Marcus Hutchins got off with time-served, and people have feelings. The range basically goes from ‘he did nothing wrong’, to, ‘he should rot in prison’. In my mind this outcome was close to perfect. Remember, he went through two years of hell since being brought up charges, he’s still a convicted felon, and he also is largely banned from the US. I think it’s good that he admitted guilt, faced consequences, and is being offered a chance to continue giving back to the community. More
Archives for July 2019
Humans Are Genebots
Somewhere in my 20’s or 30’s I became enamored with the idea of prep schools and elite colleges. I’d never gone to either of those, so it wasn’t nostalgia. And I didn’t really know about them growing up, so it’s not as if I was bitter about missing a tangible opportunity. I didn’t even know I was supposed…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 187
Lots of people in the security community went silly over the FaceApp application last week, basically saying that you shouldn’t be using the application because they’ll steal your face and then be able to impersonate you.
Time Speeds Up When You’re Wasting It
Perhaps the title is a tiny bit strong, but I don’t think by much. I read something recently where a memory expert was talking about why time seems to speed up as we age, while it seemed to move infinitely slow when we were kids. He said it was because new and interesting experiences are like temporal milestones,…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 186 (Member Edition)
Parts of Manhattan had a power outage Saturday night, which happened to be the anniversary of another power outage in 1977. The power company apologized but didn’t explain what happened. The hacker in me thinks this could easily be a probing shot by a sophisticated attacker, or a fun prank by amateurs.
The Dangers of Abruptly Destroying Meaning Structures
I recently watched an older debate between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson in which I saw Sam admonishing Jordan for creating an opening for foolish beliefs. He took a poll of who was religious in the audience, and then all but blamed Jordan for their credulity. That’s when it hit me that while Jordan might have enabled the…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 185
The Telegraph has found strong links between Huawei employees and Chinese intelligence agencies. The Huawei counter was that this was extremely common among telecom companies, and that it wasn’t a big deal. The counter to that counter was, basically, “Well, then why did you try to hide it?” /gg
Why I Don’t Think Craig Wright is Satoshi
I many years ago I wrote a piece about why I didn’t think Craig was Satoshi, and a bunch of reporters hit me up immediately for interviews. I didn’t give any, and I deleted the post. I think they were so interested because they had tracked down my interactions with him (not about bitcoin) from back in the…
YouTube’s Ban of Hacking Videos Moves Us Closer to an Entertainment-only Public Sphere
Marcus Hutchins wrote a great essay recently about YouTube’s new ban on “hacking” videos. He writes: One major problem here is that hacking tutorials are not inherently bad. There exist a vast YouTube community aimed at teaching the next generation of cyber security experts.YouTube’s New Policy on Hacking Tutorials is Problematic, Marcus Hutchins I think he’s absolutely correct,…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 184 (Member Edition)
I created a new tutorial on OWASP Amass, and just joined the team as a contributor as well. Tutorial
Chinese hacking groups have been embedded deep inside multiple major US tech firms for many years, including Fujitsu, Tata, NTT, Dimension Data, and HPE. The first thing you should be thinking is where else they are today. More