Ramblings & ephemera
From Carl Zimmer’s “The Return of the Puppet Masters” (Corante: 17 January 2006):
I was investigating the remarkable ability parasites have to manipulate the behavior of their hosts. The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, for example, forces its ant host to clamp itself to the tip of grass blades, where a grazing mammal might eat it. It’s [...]
Posted on November 24th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: science, weird | 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 Jillian Cohen’s “The Show Must Go On” (The American: March/April 2008):
You can’t steal a concert. You can’t download the band—or the sweaty fans in the front row, or the merch guy, or the sound tech—to your laptop to take with you. Concerts are not like albums—easy to burn, copy, and give to your friends. [...]
Posted on November 21st, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, law | No Comments »
From Glenn Greenwald’s “A tragic legacy: How a good vs. evil mentality destroyed the Bush presidency” (Salon: 20 June 2007):
One of the principal dangers of vesting power in a leader who is convinced of his own righteousness — who believes that, by virtue of his ascension to political power, he has been called to a [...]
Posted on October 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: history, law, politics | 1 Comment »
From Charles Glass’ “The New Piracy: Charles Glass on the High Seas” (London Review of Books: 18 December 2003):
Ninety-five per cent of the world’s cargo travels by sea. Without the merchant marine, the free market would collapse and take Wall Street’s dream of a global economy with it. Yet no one, apart from ship owners, their [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, law, security | No Comments »
From Jono DiCarlo’s “Ten Ways to Make More Humane Open Source Software” (5 October 2007):
Do
Get a Benevolent Dictator
Someone who has a vision for the UI. Someone who can and will say “no†to features that don’t fit the vision.
Make the Program Usable In Its Default State
Don’t rely on configurable [...]
Posted on April 19th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, technology | No Comments »
From Bruce Schneier’s “Movie Plot Threat Contest: Status Report” (Crypto-Gram Newsletter: 15 May 2006):
In my book, Beyond Fear, I discussed five different tendencies people have to exaggerate risks: to believe that something is more risky than it actually is.
1. People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks and downplay common risks.
2. People have trouble estimating risks for [...]
Posted on June 19th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, commonplace book, science, security, technology | Comments Off
From Bruce Schneier’s “Movie Plot Threat Contest: Status Report“:
In my book, Beyond Fear, I discusse five different tendencies people have to exaggerate risks: to believe that something is more risky than it actually is.
1. People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks and downplay common risks.
2. People have trouble estimating risks for anything not exactly like their [...]
Posted on May 14th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Webster U: infosec management, security | Comments Off
From Damn Interesting’s “The Balance of Risk“:
What’s happening is a process known as risk compensation. It’s a tendency in humans to increase risky behavior proportionately as safeguards are introduced, and it’s very common. So common, in fact, as to render predictions of how well any given piece of safety equipment will work almost useless.
… Why [...]
Posted on April 21st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, security | Comments Off
From Technology Review’s “The Fading Memory of the State“:
Tom Hawk, general manager for enterprise storage at IBM, says that in the next three years, humanity will generate more data–from websites to digital photos and video–than it generated in the previous 1,000 years. … In 1996, companies spent 11 percent of their IT budgets on storage, [...]
Posted on April 18th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Wash U: tech in changing society, Webster U: infosec management, politics, technology | Comments Off
From Edward Felten’s “Acoustic Snooping on Typed Information“:
Li Zhuang, Feng Zhou, and Doug Tygar have an interesting new paper showing that if you have an audio recording of somebody typing on an ordinary computer keyboard for fifteen minutes or so, you can figure out everything they typed. The idea is that different keys tend to [...]
Posted on April 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security, writing ideas | Comments Off
From Glenn Fleishman’s post to the Interesting People mailing list:
I heard the strangely frank head of TSA on NPR this morning–perhaps he forgot he was speaking to the public?–talk quite honestly about what I would describe as “yield management for risk.”
Basically:
* The pilots are now protected, so the plane won’t be weaponized even if many [...]
Posted on January 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: security | Comments Off