Entries Tagged "Schneier news"

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Initial Thoughts on the Boston Bombings

I rewrote my “refuse to be terrorized” essay for the Atlantic. David Rothkopf (author of the great book Power, Inc.) wrote something similar, and so did John Cole.

It’s interesting to see how much more resonance this idea has today than it did a dozen years ago. If other people have written similar essays, please post links in the comments.

EDITED TO ADD (4/16): Two good essays.

EDITED TO ADD (4/16): I did a Q&A on the Washington Post blog. And—I can hardly believe it—President Obama said “the American people refuse to be terrorized” in a press briefing today.

EDITED TO ADD (4/16): I did a podcast interview and another press interview.

EDITED TO ADD (4/16): This, on the other hand, is pitiful.

EDITED TO ADD (4/17): Another audio interview with me.

EDITED TO ADD (4/19): I have done a lot of press this week. Here’s a link to a “To the Point” segment, and two Huffington Post Live segments. I was on The Steve Malzberg Show, which I didn’t realize was shouting conservative talk radio until it was too late.

EDITED TO ADD (4/20): That Atlantic essay had 40,000 Facebook likes and 6800 Tweets. The editor told me it had about 360,000 hits. That makes it the most popular piece I’ve ever written.

EDITED TO ADD (5/14): More links here.

Posted on April 16, 2013 at 9:19 AM • View Comments

Changes to the Blog

I have made a few changes to my blog that I’d like to talk about.

The first is the various buttons associated with each post: a Facebook Like button, a Retweet button, and so on. These buttons are ubiquitous on the Internet now. We publishers like them because it makes it easier for our readers to share our content. I especially like them because I can obsessively watch the totals see how my writings are spreading out across the Internet.

The problem is that these buttons use images, scripts, and/or iframes hosted on the social media site’s own servers. This is partly for webmasters’ convenience; it makes adoption as easy as copy-and-pasting a few lines of code. But it also gives Facebook, Twitter, Google, and so on a way to track you—even if you don’t click on the button. Remember that: if you see sharing buttons on a webpage, that page is almost certainly being tracked by social media sites or a service like AddThis. Or both.

What I’m using instead is SocialSharePrivacy, which was created by the German website Heise Online and adapted by Mathias Panzenböck. The page shows a grayed-out mockup of a sharing button. You click once to activate it, then a second time to share the page. If you don’t click, nothing is loaded from the social media site, so it can’t track your visit. If you don’t care about the privacy issues, you can click on the Settings icon and enable the sharing buttons permanently.

It’s not a perfect solution—two clicks instead of one—but it’s much more privacy-friendly.

(If you’re thinking of doing something similar on your own site, another option to consider is shareNice. ShareNice can be copied to your own webserver; but if you prefer, you can use their hosted version, which makes it as easy to install as AddThis. The difference is that shareNice doesn’t set cookies or even log IP addresses—though you’ll have to trust them on the logging part. The problem is that it can’t display the aggregate totals.)

The second change is the search function. I changed the site’s search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t even store IP addresses. Again, you have to trust them on that, but I’m inclined to.

The third change is to the feed. Starting now, if you click the feed icon in the right-hand column of my blog, you’ll be subscribing to a feed that’s hosted locally on schneier.com, instead of one produced by Google’s Feedburner service. Again, this reduces the amount of data Google collects about you. Over the next couple of days, I will transition existing subscribers off of Feedburner, but since some of you are subscribed directly to a Feedburner URL, I recommend resubscribing to the new link to be sure. And if by chance you have trouble with the new feed, this legacy link will always point to the Feedburner version.

Fighting against the massive amount of surveillance data collected about us as we surf the Internet is hard, and possibly even fruitless. But I think it’s important to try.

Posted on March 22, 2013 at 3:46 PM • View Comments

Me at the RSA Conference

I’ll be speaking twice at the RSA Conference this year. I’m giving a solo talk Tuesday at 1:00, and participating in a debate about training Wednesday at noon. This is a short written preview of my solo talk, and this is an audio interview on the topic.

Additionally: Akamai is giving away 1,500 copies of Liars and Outliers, and Zcaler is giving away 300 copies of Schneier on Security. I’ll be doing book signings in both of those companies’ booths and at the conference bookstore.

Posted on February 25, 2013 at 1:49 PM • View Comments

Schneier on Security on Elementary

Two of my books can be seen in the background in CBS’ new Sherlock Holmes drama, Elementary. Copies of Schneier on Security and Secrets & Lies are prominently displayed on Sherlock Holmes’ bookshelf. You can see them in the first few minutes of the pilot episode. The show’s producers contacted me early on to ask permission to use my books, so it didn’t come as a surprise, but it’s still a bit of a thrill.
Sherlock's bookshelf

Here’s a listing of all the books visible on the bookshelf.

Posted on September 14, 2012 at 2:20 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.