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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 …
Liars and Outliers
Liars and Outliers, Bruce Schneier’s most recent security-related text, is an interesting and wide-ranging review of trust in commerce and broader society. And I do mean wide-ranging—he covers everything from the implications of early mankind’s organization into groups of around 150 individuals (the “Dunbar number”) to reputation systems such as eBay and Yelp reviews. Liars and Outliers doesn’t hang together quite as well as his previous books, but it’s still a terrific primer for readers who want more insights into the complex world of security and trust…
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…
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…
Why Doesn't Society Just Fall Apart?
Since the days when Plato and Aristotle walked this Earth, philosophers have debated what constitutes the ideal state and, more specifically, what holds societies together. Why doesn’t society just fall apart? How does society function when you know you can’t possibly trust everyone in it? And why aren’t we living in what Thomas Hobbes memorably referred to as a state of constant “war of all against all“?
There is no single or simple answer, says security technologist Bruce Schneier in his enlightening new book, Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive…
Honorary Degree
Bruce Schneier received an honorary Doctor of Science degree (ScD) from the University of Westminster in London.
In Defense of Applied Cryptography
Over the weekend I found myself re-reading a few bits of Bruce Schneier’s Applied Cryptography for a historical research project, and it reminded me what a fantastically wonderful, completely insane piece of writing it is. I’m sure Bruce Schneier needs no additional validation in his life, but I do think it’s worth saying a few words about the book—and why we need more works like it in our field.
I should preface this all by saying that Applied Cryptography is probably one of the most influential crypto books ever written. It certainly played a part in getting me interested in the field. If you don’t own a copy, you should, if only to be awed by Bruce’s knowledge of bizarre, historical ciphers and all of the ways they’ve been broken. (Though the most recent edition is from 1996, so don’t go looking for up to date information in it.)…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.