Schneier on Security

The book Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive provides a framework to answer the question, “Why do people trust each other and cooperate?”

I read this book with an eye towards improving my understanding of how people filter information, which is relevant to the focus of this blog and my recent interest in improving the trustworthiness and quality of crowd-sourced product information. I also knew of and respected the author, security expert Bruce Schneier, who is a source for parts of my password management series…

I recently read Bruce Schneier’s latest book, Liars and Outliers.

This is not a how-to book. It won’t make your code more secure. I doubt that it would serve as a manual on human interactions for extraterrestrials. Nor is it likely to improve a bank loan officer’s percentage of good loans, or an eBay buyer’s choice of sellers, or your ability to detect email phishing or a corporation whose accountants have cooked the books. But it might shape your understanding of all that stuff.

Liars & Outliers is a look at how trust works in society, with passing references to neuroscience, economics and game theory. Along with a description of how the negative feedback of societal pressure is supposed to work is an explanation of why it doesn’t work so well on-line and with large corporations…

In February of this year Bruce Schneier released his latest book, Liars & Outliers—enabling the trust that society needs to thrive. This accessible book does a good job exploring the scientific theory of trust and collaboration and combines a theoretical framework with real-life examples. It does not bring many new insights to people who have followed Schneier’s other work but the theoretical framework is useful and this is a book worth reading.

Mr. Schneier is a well-known computer security specialist. In college I studied from his book Applied Cryptography, a standard work on practical cryptography, and he has a great blog on security. I received a …

Back on August 15, Bruce Schneier made an offer to sell his latest book (below cost) in exchange for a book review.  I took him up on that offer, so here is my review.

Honestly, I was a little disappointed.  I had built up a higher expectation for this book than it delivered for me.

I think there are two reasons for this.

1. I’m kind of old, and have seen at least one really bad thing – which makes a person go through the thought processes of “WHY?”.  In exploring the violation of trust that occurred, I discovered many of the things described in this book.  I suppose an advantage of buying this book is that you get the knowledge and …