Gunnar Peterson is one of my favorite infosec thinkers. He’s extremely clear-minded in his approach to problems and solutions. Here he talks about security issues vs. integration issues: We don’t have a security problem with integration requirements. We have an integration problem with security requirements. ~ Gunnar Peterson I love this, and I think we can abstract it…
Archives for October 2015
How Twitter Should Work
Twitter’s central concept should be curation. Curation should run throughout the product’s DNA like “quality results” does for search, and the reason for this is simple: people don’t have the time or energy to manage precisely what they want from the entire planet earth.. And that’s what Twitter is. It’s realtime humanity. All of it. So let’s approach…
Why Libertarians Tend to Be White, Male, and Young
Libertarianism is bound to be attractive to those types of people who have enough power and clout in society that government really is their biggest obstacle. So, for example, it makes sense that people like the Koch Brothers, or people like Cliven Bundy, are libertarians. For the Koch Brothers, there’s literally no entity in existence which has any…
Powering Innovation With Inputs
In my own life, I found that whenever I wasn’t sure what to do next, I would go and learn a lot, read a lot, talk to experts. I don’t know how the human brain works but it’s almost magical: when you read enough or talk to enough experts, when you have enough inputs, new ideas start appearing.…
All Companies Are Tech Companies
I picked up an interesting concept from my reading/consuming recently: All companies are tech companies. They just use that tech to sell different things. I think this is fascinating because it captures the true disruptive power of technology. It shows that it’s not just a tool for your business, but rather the entire infrastructure for it. Examples are…
Replacing Passwords with Out-of-band Challenges
I think passwords will give way to another type of authentication—one that is less annoying to users, less vulnerable to attack, and that’s more sustainable over time. Out of band challenges. The concept here is that you are already authenticated in another service, and that service is used to authenticate you to the current resource you’re trying to…
The Best Man-made Global Warming Data Comes from ExxonMobil
The main play for those who disbelieve in man-made climate change is to say that it’s a liberal political issue where people are only incentivized to support it, and are punished for going against it. Well here’s the best argument you’ve ever heard for man-made global warming, and it comes from the least likely group, at the least…
A Liberal Gun Owner Explores Existing Data
My friend Brooks and I were discussing gun control, as we like to do, and I told him about the issue with Republicans blocking the CDC from researching gun violence. He responded by sending me this report from Harvard’s Journal of Law and Public Policy. I took over two hours and read the whole thing. I found it…
Jack of All Trades, Master of Some
In the modern world, where a very common job might require someone to be a social-media expert, public speaker, writer and data analyst, the polymath wins and the deep subject-matter expert is relegated to a back corner to be used as a resource for others. As an investor, if I were going to pick the perfect team, it…
Why Free Markets Don’t Create Freedom
I hear constantly from my republican friends about how we need more “free markets and liberty”, as if it’s a magical path to prosperity. The problem with this is that free markets and liberty are in conflict because the natural, unrestricted outcome of free markets is monopoly. Just as with power and violence there is some competition early…
A Theory on How the NSA Can Decrypt Some Public Traffic
For the nerds in the audience, here’s what’s wrong: If a client and server are speaking Diffie-Hellman, they first need to agree on a large prime number with a particular form. There seemed to be no reason why everyone couldn’t just use the same prime, and, in fact, many applications tend to use standardized or hard-coded primes. But…
China’s New Dystopian Citizen Rating System
China has just launched a comprehensive new system for rating its citizens. It’s like a credit score, except it’s public and it is linked to your behavior as well as your financial performance. Here are some highlights: the scores are tied to the country’s top financial/IT/search/social companies, so they know not just what you’re buying, but also what…
The Most Effective Vitamins
There is so much rubbish out there regarding which vitamins are good and which are bad. And what we’ve learned in the last five years or so is that “studies” can tell you anything. The fact that it’s a study doesn’t mean much, in other words, because you need to know how reputable the researchers are, how large…
Mobile Search Just Surpassed Desktop Search
Google’s search chief Amit Singhal said for the first time this summer, more Google searches were completed on mobile devices than desktop computers Source: Mobile Searches Surpass Desktop Searches At Google For The First Time | TechCrunch This is a significant marker in the timeline of computing. The trends seem to be: From desktop to mobile From browsers…
The No Recognition for Violence (NRV) Campaign
It’s not easy to stop discarded people from becoming violent. But maybe there is something we can do to make it less attractive to those who are thinking about it. We refuse to say their name. There are already plenty of news organizations that do this as a matter of course. They talk about the heroes instead of…
The Potential Suffering Index (PSI)
Suffering is bad. It’s caused by raising people who are hungry, neglected, malnourished, and uneducated, among other things. But the first cause of suffering is the creation of conscious life that is able to suffer. There will come a time in human history when thoughtful and kind people realize that one of the worst possible things one can…
Republicans Obstructing Data Gathering on Gun Violence
In June, the Appropriations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives rejected an amendment that would have repealed a ban on scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducting research to study the relationship between gun ownership and gun violence. Supporters of the ban, including current House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) argue that the CDC…
Companies Are Abandoning College as a Filter
It’s a strange time to be a student or a recent graduate of high school or college. It feels like two things are simultaneously true: College has never been more important because there are fewer jobs for more candidates Companies are caring far less about college than the used to because the data show that there’s no correlation…