From Mark Gibbs’ “Debt collectors mining your secrets” (Network World: 19 June 2008):
[Bud Hibbs, a consumer advocate] told me any debt collection company has access to an incredible amount of personal data from hundreds of possible sources and the motivation to mine it.
What intrigued me after talking with Hibbs was how the debt collection [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, law, security | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “News” (Crypto-Gram: 15 September 2007):
Taser — yep, that’s the company’s name as well as the product’s name — is now selling a personal-use version of their product. It’s called the Taser C2, and it has an interesting embedded identification technology. Whenever the weapon is fired, it also sprays some serial-number bar-coded confetti, [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “Basketball Referees and Single Points of Failure” (Crypto-Gram: 15 September 2007):
What sorts of systems — IT, financial, NBA games, or whatever — are most at risk of being manipulated? The ones where the smallest change can have the greatest impact, and the ones where trusted insiders can make that change.
…
It’s not [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, security | No Comments »
From BBC News’ “CCTV boom ‘failing to cut crime’” (6 May 2008):
Huge investment in closed-circuit TV technology has failed to cut UK crime, a senior police officer has warned.
Det Ch Insp Mick Neville said the system was an “utter fiasco” - with only 3% of London’s street robberies being solved using security cameras.
Although Britain had [...]
Posted on November 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, security, technology | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “How to Crash the Oscars” (7 March 2006):
If you want to crash the glitziest party of all, the Oscars, here’s a tip from a professional: Show up at the theater, dressed as a chef carrying a live lobster, looking really concerned. …
“The most important technique is confidence,” he [...]
Posted on July 26th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security, writing ideas | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “Mitigating Identity Theft” (Crypto-Gram: 15 April 2005):
The very term “identity theft” is an oxymoron. Identity is not a possession that can be acquired or lost; it’s not a thing at all. …
The real crime here is fraud; more specifically, impersonation leading to fraud. Impersonation is an ancient crime, but the rise of [...]
Posted on August 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, law, security, technology | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “More on Two-Factor Authentication” (Crypto-Gram: 15 April 2005):
Passwords just don’t work anymore. As computers have gotten faster, password guessing has gotten easier. Ever-more-complicated passwords are required to evade password-guessing software. At the same time, there’s an upper limit to how complex a password users can be expected to remember. About five years [...]
Posted on August 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “News” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 April 2006):
Undercover investigators were able to smuggle radioactive materials into the U.S. It set off alarms at border checkpoints, but the smugglers had forged import licenses from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, based on an image of the real document they found on the Internet. Unfortunately, the border agents [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, security | Comments Off
Anonymous Internet access is now a thing of the past. A doctoral student at the University of California has conclusively fingerprinted computer hardware remotely, allowing it to be tracked wherever it is on the Internet.
In a paper on his research, primary author and Ph.D. student Tadayoshi Kohno said: “There are now a number of powerful [...]
Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From David HM Spector’s Unfinished Business Part 2: Closing the Circle (LinuxDevCenter: 7 July 2003):
… an integrated enterprise directory service does give network managers a much greater ability to manage large-scale networks and resources from almost every perspective.
Unlike most UNIX systems, Windows environments are homogeneous. There are three modes of operation in terms of user [...]
Posted on June 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, security, tech help, technology | Comments Off
From Michael Alter’s States fiddle while defrauders steal (CNET News.com: 21 June 2005):
More than 9 million American consumers fall victim to identity theft each year. But the most underpublicized identity theft crime is one in which thieves defraud state governments of payroll taxes by filing fraudulent unemployment claims.
It can be a fairly lucrative scheme, too. [...]
Posted on June 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, business, law, security, technology | Comments Off
From Technology Review’s “Big Brother Logs On“:
In many ways, the drama of pervasive surveillance is being played out first in Orwell’s native land, the United Kingdom, which operates more closed-circuit cameras per capita than any other country in the world. This very public surveillance began in 1986 on an industrial estate near the town of [...]
Posted on May 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, law, security, technology | Comments Off
From Technology Review’s’ “Face Forward“:
To get around these problems, OmniPerception, a spinoff from the University of Surrey in England, has combined its facial-recognition technology with a smart-card system. This could make face recognition more robust and better suited to applications such as passport authentication and building access control, which, if they use biometrics at all, [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From FORTUNE’s “Lessons in Leadership: The Education of Andy Grove“:
[Intel CEO Andy] Grove had never been one to rely on others’ interpretations of reality. … At Intel he fostered a culture in which “knowledge power” would trump “position power.” Anyone could challenge anyone else’s idea, so long as it was about the idea and not [...]
Posted on April 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | Comments Off
From FORTUNE’s “Lessons in Leadership: The Education of Andy Grove“:
By 1983, when Grove distilled much of his thinking in his book High Output Management (still a worthwhile read), he was president of a fast-growing $1.1-billion-a-year corporation, a leading maker of memory chips, whose CEO was Gordon Moore. … What Moore’s Law did not and could [...]
Posted on April 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From SmartWater Technology:
SmartWater Security Systems are forensic coding systems which can be applied in several ways:
SmartWater Tracer
An aqueous based solution with a unique forensic code.
SmartWater Tracer uniquely codes your property, whilst being virtually invisible to the naked eye, glows under UV light and is practically impossible to remove entirely. Tracer is used in commercial businesses, [...]
Posted on April 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science, security, writing ideas | Comments Off
From “Study: Want Community? Go Online” [emphasis added]:
Nearly 40 percent of Americans say they participate in online communities, with sites around hobbies, shared personal interests, and health-related issues among the most popular. That’s according to a survey conducted by ACNielsen and commissioned by eBay.
The survey was conducted in late September. Of 1,007 respondents, 87 percent [...]
Posted on January 29th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: social software, Wash U: tech in changing society | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “REAL ID” in Crypto-Gram (15 May 2005):
REAL ID also prohibits states from issuing driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. This makes no sense, and will only result in these illegal aliens driving without licenses — which isn’t going to help anyone’s security. (This is an interesting insecurity, and is a direct result of [...]
Posted on December 12th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security | Comments Off