One of major differences I’ve noticed after making the switch from Linode to AWS is how network security works. On Digital Ocean, Linode, and most other VPS hosts, when you get an IP the IP is live on the internet. People can ping it directly, in other words (assuming you allow that in your OS itself), and any…
How to Connect to a Local Port on a Remote SSH Server
If you ever have a web server (or other type of server) running on a remote Linux box, and you want to connect to it using your local system, here’s how you do it. ssh -i ./.ssh/key.pem -N -L 8081:localhost:8000 user@host This reads as: Authenticate using a key. The port you’re listening on on your local system is…
Comments on the OWASP Top 10 2017 Draft
I’m going to make some comments about the proposed 2017 update of the flagship OWASP Project—the OWASP Top 10. Before I do, I just want to say that as a present and former leader of multiple OWASP projects (IoT Security, Mobile Top 10, Game Security Framework, etc.) over the last seven years, I empathize with the difficulty of…
On Forcibly Removing People From Your Private Business
There’s been another incident with United this week. This time they created their own overselling problem, let people actually board the plane and get seated, and then told them that four people had to get off the plane because employees needed to fly. Nobody volunteered to give up their seat—even after being offered increasing sums of money—so they…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 73
This week’s topics: Word 0-day, BrickerBot, iOS GIF, Russian arrested, Tizen, OilRig, APT10 MSPs, Dallas sirens, ATM drilling, Watson golf, Uber Italy, AI memory, links, projects, and more… This is Episode No. 73 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…
A Few Thoughts on Creativity and Age
I just read this NYT article about a brilliant physicist who happens to be 94-years-old. The article basically said that it could be that people get more creative when they get older, which, as they explain, is in contrast to youth-worship that pervades Silicon Valley. I have some ideas about this. First, I think most of cognitive decline…
Adjacent Possibles
I had a great conversation with friend and colleague Josh Corman this weekend about various information security topics. Josh is one of those people who produces multiple packets of interesting speech and thought during the course of a conversation. He creates these bundles, collects them, and can employ them whenever needed. It’s quite remarkable. Anyway, one he had…
Bookstores vs. Check Cashing Places
I think the two most opposite geographic markers, in terms of income and class dynamics in the United States, might be bookstores and check cashing establishments. I was just driving in Fremont, CA and realized that there are no bookstores there. Same with Newark, Milpitas, Union City, etc. They have no bookstores, no Philz, no Apple Stores—none of…
The Power of Reading
I’ve only just now—within the last five years—realized how powerful reading is. I think I went through the following evolution. Thinking it was an intellectual nice-to-have (my whole life). Thinking it was a genuine enhancement to one’s cognitive abilities (up to 10 years ago). Realizing it’s the hidden secret of most creative people in the world (5 years…
AR Glasses + Language Translation / Subtitles
There are credible rumors that Apple is working on AR glasses. Of course that’s not to say that they’ll decide they’re good enough to launch. If and when they do appear, though, I think one of the first attention-grabbing features will be realtime language translation. So, the combination of quality direction microphones, voice recognition, and natural language processing….
Moving to a Sponsorship Model
I’ve been quite reluctant to run ads on this website, for a number of reasons. They feel dirty to me, whatever that means. They literally junk up the aesthetics of the site, although the single ad in the sidebar wasn’t bad. I just prefer to be someone who doesn’t participate in the ad modal. For those reasons, I’m…
Some Thoughts on Dataism
The final chapters of Homo Deus talks about the concept of Dataism. A cursory glance online doesn’t give too many previous reverences to the term, so I’m not sure if Yuval Noah Harari created the term himself, if he’s giving a different definition for a term already in use, or exactly what that situation is. But let’s use…
VPN Recommendations
VPNs are becoming a major topic of conversation due to the recent removal of ISP privacy protections. There are hundreds of VPN providers out there already, and more are materializing every day—some for good reasons, and some for bad. Given that reality, I thought it would be a good idea to assemble a short, curated list of my…
The Unsupervised Learning Book List
I’ve been reading more than ever over the last five years, and I get a lot of questions about what I recommend. So here’s my official book list. I’ll give one sentence about what each is about, but I won’t try to sell it to you. The sell is simply that I’ve read a couple hundred books over…
Pythagoras’s Theory on How Parents Make Children
I’m currently reading The Gene: An Intimate History, a stellar book on the history of genetics. One of the anecdotes in the book, which I really enjoyed, was that Pythagoras—who we know best from the Pythagorean Theorem—also had a theory about birth and heredity. As you’ll recall, the Pythagorean Theorem states that: a2 + b2 = c2 …and…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 72
This week’s topics: Apple fixed tons of bugs, hacking smart TVs over DVB-T, gift card bots, handgun AIs, Uber manipulations, AI vs. jobs, how to read more, cloud secret management, OPSEC and phishing, links, projects, and more… This is Episode No. 72 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and…
AI and Synthetic Mind Creation
Before we can fully transfer and represent human minds into digital form, and thus achieve long-term immortality, we will have many intermediate phases. One such phase will be parsing the artifacts left behind by a living person before they died, and then creating a digital simulation that emulates them as closely as possible. If the simulations are good…
OPSEC vs. Unsubscribe Phishing Attacks
Woke up in attack mode today. Consider the common tone of many social media posts complaining about various brands. I’ve met elementary school kids with more tech knowledge than the average Best Buy store manager. or… Anyone know a better bank than Bank of America? I’ve had enough of their mistreatment of customers. In both of these cases,…
The Bottom Turtle of Cloud Secret Management
One of the best talks I saw at Enigma 2017 was this one by Ian Haken (@ianhaken) of Netflix about establishing a trust scaffolding within the cloud. When building complex IT infrastructure you always have to create/retrieve/and store secrets, and when you’re doing this quickly, at scale, like we do in modern cloud environments, you have to start…
No, the IRA Isn’t Just Like ISIS
On March 22nd, 2017 a man drove his car into pedestrians on the Westminster Bridge in London, and then attacked a police officer inside New Palace Yard. He killed three people and injured more than 50. The perpetrator had converted to Islam during one of his periods in jail, and the attack had much of the classic structure…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 71
This week’s topics: Half of Android devices haven’t been patched in over a year, Tavisclosure, NEST camera flaws, senate vs. privacy, electronics ban, bad Let’s Encrypt certs, Moodle SQLi, infosec venture capital drying up, IBM employees heading into the office, Twitter going paid model, Google killing Talk, Quiet spaces, Age of the influencer, AI vs. jobs, tools, aphorisms,…
The Rise of the Individual Influencer
I think we’re entering a new era of human creativity and productivity—one that is focused around individual influencers and the value that they bring to the world by themselves. This transition is being driven by several factors: Companies shedding their workforces due to advancements in AI, automation, and robotics, leaving people to come up with alternative ways to…
On Islam it’s Extreme vs. Extreme
Canada is trying to make it illegal to criticize Islam by labeling all such criticisms as “Islamaphobia”. That’s dumb. The hard right in the U.S. and Europe wants to do the exact opposite and label all Muslims as terrorists. That’s dumb too. So now the forgotten center of these two countries get to watch the fringe extremes battle…
Game Design is About to Become a Critical Career
Game Design—defined not just as the visual elements in a game, but the underlying structure, incentives, value systems, and other mechanics—is about to become an extremely important job in our society. In the past the title was associated with the visual aspects of video games, such as the art, the interfaces, etc., and video games have long been…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 70
This week’s topics: Russians at it again, Microsoft and Adobe updates, PoS breaches, US-CERT throws TLS shade, epilepsy tweet stalking, Tesla’s billion, lip-reading AI, autonomous BMWs, Fiber Lasers, taxing robots, Green Zones and Red Zones, AI disruption of healthcare, discovery, recommendations, and aphorisms, and more… This is Episode No. 70 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate…