News Tagged "InfoWorld"
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Security Guru Bruce Schneier: Your Privacy is Already Gone
In <cite>Data and Goliath</cite>, one of the world's foremost security experts piles on the evidence that privacy is dead -- and proposes a detailed plan to restore it
You can’t help but get a little depressed as you read Bruce Schneier’s latest book, “Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Capture Your Data and Control Your World.” It confirms over and over how all our supposed guaranteed personal privacy, digital or otherwise, is nothing but a façade. Here are some examples from the book:
- It doesn’t take much metadata to specifically identify and track anyone.
- “We kill people based on metadata.”—General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA
- The U.S. Post Office photographs (and keeps) the exterior back and front of every piece of mail sent in the United States, and this data is available to other agencies…
Security guru: FBI Internet-Tapping Good for Criminals, Bad for Everyone Else
If you’re looking for more evidence that politicians don’t get technology, look no further than the FBI’s proposal to make Internet communications easier to wiretap. Specifically, the FBI wants to force companies to design their email, IM, VoIP, and other Internet-based communication products such that law-enforcement agents can eavesdrop on conversations—naturally, in the name of collecting evidence against evil-doers.
Although the plan reportedly has support from the Obama Administration, it doesn’t have the backing of a guy who knows a thing or two about security: …
Geeky Books to Get You through the Summer
Excerpt
“Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive,” by Bruce Schneier
Internationally renowned security expert Bruce Schneier delves into the world of trust, bringing together “ideas from across the social and biological sciences to explain how society induces trust … how trust works and fails in social settings, communities, organizations, countries and the world.”
Book Review: Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive
I’ve always considered anything written by Bruce Schneier to be part of my ongoing education about IT security. Like Warren Buffet of the financial world, Schneier has a special talent for simplifying complex IT concepts by stripping away the fat. Each book is like its own little graduate course on whichever subject he happens to be discussing. I had a chance to review a pre-release of his forthcoming book “Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive,” and I can say that it is among his best. It explores the end-game emotion for all computer security, trust—and it prompted me to rethink my long-standing proposal for fixing the Internet…
Computer Security's Dubious Future
InfoWorld's Roger Grimes weighs in on why security expert Bruce Schneier thinks computer security won't get any better in the next 10 years
As longtime readers already know, I’m a big fan of Bruce Schneier, CTO and founder of BT Counterpane. Besides being a cryptographic and computer security authority, cryptographic algorithm creator, and author of many best-selling books on security, Bruce produces some of the most relevant conversations on computer security. I consider his books, his Cryptogram newsletter, and his blog must-reads for anyone in computer security.
Bruce is a guy who pushes us to rethink our currently held paradigms. He lays bare unsubstantiated dogma. I don’t always agree with Bruce. But many of the potent ideas that I disagreed with when he espoused them a half decade ago, I find myself agreeing with years later, ideas like how two-factor authentication won’t stop malicious hackers from stealing gobs of money from the online banking industry, and how the biggest problem with security, in general, is us and our irrational ranking of threats…
Bruce Schneier: Channeling Common Sense
This mastermind's teachings and advice lead back to a singular goal: a common-sense approach to security
Bruce Schneier, CTO of Counterpane, is one of the world’s foremost experts on computer security. From a hard-core technical aspect (his first book, Applied Cryptography, is a long-time best seller for people wishing to understand cryptography in detail) as well as a philosophical viewpoint (his other books, such as Secrets and Lies or Beyond Fear, and his monthly Crypto-Gram newsletter), he continues to promote innovative commonsense security.
Bruce will come at an issue with what seems like an unpopular viewpoint, and turn your initial, gut reaction on its head. Say black, and Bruce is likely to say white. Say we need better security at large sports arenas and Bruce will argue the opposite. Say we need to create national ID cards to separate the terrorists from the law-abiding citizens and Bruce will say “baloney!” Want to spend billions making our skies safe from bomb-toting madmen? Forget about it!…
CTO 25 Award
As CTO and founder of Counterpane Internet Security, Bruce Schneier invented outsourced security-monitoring services. Following methodology similar to that used by the Centers for Disease Control, Counterpane has created a worldwide early-warning system that responds quickly to attacks on corporate infrastructures. But that’s only one of Schneier’s full-time jobs. Inventor of the Blowfish encryption algorithm and author of eight books on cryptography and security, Schneier consults with organizations as diverse as the Department of Homeland Security and the American Civil Liberties Union. His monthly Cryptogram newsletter has become required reading among security pros. “There are great products out there, but no one is using them,” he says. “My new slogan for Counterpane is: We don’t make the technology; we make the technology work.”…
The Visionaries: IT Leaders Make Predictions about the Future
Excerpt
Q: Will computers be more or less secure in 2028 than they are today?
A: Computers will be just as insecure, but computing will be more secure. Right now our major problem is that computer security is brittle; when it breaks, it breaks completely. As computing becomes embedded and invisible, it will become more resilient. Different systems will work in tandem, providing defense in depth. Cyberspace is no different than the real world: The individual pieces may be insecure, but the collection of pieces we call society hums along just fine…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.