Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • December 9, 2022 3:46 PM

@ Gunter Königsmann, Brenden Walker,

Re : A picture paints a thousand words.

“Are my Fotos really worth all that money to someone else?”

I guess that depends on two unknowns

1, Who you realy are.
2, Who the customer might be.

But most if not all the home security cameras appear to work on the fact that “access to images has value”.

The two worst offenders were,

1, Amazon Ring for giving access to “street images” to law enforcment.
2, Palantir for acquiring access via their systems to law enforcment.

You might or might not know that Palantir’s aims is to make all Law Enforcment detectives either redundant or hopelessly hooked on their systems. They aquire data where ever they can…

For instance they did a backroom deal to get all the health records of UK Citizen’s into their databases, why is not known. But it’s been said they had connections with Cambridge Analytica that was alledged to have significantly manipulated US voting and been involved with supply of illegal money from Russia to atleast two UK political organisations who’s intent was to get the UK out of Europe. Oh and behind Cambridge Analytica was the Hegdge Fund billionair Mercer family that had tried to gain control of the US GOP (Republicans). Whilst the father is “retired” the daughter is very much upto the old political tricks.

Understanding the “Dark Tetrad” mentality these players appear to exude in excess is shall we say “Difficult at best”.

Which should be of a very great concern to every voting citizen and anyone who cares even a small amount about both National and Global Security.

However as @Brenden Walker notes above,

“I think the general population is burning out on worrying about security.”

Yes, and it’s only going to get wotse as we head into this Global Recession where the price of food is rising at many times the increase in wages/salaries, and likewise energy. In both cases one major attributable cause is as a direct result of idiot politicians receiving benifit from these people. Thus arguably, they are “Creating the market, by which they will profit” and we are letting them due to being to “careworn with just trying to survive”.

Clive Robinson • December 9, 2022 6:27 PM

@ Ismar, ALL,

Re : Someone to blaim.

“… just wandering about the owners of these cameras being in the situation they are in due to previous positive ReviewGeek’s reviews…”

Humans have as an over generalised statment, “a number of failings”. Two of which are,

1, We are usually not competent, lazy or both.
2, We do not like being embarrassed.

The result being we do not like taking responsability for our uninformed actions, so seek to blaim others.

The real problem is as a race we are both overly trusting and thus too optomistic, despite many warnings to the contrary such as,

“Buyer beware”
“If it looks to good to be true, then it probably is to good to be true”

And heaps more, but there is also a flip side, which is dangerous,

“Never look a gift horse in the mouth”

Etc.

Our over trust and optimism leads us to ignore downsides and only see upsides… Or we look at “Profit Potential” not “Bottom line loss”. Many are surprised when shown evidence that less than one in ten consumer products going to market ever breaks even, let alone makes a profit… So for most of us,

“Life is not what it seems”

Which also means that there are some who take advantage and we get sold a pile of junk…

I guess my first experience that hit hard enough to hurt, was when I was quite small. Prior to Christmas there were toy adverts, and one series from a well known toy manufacturer looked fun, exciting and a lot more than it realy turned out to be. Looking back I would say the adverts were designed to quite deliberately mislead. It was called “Radar” and it was a realy poor implementation of “battle-ships” at a well over inflated price. Had I been able to look at it in a toy store I would have quickly realised it was a pile of xxxx in about thirty seconds (as I did on Christmass morning).

Back then, the fact that it was not available to “try before you buy” in the shops would perhaps have been a warning sign to an older child, I don’t know. All I can say is that another toy a different year called “Mastermind” proved endlessly enjoyable (and some years later ended up with me writing a computer program to play as a college project and as it beat just about everyone, got my project top marks).

I put my hand up over “Radar” being a memorably sad Christmass event, and it was me that had pushed my parents to get it.

My excuse, the adverts made it look exciting, there was no try before you buy.

And that’s what is going on with modern technology.

Nobody has time to do a full market search on “claimed features” let alone hidden deliberatly or othereise defects, not even proffesional reviewers. If you think about it for even a short while, they can not due to the way technology is often made to work.

Which means that those who do deliberatly hide defects get away with it because we the customers are generally to embarrassed to admit we were duped and so hold them to account.

They know that which just makes them worse…