This week’s topics: Air marshal surveillance, Russians hacking control systems, Google 2FA, 23andMe sharing your data, Pentagon’s DoNotBuy list, technology news, human news, discovery, notes, recommendations, and the aphorism of the week… Every week I spend 5-20 hours finding the most interesting stories in security, technology, and humans, which I then curate into a 30 minute podcast &…
Archives for July 2018
It’s Becoming Difficult to Discuss Interesting Topics With People Who Don’t Read
Books are a uniquely portable magic.Stephen King The more I read the more I find it difficult to talk to people who don’t. I am aware of how bad that sounds, but it’s not what you’re thinking. It’s not as if I don’t like talking to people who don’t have certain views, or who don’t have a certain…
Anatomy of the American Death Spiral
America is struggling in a way that it never has before. This is not like the last times. It’s not a recession. It’s not even a depression. It’s a catastrophe. Here’s some additional context around what I’m talking about here. The reason this time is so different is that Americans have always had something solid to fall back on…
Humans Oscillate Between Wanting Novelty and Familiarity
I was listening to a random episode of the a16z podcast a few years back, and a guest on the show said something random that I thought was profound. I’m not sure the exact quote, but it was something like: We bounce back and forth between wanting something new and wanting to experience patterns that we recognize. It…
DNS Rebinding Attacks Explained
A lot of people have questions about the concept of DNS Rebinding attacks, and many of the overviews dive too deep into the details. Here’s a simple explanation that should help those having trouble getting it. DNS Rebinding lets you send commands to systems behind a victim’s firewall, as long as they’ve somehow come to a domain you…
The Problem With Pinker’s Positivity
I recently finished Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, which was remarkably well done. I particularly loved the later chapters on science and reason, which talked about how far these have brought our society, and how far they can continue to take us. In general, the book argued—similar to his previous work The Better Angels of Our Nature—that we should…
How to Become a Superforecaster
I just finished Steven Pinker’s latest book, Enlightenment Now, which turned out to be fantastic. I was frustrated in the first two-thirds of the book for reasons I won’t go into here (it seemed too positive while ignoring negatives), but the final several chapters were spectacular. Those chapters mostly focused on science and reason, and why they’re so…
The Difference Between Ex-Ante, Post Hoc, Ex Post, A Priori, and A Posteriori
If you do a lot of (good) reading you have probably run into a few highbrow, Latiney sounding phrases like those in the title of this post. I’m guessing you almost looked them up several times, but if you’re here you finally did. Well done. Here they are. Ex Ante means before the event, and is basically a…
The Evolution of the SOC and the CSIRT
We’re starting to see significant debate around the terms SOC vs. CSIRT, and which one companies should have. As with most such debates in tech—which is moving almost as fast as we can lock down definitions—the issue is largely one of semantics. To start, Wikipedia says a SOC is a centralized unit that deals with security issues on…
Why I Use a Single-screen iPhone Configuration
There are lots of ways to organize the apps on your phone. You can have lots of screens of single apps, or you can have lots of screens of app folders, or you can have something in-between. I do something simpler. I have one screen of apps, and everything else I have to invoke via the down-swipe. Not…