Tag: security

identity theft

while dubya claims to enhance security by fostering denunciation, the theft of identities continues unabated.

the government has failed to protect the voters from identity fraud, and instead protects only the banks and government bureaucrats

and don’t think it only happens in the us. companies everywhere are busily profiling their customers (in able to deliver personalized spam), and the notion that any data that is created through the activities of a person should be their property is foreign to them. maybe i should get a new face, and jump into the fray.

Trusted brains

Another problem for the entertainment companies is what they’re calling the “analog hole.” This recognizes the fact that human beings are not digital, so digital programming has to be converted to a format, known as analog, that we can see and hear.

computers will have the capacity of the human brain by 2020.

The memory capacity of the human brain is ~100T synapse strengths (neurotransmitter concentrations at interneural connections), which we can estimate at ~100TB. In 1998, 128 MB of RAM cost ~$200. The capacity of memory circuits has been doubling every 18 months. Thus by the year 2023, 100TB will cost ~$1000. However, this silicon equivalent will run more than 1b times faster than the human brain. There are techniques for trading off memory for speed, so we can effectively match human memory for $1000 sooner than 2023.

if the MPAA and friends have their way it will have to run on trusted hardware. mind control?

Microsoft Security

Security is the new number 1 concern for Microsoft. The repercussions of this are still some time off, but the Windows is insecure jokers will have to look elsewhere for amusement. Security has so far been the domain of anal-retentive folks, and was not exactly hot. Maybe we can finally move away from crappy pointer-based languages? Yeah, one can hope.
2003-08-23: Very interesting perspective on the security of DCOM after last week’s worms:

Microsoft has made some pretty strong claims about the improved security of our products as a result of these changes. And then the DCOM issues come to light. Unfortunately, it’s still going to be a long time before all our code is as clean as it needs to be.
Some of the code we reviewed in the DCOM stack had comments about DGROUP consolidation (remember that precious 64KB segment prior to 32-bit flat mode?) and OS/2 2.0 changes. Some of these source files contain comments from the 80s. I thought that Win95 was ancient!

2004-02-17: You’ve got to hand it to these guys that they have sense of humor.

2004-06-24: Turns out Microsoft really means it this time. I had an older SQL Server 2000 running that stopped working after the update. Turns out XP detected the missing service packs for MSSQL and disabled TCP access on the default MSSQL port. Commendable, although the error message could have been displayed more prominently (maybe as part of the new security center)
2007-11-30: Microsoft continues its old lies about security. Why do they bother? Their products have become better, why piss into their own well?

Do people in charge of security strategy at Microsoft really believe that aggressively concealing the count of fixes that do make it out makes a product more secure? Shouldn’t they be trying to fix more bugs, rather than writing reports that would “punish” them for actively improving the security of their users rather than hoping that defects aren’t found by someone who they can’t keep quiet?

gnutella problems

uh oh. Gnutella will not scale anywhere near the desired number of users.

On a slow day, a GnutellaNet would have to move 2.4 GB per second in order to support numbers of users comparable to Napster. On a heavy day, 8 GB per second.

but there’s more. apparently Gnutella is insecure as well. and they continue to tell us how hot P2P is going to be. my ass.

Security by nudity

Tom Friedman, the guy who wrote “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”, is proposing a novel solution to airline security: fly nude.

If everybody flew naked, not only would you never have to worry about the passenger next to you carrying box cutters or exploding shoes, but no religious fundamentalists of any stripe would ever be caught dead flying nude, or in the presence of nude women, and that alone would keep many potential hijackers out of the skies.

nice solution, you think. well, nudity can also be a new style of terrorism:

The womenfolk were so embarrassed by the nudity of the well-built men that they ran away from their homes giving a free hand to the robbers to decamp with their valuables.

what gives?

Social Network Analysis

astonishing what can be gleamed from public ally released information. social network theorist Valdis Krebs graphically mapped the hijackers connections amongst themselves. social network analysis is what does the trick, and it may be a potent weapon for fighting future wars, and running business. he researches

the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, computers or other information/knowledge processing entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes. SNA provides both a visual and a mathematical analysis of human relationships.

valdis is now conducting an analysis of the ryze blogger tribe, a schmoozing cabal i happen to be part of. what a great opportunity to test drive FOAF (friend of a friend)

allows the expression of personal information and relationships, and is a useful building block for creating information systems that support online communities.

if this analysis goes out of its way to look into FOAF, interesting things could happen. stay tuned.

idiot gallery @ interpol

this interpol query shows some 96 idiots who are currently wanted by interpol for terrorism. not a whole lot you would think, considering that there must be 1000s of terrorist around the world. note how they are all male and ugly. there may be something to the theory that terrorists are promised virgins in the afterworld as they won’t get laid in this world.. what a bunch of losers.