A vulnerability was discovered today in Apple’s laptops that allows you to log into a root account with no password. I am not 100% sure what Responsible Disclosure means. Seems like it has lots of definitions, and that they change based on the person and over time. So requiring someone to “responsibly disclose” something—according to whatever arbitrary definition…
Archives for November 2017
Protection From Sexual Harassment is the Latest in Everyday Luxuries for the Rich
A number of things that seem like basic features of an advanced society are increasingly becoming luxuries for the rich. Doing work that you enjoy. Having good healthcare. Going to college. Having access to good information. Etc… I think we can now add Protection From Sexual Harassment to the list. The Weinstein Effect has basically put the corporate…
Struggle as the Center of Happiness
I think a lot about happiness and how to achieve it.—both as individuals, and as societies. I can think of nothing that’s as important, once the more tactical issues are out of the way. I believe I’ve come into some ideas recently, spawned by reading as usual, that I hope have brought me closer to the truth. That…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 103
This is episode No. 102 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 30 minute summary. The goal is to catch you up on current events, tell you about the best content from the week, and hopefully give you something to think about as well… This week’s…
Why We’ll See AI in Security Operation Centers Sooner Rather Than Later
I’ve had a few debates with InfoSec colleagues of mine about the current and future efficacy of AI within the security field. Their general stance is that AI for InfoSec is crap, garbage, and snake oil, and that it will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. They say it’s basically too hard of a problem, to…
Punctuation Rules & Quotation Marks
I recently had the worst feeling that I’d been doing punctuation near quotation marks all wrong—for like 7,000 posts—since 1999. I probably have, but I can start doing doing the right thing now if I just capture the basic rules. So I did some reading and here’s my summary. If the punctuation matters, put it inside. Commas, semicolons,…
How to Run the Latest Version of Nmap on Ubuntu
Nmap is constantly upgrading, so it’s best to have the latest version. Especially when you factor in its application identification and NSE functionality, which benefit significantly from being fresh. The problem for us is that while new versions of Nmap have .rpm files ready to go, there are no .deb versions released for Debian/Ubuntu users. TL;DR: Download latest,…
5 Ways to Instantly Upgrade Your Online Typography
Typography is the visual component of the written word. ~ Eric Spiekermann Using good typography is an easy way to upgrade your writing. While you can do a lot to make it beautiful, this short guide will show you how to avoid major mistakes that detract from your writing. Doing these five things will make your content far…
Simplifying Net Neutrality
I’m annoyed that I don’t have a perfectly clean opinion about net neutrality. It’s not that I don’t have a strong opinion—it’s that I feel like I could be missing some major counterpoint. To me it’s matter of ideal vs. non-ideal worlds, where in an ideal world net neutrality would be a bad thing because it limits the…
How to Edit Your Crontab Using Vim
If you’re a vim user like I am and you run crontab -e and get dropped into nano, you’re likely to make the same face as a baby eating a lemon. Not fun, but there’s a fix. Update your shell configuration file (.bashrc, .zshrc, .profile, whatever), to include the following: alias crontab=”export VISUAL=vim; crontab” Then you can simply…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 102
This is episode No. 102 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 30 minute summary. The goal is to catch you up on current events, tell you about the best content from the week, and hopefully give you something to think about as well… This week’s…
The Connection Between Opiate and Smartphone Addiction
A while back I wrote a short piece called Addiction Caused by Isolation, where I talked bout research saying that the main cause for addiction to drugs is basically the lack of another meaning loop. The research, which has been done by a number of people now, essentially asked if we’ve been thinking about the problem of addiction…
The Algorithmic Learning Series: Leadership
Art by Dan Tepfer This is an experimental series where I attempt to put Algorithmic Learning into practice. I describe Algorithmic Learning here: It starts with having an algorithm—a methodology—for doing some task or approaching some problem. Then, when new information is acquired, instead of relying on osmosis, we modify our actual algorithm for doing that thing. Then…
Seeing a Site’s Technology Stack Using Wappalyzer
There are many reasons why you might want to know what technologies a site is running. You might like how the site looks or functions, and want to copy it. Or you might be a security tester looking for vulnerabilities. For a long time, BuiltWith was pretty much the only option out there, but it’s a paid offering…
Triangulating on Conservative Values From Multiple Sources
For someone who grew up in the Bay Area and has spent their life being mostly liberal, becoming “a lot” more conservative can mean a lot of things. But let me try to unpack some of what I’m feeling right now. First, the impetus here is a collision between multiple ideas and the reading of multiple books. BoBos…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 101
This is episode No. 101 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 30 minute summary. The goal is to catch you up on current events, tell you about the best content from the week, and hopefully give you something to think about as well… This week’s…
Moving Application Authentication to the Operating System
Benedict Evans said something on Twitter the other day that got me thinking a lot about the future of app authentication. He’s highlighting a pain that we all experience but that we accept as necessary, like a barbed wire watch band. And it absolutely does feel like something we will eventually fix. The question is when. I’ve been…
Maybe the Best Application for Blockchain is Democracy
There are lots of possibly great applications for blockchain technology. The one that’s mentioned most is usually finance, where people can more easily send money without no (or less) middle-entity involvement. I think Democracy might be the killer app, though. Voting, in particular. Two of the core concepts of the blockchain’s distributed ledger are the fact that it…
Notes and Analysis on the 2017 Verizon DBIR Report
Verizon just released the 10th edition of their Data Breach Investigations Report, and this is one that I always look forward to. Here are the things that stood out to me, along with some comments on them. Verizon classifies an Incident as a security event that compromises the integrity, confidentiality or availability of an information asset. It defines…
How to Record a Table Tennis Workout Using the Apple Watch
I’m an Apple Watch user who loves table tennis, and merging these two is not super intuitive. When you first start the Workout app there is no table tennis option available. Here’s how to make the app more table tennis friendly. Start a workout type of “Other”. Play table tennis like normal. When you finish your workout, end…
I Can’t Do iPhone Cases
I really, really tried to keep a case on my iPhone X. Just like the other 9 I’ve tried it with, I lasted 2 days. I just can’t do it. It’s like going to a fine restaurant and putting Vicks under your nose while you eat. What’s the point? Some good things are just fragile, and I’m ok…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 100
This is episode No. 100 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 30 minute summary. The goal is to catch you up on current events, tell you about the best content from the week, and hopefully give you something to think about as well… This week’s…
How Russia is Helping America Destroy Itself
Maybe Putin is trying to get Trump elected so that he’ll be able to play the role of international savior from the (then obviously evil) US. And in order to do that, he’s collecting as much as possible that he (or someone else) can use to harm Clinton during the election. Source: Why is Russia Trying to Get…
My Quick Thoughts on the iPhone X
I just camped for my 10th iPhone, meaning 10 straight years starting with the original iPhone in 2007. The iPhone X is my favorite device since the original, or perhaps the 5S. It’s hard to compare such things retroactively. Anyway, there are many reviews and write-ups out there, but I wanted to capture a few basic thoughts for…
My Preferred View in Feedly
I do a weekly show called Unsupervised Learning where I curate thousands of stories down into a 30 minute podcast and newsletter. To be able to consume that much content, I’ve spent some significant amount of time messing with Feedly to get it to display feeds the way I want. What I’d really like is the ability to…
FaceID Adds a Step for Apple Pay, and For Good Reason
FaceID is an upgrade not just because it’s more accurate than TouchID, or because it’s a faster way to authenticate—it’s an upgrade because you are basically removing the authentication step entirely. Source: FaceID is Brilliant Because It’s Subtraction Instead of Addition I wrote that about FaceID itself, and now that I have the new iPhone X I have…