News Tagged "Register"
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Schneier Tries to Rip the Rose-Colored AI Glasses from the Eyes of Congress
Security guru Bruce Schneier played the skunk at the garden party in a Thursday federal hearing on AI’s use in the government, focusing on the risks many are ignoring.
“The other speakers mostly talked about how cool AI was—and sometimes about how cool their own company was—but I was asked by the Democrats to specifically talk about DOGE and the risks of exfiltrating our data from government agencies and feeding it into AIs,” Schneier explained in a blog post.
DOGE stands for the Department of Government Efficiency. It’s a White House initiative, run until recently by centi-billionaire Elon Musk, that has been rifling through government databases and ordering layoffs at various government agencies in the name of cost savings and efficiency. Its staff cuts have been so extensive that the Trump administration reportedly …
Nearly 10 Years After Data and Goliath, Bruce Schneier Says: Privacy’s Still Screwed
“In 50 years, I think we'll view these business practices like we view sweatshops today”
It has been nearly a decade since famed cryptographer and privacy expert Bruce Schneier released the book Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World—an examination of how government agencies and tech giants exploit personal data. Today, his predictions feel eerily accurate.
At stake, he argued then, was a possibly irreversible loss of privacy, and the archiving of everything. As he wrote, science fiction author Charlie Stross described the situation as the “end of prehistory,” in that every facet of our lives would be on a computer somewhere and available to anyone who knew how to find them…
Don't Tell Alice and Bob: Security Maven Bruce Schneier Is Leaving IBM
Infosec veteran Bruce Schneier has said he’ll step down as a “special advisor” to IBM’s security business to, in part, focus his time on teaching the next generation of security pros.
Schneier said he also wanted to focus on work with nonprofit projects including Tor and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), where he is a board member.
The cryptographer, formerly BT’s chief security technology officer, has been writing about security since 1998 and has produced more than a dozen books, as well as hundreds of articles, essays and academic papers…
Q&A: Crypto-Guru Bruce Schneier on Teaching Tech to Lawmakers, Plus Privacy Failures—and a Call to Techies to Act
Politicians are, by and large, clueless about technology, and it’s going to be up to engineers and other techies to rectify that, even if it means turning down big pay packets for a while.
This was the message computer security guru Bruce Schneier gave at last week’s RSA Conference in San Francisco, during a keynote address, and it appeared to strike a chord with listeners. Schneier pointed out that, for lawyers, doing pro bono work was expected and a route to career success. The same could be true for the technology industry, he opined.
We sat down with Schneier to have a chat after he had finished autographing copies of his latest book …
Bruce Schneier: The US Government Is Coming for YOUR Code, Techies
Open source has won, but victory may be fleeting
The Open Source Leadership Summit began on Tuesday amid roads closed by a landslide: held in The Resort at Squaw Creek near Lake Tahoe, California, it was not easily accessible to attendees traveling Highway 80 from the San Francisco Bay Area.
During his opening keynote, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, made light of the mudslides that brought traffic to a crawl near Donner Pass on Monday evening. The trip at least was less arduous than it was last year, he said.
Zemlin’s remarks amounted to an open-source victory lap. Some 99.4 per cent of the world’s high performance computing systems, 90 per cent of the world’s stock exchanges, and 64 per cent of mobile devices run on Linux, he said, adding that the foundation’s projects have created $14.5 billion worth of value, as measured in cost per line of code…
Government Regulation Will Clip Coders' Wings, Says Bruce Schneier
Systems "too critical to allow programmers to do as they want"
Government regulation of the Internet of Things will become inevitable as connected kit in arenas as varied as healthcare and power distribution becomes more commonplace, according to security guru Bruce Schneier.
“Governments are going to get involved regardless because the risks are too great. When people start dying and property starts getting destroyed, governments are going to have to do something,” Schneier said during a keynote speech at the Infosecurity Europe trade show in London.
The choice is between smart (well-informed) or stupid government regulations with the possibility of non-interference getting taken off the table…
Q&A: Bruce Schneier on Joining IBM, IoT Woes, and Apple v. the FBI
It's going to get worse before it gets better
Security guru Bruce Schneier is a regular at shows like RSA and his talks are usually standing-room-only affairs.
Schneier has written some of the definitive texts for modern cryptography teaching and his current book, Data and Goliath, examines the perils and solutions to government and corporate surveillance of internet users. The Register sat down with him to talk over the news of the day, and to get an idea of where the security industry is going.
Q: First things first—you’re the CTO of Resilient Systems, which IBM is in the process of buying…
Bruce Schneier: We're Sleepwalking towards Digital Disaster and Are Too Dumb to Stop
Coders and tech bros playing chance with the future
Security guru Bruce Schneier has issued a stark warning to the RSA 2016 conference—get smart or face a whole world of trouble.
The level of interconnectedness of the world’s technology is increasing daily, he said, and is becoming a world-sized web—which he acknowledged was a horrible term—made up of sensors, distributed computers, cloud systems, mobile, and autonomous data processing units. And no one is quite sure where it is all heading.
“The world-sized web will change everything,” he said. “It will cause more real-world consequences, has fewer off switches, and gives more power to the powerful. It’s less being designed than created and it’s coming with no forethought or planning. And most people are unaware that it’s coming.”…
Global Crypto Survey Proves Govt Backdoors Completely Pointless
Like playing a frustrating game of whack-a-mole
In 1999, when a fierce crypto war was raging between governments and developers, researchers undertook a global survey of available encryption products.
Now security guru Bruce Schneier and other experts have repeated the exercise, and it spells bad news for those demanding backdoors in today’s cryptography.
The latest study analyzed 865 hardware and software products incorporating encryption from 55 countries, with a third of them coming from the US. That’s up from 805 in 35 countries in 1999.
The goal of the survey is to catalogue available products and applications, rather than score or rate them. The team did not have the time to evaluate each system in depth. One thing the list does demonstrate, though, is the wide availability of software with builtin encryption, distributed from all corners of the globe…
Bruce Schneier: "We're in Early Years of a Cyber Arms Race"
Security guru Bruce Schneier says there’s a kind of cold war now being waged in cyberspace, only the trouble is we don’t always know who we’re waging it against.
Schneier appeared onscreen via Google Hangouts at the LinuxCon/CloudOpen/ContainerCon conference in Seattle on Tuesday to warn attendees that the modern security landscape is becoming increasingly complex and dangerous.
"We know, on the internet today, that attackers have the advantage," Schneier said. "A sufficiently funded, skilled, motivated adversary will get in. And we have to figure out how to deal with that."…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.