Essays Tagged "Wired"
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Lesson From Tor Hack: Anonymity and Privacy Aren't the Same
As the name implies, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are anonymous. You don’t have to sign anything, show ID or even reveal your real name. But the meetings are not private. Anyone is free to attend. And anyone is free to recognize you: by your face, by your voice, by the stories you tell. Anonymity is not the same as privacy.
That’s obvious and uninteresting, but many of us seem to forget it when we’re on a computer. We think “it’s secure,” and forget that secure can mean many different things.
Tor is a free tool that allows people to use the internet anonymously. Basically, by joining Tor you join a network of computers around the world that pass internet traffic randomly amongst each other before sending it out to wherever it is going. Imagine a tight huddle of people passing letters around. Once in a while a letter leaves the huddle, sent off to some destination. If you can’t see what’s going on inside the huddle, you can’t tell who sent what letter based on watching letters leave the huddle…
NBA Ref Scandal Warns of Single Points of Failure
Sports referees are supposed to be fair and impartial. They’re not supposed to favor one team over another. And they’re most certainly not supposed to have a financial interest in the outcome of a game.
Tim Donaghy, referee for the National Basketball Association, has been accused of both betting on basketball games and fixing games for the mob. He has confessed to far less—gambling in general, and selling inside information on players, referees and coaches to a big-time professional gambler named James “Sheep” Battista. But the investigation continues, and the whole scandal is an enormous black eye for the sport. Fans like to think that the game is fair and that the winning team really is the winning team…
Time to Close Gaps in Emergency Communications
I live in Minneapolis, so the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River earlier this month hit close to home, and was covered in both my local and national news.
Much of the initial coverage consisted of human interest stories, centered on the victims of the disaster and the incredible bravery shown by first responders: the policemen, firefighters, EMTs, divers, National Guard soldiers and even ordinary people, who all risked their lives to save others. (Just two weeks later, three rescue workers died in their almost-certainly futile attempt to save six miners in Utah.)…
E-Voting Certification Gets Security Completely Backward
Over the past several months, the state of California conducted the most comprehensive security review yet of electronic voting machines. People who I consider to be security experts analyzed machines from three different manufacturers, performing both a red-team attack analysis and a detailed source-code review. Serious flaws were discovered in all machines, and as a result the machines were all decertified for use in California elections.
The reports are worth reading, as is much of the blog commentary on the topic. The reviewers were given an …
Disaster Planning Is Critical, but Pick a Reasonable Disaster
If an avian flu pandemic broke out tomorrow, would your company be ready for it?
Computerworld published a series of articles on that question last year, prompted by a presentation analyst firm Gartner gave at a conference last November. Among Gartner’s recommendations: “Store 42 gallons of water per data center employee—enough for a six-week quarantine—and don’t forget about food, medical care, cooking facilities, sanitation and electricity.”
And Gartner’s conclusion, over half a year later: Pretty much no organizations are ready.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s not that organizations don’t spend enough effort on disaster planning, although that’s true; it’s that this really isn’t the sort of disaster worth planning for…
The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism Fail
Two people are sitting in a room together: an experimenter and a subject. The experimenter gets up and closes the door, and the room becomes quieter. The subject is likely to believe that the experimenter’s purpose in closing the door was to make the room quieter.
This is an example of correspondent inference theory. People tend to infer the motives—and also the disposition—of someone who performs an action based on the effects of his actions, and not on external or situational factors. If you see someone violently hitting someone else, you assume it’s because he wanted to—and is a violent person—and not because he’s play-acting. If you read about someone getting into a car accident, you assume it’s because he’s a bad driver and not because he was simply unlucky. And—more importantly for this column—if you read about a terrorist, you assume that terrorism is his ultimate goal…
Strong Laws, Smart Tech Can Stop Abusive 'Data Reuse'
We learned the news in March: Contrary to decades of denials, the U.S. Census Bureau used individual records to round up Japanese-Americans during World War II.
The Census Bureau normally is prohibited by law from revealing data that could be linked to specific individuals; the law exists to encourage people to answer census questions accurately and without fear. And while the Second War Powers Act of 1942 temporarily suspended that protection in order to locate Japanese-Americans, the Census Bureau had maintained that it only provided general information about neighborhoods…
Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot
The recently publicized terrorist plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport, like so many of the terrorist plots over the past few years, is a study in alarmism and incompetence: on the part of the terrorists, our government and the press.
Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots—and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse—is wrong.
The alleged plan, to blow up JFK’s fuel tanks and a small segment of the 40-mile petroleum pipeline that supplies the airport, …
Don't Look a Leopard in the Eye, and Other Security Advice
If you encounter an aggressive lion, stare him down. But not a leopard; avoid his gaze at all costs. In both cases, back away slowly; don’t run. If you stumble on a pack of hyenas, run and climb a tree; hyenas can’t climb trees. But don’t do that if you’re being chased by an elephant; he’ll just knock the tree down. Stand still until he forgets about you.
I spent the last few days on safari in a South African game park, and this was just some of the security advice we were all given. What’s interesting about this advice is how well-defined it is. The defenses might not be terribly effective—you still might get eaten, gored or trampled—but they’re your best hope. Doing something else isn’t advised, because animals do the same things over and over again. These are security countermeasures against specific tactics…
Virginia Tech Lesson: Rare Risks Breed Irrational Responses
Everyone had a reaction to the horrific events of the Virginia Tech shootings. Some of those reactions were rational. Others were not.
A high school student was suspended for customizing a first-person shooter game with a map of his school. A contractor was fired from his government job for talking about a gun, and then visited by the FBI when he created a comic about the incident. A dean at Yale banned realistic stage weapons from the university theaters—a policy that was reversed within a day. And some teachers terrorized…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.