I have decidedly mixed feelings about this. Like any tool, it could be either good or evil depending on who wields it, but the amount of power it provides greatly amplifies both possible outcomes — and in another five or ten years, it will probably be available to anyone who’s willing to spend the money. [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Security (Digital And Otherwise) category.
“Star Trek tractor beam to save Earth from asteroid Armageddon”
No, there’s no real Star Trek-style tractor beam (yet, anyway). What they’re discussing is parking a large spacecraft near such an asteroid and using its gravity to drag the asteroid onto a course that would miss the Earth. That assumes that we detect the threat early enough to launch such a craft, get it into [...]
“US Supremes: GPS tracking requires warrant”
Wow! Maybe the US won’t turn into a technology-driven police state, as all recent indications had pointed toward (and as I had cynically expected, as the “security” apparatus has more money, and thus influence, than ordinary citizens). Between this and the SOPA uprising, my flagging hope for the US has been renewed.
“Facebook exposes hackers behind Koobface worm”
The literary and film genre known as the Western covers a very short period of American history — 1850 to 1900 by the most commonly-accepted definition, but it’s more accurate to say from the end of the Civil War (1865) to maybe 1890, when our forefathers ran out of frontier — a small window of [...]
“Authentication by ‘Cognitive Footprint’”
This entry could almost have come from Geek Drivel: [...] I remember reading a science fiction story about a computer worm that searched for people this way: going from computer to computer, trying to identify a specific individual. I immediately thought of The Adolescence of P-1, one of my teenage favorites, and I was tickled [...]
“US killer spy drone controls switch to Linux”
So you’ve got an unmanned flying drone with deadly weapons, controlled by ground stations that could be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Of course you run it with the most popular and least secure operating system on the planet! I mean, what could possibly go wrong? I’ve said it before, in all-caps and bold [...]
“Man convicted of murder gets retrial after virus eats transcripts”
Twenty years ago, headlines like this one wouldn’t have even been imaginable.
“Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker’s 1903 lulz”
Wow… it seems that hacking, and hacker pranks, got their start well before the first computers were created. I can’t imagine how Marconi could have thought any clear-text wireless signal was secure against eavesdroppers. Even if his patented tuning system worked to keep the signal on a very narrow band, all it would take to [...]
“Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy”
In the small mid-western hick community where my family spent the early- to mid-eighties, you didn’t dare let people know you were different in any way. Fifties McCarthyism was still alive and well, but no communists presented themselves, so it was turned on anyone who was different in any way. Kids who couldn’t fit in [...]
“Assessing Terrorist Threats to Commercial Aviation”
I’ve talked more than a few times about terrorists, terrorism, and the TSA on this blog, often quoting security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier. He’s posted links to a new article by a former airline advisor which sums up the problems with the TSA’s responses to date, and offers suggestions about how to do things [...]