabriel Archer, Rev. Robert Hunt, Sir Ferdinando Wainman and Capt. William West, 4 of the earliest leaders of the Jamestowne settlement. Among Archer’s remnants was a small silver box that researchers have identified as a Roman Catholic reliquary.

Microsoft capitulation

Tech culture is very fond of persistence, stubbornness, perseverance, and the idea that you should never give up. We’re surrounded by stories of visionaries who were told they’d never succeed and went on to change the world. But sometimes, you should put selection bias aside and, yes, give up.

This applies to big companies perhaps even more than for startups. Big companies have entire strategy teams devoted to working out what to do next and how to do it, and budgets to hire strategy consulting firms for millions of $ to produce 100-page decks with more strategies and ways to achieve them. Such people have little interest in saying ‘give up – it won’t work’ (perhaps because that might mean you don’t need a strategy team anymore). And there’s no SmartArt for failure.

Microsoft today, I think, is a case study in knowing when you should indeed give up, and what you should do after that.

Amnesty in Brooklyn

“I don’t know what happened,” James said of the initial summons. She kept one pink earbud in as we talked outside the church. She had just successfully cleared her warrant. In March, she recounted, she was sitting on a bench with her cousin in Fulton Park when a police officer approached. “She gave us both tickets for public drinking, but I wasn’t even holding anything”. She stretched the length of the earbud wire across her stomach. She thought her pregnancy must have been visible to the officer that night. James was unable to travel to the summons court, in lower Manhattan, the day she had been assigned to answer the citation. As generally happens with unanswered summonses, a warrant was put out for her arrest.