News in the Category "Text"
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Audio: How Will AI Affect Democracy
Two AI experts join Governors Bredesen and Haslam to discuss the potential impact of AI on democracy
Listen to the Audio on Baker.UTK.edu
Policymakers are increasingly focused on how to regulate AI, but what impact might AI have on democracy itself? The risks of AI technology for the democratic system, including misinformed voters and manipulated election processes are becoming more evident by the day, but is it all bad news? Dr. Sarah Kreps, a political scientist and director of the Cornell Tech Policy Institute, and Bruce Schneier, a technologist and Harvard Kennedy School lecturer, join Governors Bredesen and Haslam to dig into the good, the bad, and the unknown about how AI will impact democracy…
Book Review: A Hacker’s Mind by Bruce Schneier
I have known Bruce Schneier for many years, and met him most recently just after he gave one of the keynotes at this year’s RSA show. The keynote extends his thoughts in his most recent book, A Hacker’s Mind, which he wrote last year and was published this past winter. (I reviewed some of his earlier works in a blog for Avast here.)
Even if you are new to Schneier, not interested in coding, and aren’t all that technical, you should read his book because he sets out how hacking works in our everyday lives.
He chronicles how hacks pervade our society. You will hear about the term Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich (how Google and Apple and others have hacked and thus avoided paying US taxes), the exploits of the Pudding Guy (the person who hacked American Airlines’ frequent flyer system by purchasing thousands of pudding cups to obtain elite status), or when the St. Louis Browns baseball team hacked things by hiring a 3’7″ batter back in 1951. There are less celebrated hacks, such as when investment firm Goldman Sachs owned a quarter of the total US aluminum supply back in the 2010’s to control its spot price. What was their hack? They moved it around several Chicago-area warehouses each day: the spot price depends on the time material is delivered. Clever, right?…
Bruce Schneier’s Plan to Reinvent Democracy
I have a confession to make: I am a complete Bruce Schneier fanboy. I have been following the cryptographer, Harvard lecturer and privacy specialist for many years, and was delighted to meet him face-to-face at last week’s RSA Conference in San Francisco, where he gave a keynote (registration required) on how to reinvent democracy using cybersecurity concepts. His oeuvre spans decades with numerous books along with his own blog that publishes interesting links to security-related events, strategies and failures that you should follow.
Schneier began his talk by saying that “the political systems that were invented in the 18…
Bruce Schneier on His New Book, a Hacker’s Mind
GrowthPolicy: I’d like to talk about your brilliant, and timely, new book, A Hacker’s Mind. In the book’s introduction, you write: “Security technologists look at the world differently than most people. When most people look at a system, they focus on how it works. When security technologists look at the same system, they focus on how it can be made to fail.” Tell our readers what first made you interested in the psychology of security technologists and hackers? In other words, what is the origin story of this book?
Bruce Schneier: These threads have been percolating in my head for a while now. I started writing about the psychology of security around 2008. That quote is something I have been saying for decades. The notions of socio-technical systems and how they can be attacked are just as old…
Bruce Schneier Wants to Recreate Democracy
Arguing that American democracy has been hacked, the computer security expert doesn’t want to just fiddle on the margins when it comes to re-envisioning what a new 21st-century American democracy should look like.
Like many people cooped up at home during COVID-19, Bruce Schneier had a pandemic project. In this case, it was a new book called A Hacker’s Mind, which encourages readers to apply the hacker mentality to our various social, political, economic, and legal systems. Schneier’s work on the book sparked deeper thinking about the suitability of our centuries-old democratic processes and institutions and whether they were still up to the task in our ever-increasing polarized and fractured political climate.
“Democracy has been hacked, mostly for the worse,” Schneier, a computer security specialist and privacy expert who is a faculty affiliate at the Ash Center, is quick to note. “Our democracy in the United States is really just not suited to the task anymore.” But if American democracy is no longer up to snuff in Schneier’s mind, the question quickly arises: What should a new American democracy look like?…
A Hacker’s Mind—How the Elites Exploit the System
What does the computer world have to teach us about designing for resilience in other domains? Quite a lot, argues Bruce Schneier, in a new book that sees the security expert turn his gaze to the increasingly vulnerable financial, legal and political systems that underpin society.
“When most people look at a system, they focus on how it works,” writes Schneier, whose popular books and practical expertise have earned him a stellar reputation in the computer security field. “When security technologists look at the same system, they can’t help but focus on how it can be made to fail.”…
Hacking and the Social Contract
View or Download in PDF Format
The concept of “hacking” is not an invention of the digital age. Nor is it a purely technical process, although today it often requires some technical expertise. Humans have always tried to find loopholes in the systems of rules we find ourselves beholden to. When we reach a wall, we try to find a way around it.
Bruce Schneier’s A Hacker’s Mind is a collection of fairly short, often insightful commentaries about hacking. Schneier is one of the nation’s most well-known cybersecurity experts, and his prose is clear, jargon-free, and a pleasure to read. A reader might pick up this book for the numerous instructive cases and vignettes it offers, but conceptually, …
Review: Digital Tech Advances, AI Spur Hacking of Society
This Associated Press book review was reprinted by: ABC News, The Buffalo News, The Chicago Tribune, The Lexington Clipper-Herald, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Tucson.com, The Winchester Star, and WRAL News.
“A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules, and How to Bend Them Back” by Bruce Schneier (W.W. Norton & Company)
Hacking is universally understood as the exploitation of a software vulnerability by a malicious actor.
But hacking encompasses oh, so much more. By gaming systems, it achieves outcomes for which they were not designed. People do it to the economy, the tax code, the law. Discover a loophole, profit from an oversight…
How to Know if You’re a Hacker, and Other Life Hacks
In “A Hacker’s Mind,” Bruce Schneier goes beyond the black-hoodie clichés.
In the popular imagination, a hacker has one of two goals: to crusade as a modern-day folk hero against totalitarianism and corporate duplicity, or to steal your identity. In either case, he—for pop culture dictates that the hacker must be a man—looks much the same in his dark, windowless room, his pallid features bathed in the glow of computer monitors (at least three) and swaddled in a cloud of e-cig vapor. He’s a furtive underdog consigned to a realm of greasy pizza boxes, Guy Fawkes masks and, especially, black hoodies, which hackers are apparently issued at birth…
Pluralistic: Bruce Schneier’s A Hacker’s Mind (06 Feb 2023)
A Hacker’s Mind is security expert Bruce Schneier’s latest book, released today. For long-time readers of Schneier, the subject matter will be familiar, but this iteration of Schneier’s core security literacy curriculum has an important new gloss: power.
https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393866667
Schneier started out as a cryptographer, author of 1994’s Applied Cryptography, one of the standard texts on the subject. He created and co-created several important ciphers, and started two successful security startups that were sold onto larger firms. Many readers outside of cryptography circles became familiar with Schneier through his contribution to Neal Stephenson’s …
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.