Santa's Naughty–Nice Database Hacked
This is very serious.
EDITED TO ADD (12/11): Form letters from Santa, informing children of the breach. Jack Bauer (of 24) interrogates Santa.
Entries Tagged "videos"
Page 10 of 18
The U.S. Civil Rights Movement as an Insurgency
This is interesting:
Most Americans fail to appreciate that the Civil Rights movement was about the overthrow of an entrenched political order in each of the Southern states, that the segregationists who controlled this order did not hesitate to employ violence (law enforcement, paramilitary, mob) to preserve it, and that for nearly a century the federal government tacitly or overtly supported the segregationist state governments. That the Civil Rights movement employed nonviolent tactics should fool us no more than it did the segregationists, who correctly saw themselves as being at war. Significant change was never going to occur within the political system: it had to be forced. The aim of the segregationists was to keep the federal government on the sidelines. The aim of the Civil Rights movement was to “capture” the federal government—to get it to apply its weight against the Southern states. As to why it matters: a major reason we were slow to grasp the emergence and extent of the insurgency in Iraq is that it didn’t—and doesn’t—look like a classic insurgency. In fact, the official Department of Defense definition of insurgency still reflects a Vietnam era understanding of the term. Looking at the Civil Rights movement as an insurgency is useful because it assists in thinking more comprehensively about the phenomenon of insurgency and assists in a more complete—and therefore more useful—definition of the term.
The link to his talk is broken, unfortunately.
EDITED TO ADD (12/15): Video here. Thanks, mcb.
Me Speaking on "The Future of Privacy"
Video of the talk I gave to the Open Right Group last week in London.
The Psychology of Being Scammed
This is a very interesting paper: “Understanding scam victims: seven principles for systems security,” by Frank Stajano and Paul Wilson. Paul Wilson produces and stars in the British television show The Real Hustle, which does hidden camera demonstrations of con games. (There’s no DVD of the show available, but there are bits of it on YouTube.) Frank Stajano is at the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge.
The paper describes a dozen different con scenarios—entertaining in itself—and then lists and explains six general psychological principles that con artists use:
1. The distraction principle. While you are distracted by what retains your interest, hustlers can do anything to you and you won’t notice.
2. The social compliance principle. Society trains people not to question authority. Hustlers exploit this “suspension of suspiciousness” to make you do what they want.
3. The herd principle. Even suspicious marks will let their guard down when everyone next to them appears to share the same risks. Safety in numbers? Not if they’re all conspiring against you.
4. The dishonesty principle. Anything illegal you do will be used against you by the fraudster, making it harder for you to seek help once you realize you’ve been had.
5. The deception principle. Things and people are not what they seem. Hustlers know how to manipulate you to make you believe that they are.
6. The need and greed principle. Your needs and desires make you vulnerable. Once hustlers know what you really want, they can easily manipulate you.
It all makes for very good reading.
Two previous posts on the psychology of conning and being conned.
EDITED TO ADD (12/12): Some of the episodes of The Real Hustle are available on the BBC site, but only to people with UK IP addresses—or people with a VPN tunnel to the UK.
Video Interview with Me
Here’s an interview with me, conducted at the Information Security Decisions conference in Chicago in October.
DDNI for Collection Press Conference
The U.S. Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Collection gives a press conference on the new Utah data collection facility: video and transcript.
TSA Successfully Defends Itself
Story here. Basically, a woman posts a horrible story of how she was mistreated by the TSA, and the TSA responds by releasing the video showing that she was lying.
There was a similar story in 2007. Then, I wrote:
Why is it that we all—myself included—believe these stories? Why are we so quick to assume that the TSA is a bunch of jack-booted thugs, officious and arbitrary and drunk with power?
It’s because everything seems so arbitrary, because there’s no accountability or transparency in the DHS. Rules and regulations change all the time, without any explanation or justification. Of course this kind of thing induces paranoia. It’s the sort of thing you read about in history books about East Germany and other police states. It’s not what we expect out of 21st century America.
The problem is larger than the TSA, but the TSA is the part of “homeland security” that the public comes into contact with most often—at least the part of the public that writes about these things most. They’re the public face of the problem, so of course they’re going to get the lion’s share of the finger pointing.
It was smart public relations on the TSA’s part to get the video of the incident on the Internet quickly, but it would be even smarter for the government to restore basic constitutional liberties to our nation’s counterterrorism policy. Accountability and transparency are basic building blocks of any democracy; and the more we lose sight of them, the more we lose our way as a nation.
EDITED TO ADD (11/12): Follow up by the woman who posted the original story. She claims that the TSA’s video is incomplete, and omits the part where she is separated from her son. I don’t believe her.
Pigs Defeating RFID-Enabled Feeding Systems
Pretty clever (for a pig, that is).
EDITED TO ADD (10/10): Better link for video.
Schneier on "The Future of the Security Industry"
Here’s a video of a talk I gave at an OWASP meeting in August.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.