News in the Category "Book Reviews"
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Trust and Society: A Review of Liars & Outliers by Bruce Schneier
When I was asked to review this book I was very pleased as I was able to get away from my day job of researching and analyzing new malware and spam. I’m not a book reviewer but here’s what I thought of his book.
Bruce Schneier’s new book, Liars & Outliers, is subtitled “Enabling the trust that society needs to thrive”, and the word society’ is key here.
Unlike many of the books that Schneier has written, this is not a technical book but it does describe—clearly and concisely—the problems that we, the computer security professionals, provide technical solutions for…
Trust and Society
I used to think that Bruce Schneier was out of touch with industry CISOs, but now I think that they are out of touch with him. He’s come on tremendously in recent years. I saw him present to the United Nations last year and he was awesome, reflecting a lot of research and deep thinking about important issues such as trust, risk, surveillance and cyber warfare.
I shall be ordering a copy of his new book Liars and Outliers. It’s about trust, a subject I find both relevant and fascinating. Trust is a phenomenon that few security researchers seem to understand. The problem is that it’s a means to an end, and makes little sense when studied in isolation from its purpose…
Liars & Outliers, o cómo se articula la confianza
Liars & Outliers es el nuevo libro de Bruce Schneier que recibí hace unas semanas por cortesía de Wiley. Aunque el libro sale a la venta en los próximos días, ya se puede pedir en pre-order y ciertamente si ya han leído otros libros de Schneier, seguramente no se arrepentirán de buscar este Liars & outliers. Pero antes de que nadie se aburra, vamos con algo de chicha sobre el libro 🙂
Schneier, como es habitual, construye un ensayo sólido al que dota de un relato y un hilo conductor que te va desglosando en capítulos-píldora de unas 20 páginas. Por hacer un símil rápido, y salvando las (enormes) distancias, …
Liars and Outliers: Thoughts on Societal Trust in Bruce Schneier’s New Book
The subtitle of Liars and Outliers is “Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive,” and it’s a good explanation of the author’s direction. He looks at how trust mechanisms work, whether you’re ordering products online from people you’ve never met, or you’re paying a neighborhood kid to mow your lawn. In order for commerce to function, there must be a certain level of trust.
But how do we build these trust models? And what do we do when someone cheats us? Schneier labels those who don’t cooperate in society as ‘defectors’ because they go against the rules. Normally we might associate their behavior with lying, cheating, and stealing, but in Schneier’s model, defectors can play a role in changing societies that are unjust, such as with slavery or apartheid. I think this approach may confuse the issue somewhat, since the main point of the book is trust in a commercial sense—can you safely do business with this person or company?…
Why The Global System is Killing Trust
Trust is an essential building block of any economic and social system. Systems that attempt to operate without it inevitably fail. A loss of trust typically precedes a collapse in legitimacy.
That’s our future. Here’s why:
Let’s start with a philosopher “king” of crypt0-security, Bruce Schneier. He has a new book out called “Liars and Outliers.” The book is all about the mechanisms for building trust. There are four mechanisms:
- moral controls,
- reputational pressure (shame),
- institutional pressure (legal system), and
- security controls (encryption, locks, etc.)…
Book Review: Liars and Outliers
During the 2003 London march to protest the beginning of the Iraq war, we shuffled very, very slowly over a clogged Waterloo Bridge. Monitoring helicopters waggled overhead. I marvelled at living in a society where 2 million people could protest under the eye of police without fear—that the government went on to ignore those 2 million protesters is a different issue.
That is a demonstration of trust, the subject of Bruce Schneier’s latest book, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive. Schneier is well known for his security books such as Applied Cryptography and Secrets and Lies. But, as he argues at the beginning of Liars and Outliers, if you do not understand how trust works you cannot make good decisions about security…
"Liars and Outliers" by Bruce Schneier
Society runs on trust and would collapse without it. The interconnectedness of the modern world creates new and dangerous risks to trust.
Bruce Schneier‘s recent book Liars and Outliers is a philosophical exploration of the role of trust in society, and is likely to appeal more to policy makers and academics than to information security practitioners. He describes how theories regarding trust (and perhaps trust itself) have evolved over time and sets this within the context of today’s global interconnected society.
Schneier has done a very careful literature review, citing theories and experiments across multiple disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and psychology. The computer scientist will find that the book does a very good job of discussing abstract concepts, while the computer professional will find that it lacks a concreteness needed for it to be useful in their daily work…
Review: Liars & Outliers
Bruce Schneier's New Book Explores the Relationships of Trust on Which Civilization Depends
Bruce Schneier is a security icon, the cryptological equivalent of action-movie superstar Chuck Norris, able to straighten elliptic curves with his bare hands. Liars & Outliers isn’t the book you’d expect from someone whose portrait adorns posters—nor from the coauthor of several important encryption algorithms (one of them a finalist for the next generation of national encryption standards).
On his blog, Schneier reminds us almost daily that protecting our secrets with a 4096-bit key doesn’t do much good if we have to tape the new pass phrase to our monitors, and that an unforgeable ID card can be a very bad idea if someone can get one by slipping 20 bucks to a file clerk. In …
Review: Liars & Outliers
Bruce Schneier’s new book explores the relationships of trust on which civilization depends
Bruce Schneier is a security icon, the cryptological equivalent of action-movie superstar Chuck Norris, able to straighten elliptic curves with his bare hands. Liars & Outliers isn’t the book you’d expect from someone whose portrait adorns posters—nor from the coauthor of several important encryption algorithms (one of them a finalist for the next generation of national encryption standards).
On his blog, Schneier reminds us almost daily that protecting our secrets with a 4096-bit key doesn’t do much good if we have to tape the new pass phrase to our monitors, and that an unforgeable ID card can be a very bad idea if someone can get one by slipping 20 bucks to a file clerk. In …
Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive
Over the years an incredible amount of ink has been spilled on the concept of trust. What it is, why it’s important, how to achieve it, how to keep it, how to spread it around the Internet like margarine on toast. The difficulty in all this is trust is subjective. Trust is a human measure, inseparable from personal judgment, custom, culture, and law.
Trust, as the author states, “is relative, fluid, and multidimensional.” And Bruce Schneier’s Liars and Outliers is a far flung and wide-ranging study of trust touching on anthropology, sociology, economics political philosophy, social theories behavioral economics, rational choice theory, bounded rationality theory, and contract theory…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.