Bush is currently enjoying a surge in popularity. The second Bush, not the first. He’s the one who got us into Iraq and oversaw the Katrina disaster. Anyway, there are lots of people saying very nice things about him. And for good reason, I think. I think the guy has a genuinely good heart, and that he was…
Archives for February 2017
Unsupervised Learning: No. 67
This week’s topics: CloudBleed, SHA1-1, White House Leaks, Planets, Satellites, Drones vs. Eagles, InfoSec Jobs, ExFil, IQ and Creativity in a Post-work World, Weaponized Narrative, Security Tools, Tons of Great Links, and more… This is Episode No. 67 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 15…
Companies Exist to Serve Customers, Not to Employ People
I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the American history timeline people became convinced that employers owe people jobs. They don’t. Companies have employees for one reason alone: it helps them serve their customers better. The moment this stops being true is the same moment the company will get rid of employees. This is what people…
You Should Have Two Different Kinds of Hiring Interview
Most companies and managers today are making a fundamental mistake in their hiring process. They are conflating two different types of filter—the positive filter and the negative filter. When most people interview they’re actually trying to do two things simultaneously. They’re trying to filter out bad candidates. They’re trying to select the very best. Whiteboards and puzzles By…
America’s Shark Jump
The term “Shark Jump” comes from a show called Happy Days, where after many weak episodes a main character jumps a motorcycle over a shark on water skis. The moment was meaningful because it meant the show was over, and many dying TV shows have their own versions of the same. Our country’s Shark Jump was likely the…
A Summary of the General Data Protection Regulation
Here’s a quick summary for my own reference and to be used by others if they find it helpful. It’s goal is to strengthen privacy for individuals within the EU. Its focus is uniting, simplifying, and strengthening regulations around this. It was accepted on April 27, 2016, and goes into effect on May 25, 2018. The regulation extends…
IQ and Creativity Bias in a Post-work World
I think the post-work world is going to heavily favor those with high IQs, and I think this could be a major factor in the social tensions that will arise due to economic stresses. IQ isn’t magical. It doesn’t guarantee success. But it does predict success, and I think the biggest reason for that is being flexible in…
The Need for Hamilton vs. Jefferson as Society Evolves
I’m deeply in love with history right now (and especially American history) due to my reading of the Hamilton biography. It’s over 800 pages, but worth it. One of the things it has me thinking about is the disagreement between Hamilton and Jefferson about how to run a government, and a nation. In general, Hamilton was for a…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 66
This week’s topics: My recap of RSA 2017, Google’s zero-trust implementation, Trump domain hacked, robots doing your taxes, the IoT Security train analogy, the future of authentication, toolswatch best tools of 2016, and more… This is Episode No. 66 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a…
My RSA 2017 Recap
Every year I try to recap what I saw and did at RSA, so here’s the capture for 2017. It won’t be comprehensive, but should get most major things. Impressions Things are just fine for companies selling products, but not so great for the companies using them. We continue to under-emphaize fundamentals, and we get hacked as a…
IoT Security’s Train Analogy
I have an analogy I like to use for IoT Security: it’s like a giant train that seats billions of people, and it’s currently boarding. The people getting on read the marketing and they’re super excited—IoT is evidently like Disneyland, but way better. The conductor is the free market, and there is nothing stopping him from leaving the…
Violence and Terrorism Are Not the Same
We continue to hear noises about how many recent violent attacks are not being labeled as terrorism, and that this failure to label them as such is (always or usually) because of racism. I think this jump is often unwarranted, and that there’s a simple, useful distinction that can be used to determine whether or not a given…
It’s the People, Stupid
Imagine you have decided to spend your life evangelizing healthy eating. And then imagine that you happen upon a population that does nothing but scream out constantly for candy, sugar, and cake. We want cake! We want cake! We love sugar. We want sugar! Day in and day out, that’s what the people yell. And it’s all they’ll…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 64
This week’s topics: Tax phishing, Microsoft SMB vulnerability, Cellebrite tools released, Computer interfaces, Mobile 2.0, new projects, more… This is Episode No. 64 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 15 to 30 minute summary. The goal is to catch you up on current events, tell…
An Exploration of Human to Computer Interfaces
I read and think a lot about how humans interact with computers, and what that interaction will look like at various points in the future. I was going to call this a hierarchy of human to computer interfaces, but quickly realized that it’s not a hierarchy at all. To see what I mean, let’s explore them: Input interfaces…
The Clash of Extreme Left and Extreme Right Will Create a New Centrism
Right now we’re seeing the extreme right clash with the extreme left, and people in the middle are being forced to choose. It’s getting ugly. There’s basically no place for people who think the following: Both sides are messed up and wrong The left has gone too far with their fetishization of being offended Too much of Trump’s…