Essays Tagged "Hindu"

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Terrorists May Use Google Earth, But Fear Is No Reason to Ban It

  • Bruce Schneier
  • The Guardian
  • January 29, 2009

This essay also appeared in The Hindu, Brisbane Times, and The Sydney Morning Herald.

German translation

It regularly comes as a surprise to people that our own infrastructure can be used against us. And in the wake of terrorist attacks or plots, there are fear-induced calls to ban, disrupt or control that infrastructure. According to officials investigating the Mumbai attacks, the terrorists used images from Google Earth to help learn their way around. This isn’t the first time Google Earth has been charged with helping terrorists: in 2007, Google Earth images of British military bases were found in the homes of …

Passwords Are Not Broken, but How We Choose them Sure Is

  • Bruce Schneier
  • The Guardian
  • November 13, 2008

This essay also appeared in The Hindu.

I’ve been reading a lot about how passwords are no longer good security. The reality is more complicated. Passwords are still secure enough for many applications, but you have to choose a good one. And that’s hard. The best way to explain how to choose a good password is to describe how they’re broken. The most serious attack is called offline password guessing. There are commercial programs that do this, sold primarily to police departments. There are also hacker tools that do the same thing.

As computers have become faster, the guessers have got better, sometimes being able to test hundreds of thousands of passwords per second. These guessers might run for months on many machines simultaneously…

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.