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What I Found Most Interesting from Amazon re:invent 2018
Amazon has completely crushed it again at this year’s re:invent conference. They continue to innovate a truly frightening pace. And when I say frightening, I mean…in that it creates fear within me. It’s just doing so much, so quickly, that I can’t help but feel uncomfortable. But it’s a good thing. I think. It’s definitely sending a great…
My Friend Chris Romeo Died Yesterday
I used to work at Aflac with a bunch of cool guys. One of them was named Chris Romeo. He was always smiling and trying to figure out how to turn the previously uttered sentence into a joke. He called it checking someone’s oil. One day he came up behind me next to our cubes and tried to…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 150
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Why You Should Directly Support as Many News Sources as Possible
By now most people understand that there’s a serious problem with the news, but I’m not sure how many know how fundamental it is. Here’s the underlying issue: The companies that make the news we consume are for-profit businesses. These companies aren’t just pressured to increase profits, but will go out of business if they don’t constantly adapt…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 153
🛡️ Security News Ukraine has found another nasty piece of malware targetting their government systems. It’s a Windows backdoor called Pterodo. Link China has turned on their social credit system that was basically a Black Mirror episode, and it’s resulted in the blacklisting of millions of Chinese from booking flights. Their scores were too low. Unreal. Link The US…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 152
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Some of My Favorite Shell Aliases From Over the Years
Aliases are one of those things that follow you, from laptop to laptop, and server to server—like snippets of your educational DNA. Here are some of mine that have followed me for two decades: Type f to find things by name using find $ alias f="find . -name" A super quick speed test You can do this with…
The Few Are Winning, The Many Are Losing
I was just watching the mid-term results come in this evening and was struck with an idea: even in our democratic republic, it’s the few elites that seem to be winning. Trump won by electoral college, and he lost the popular vote. The electoral college is a collection of a few super influential people. The people are—well—the people.…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 151
Security News 👋 We’re preparing to release the 2018 version of the OWASP IoT Top 10, and we would love your feedback! Updated to include a feedback form. Form Link 🛑 Check your Facebook account to see if it was hacked. Link The company that owns Fortnite has purchased a company focused on stopping cheaters. Link A government report…
Building Your Own Dedicated IPSEC VPN in Less Than 10 Minutes
There are tons of VPN options out there, and the field is confusing enough that I did a post on the topic a while back to help people pick one of the better ones and avoid the scams. But if you look at the considerations for making a good choice, they mostly reduce to the following: Privacy Log…
What If Corporations Provided For Their Customers?
I was talking about books with my friend Jon Robinson the other day, and he said something offhand that I’ve not been able to chase out of my brain. It sounds like a silly idea until you realize that what we’re doing now is not likely to work for much longer. Corporations are becoming more powerful. They’re buying…
Entropy and Security
I’ve been obsessed with entropy since I learned about it in high school. It’s highly depressing, but it’s awesome at the same time given how inevitable it is, and how it’s happening all the time and all around us. I was just reading The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian, and it reminded me that I’ve wanted to…
Falling Testosterone, Poverty, and Violence, and How That Will Combine With Rising Inequality
It’s interesting to think about all the different trends happening at the same time right now: This is obviously not a complete list. Testosterone has been falling in men for decades Link Global violence is at an all-time low Link Global poverty is at an all-time low Link Income inequality is the worst it’s been in over a…
The Cybersecurity Hiring Gap is Due to The Lack of Entry-level Positions
If you haven’t heard yet—which is unlikely—there’s a problem with hiring in cybersecurity. The issue is we’re not sure of the nature of that problem. A number of studies are talking about there being 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity positions by 2021. But many are in that same market looking for work and are unable to find any. So…
On the History of Watches
Some friends just commented about a video on Twitter where a watch guy basically described why real watches are real watches, and technology-based watches like the Apple Watch don’t qualify. You should take a moment to watch the video. I agree with many of his points, and I’ve recently consumed a number of similar opinions from similar people.…
Preparing to Release the OWASP IoT Top 10 2018 (Updated: Released)
[ UPDATE: The project is now live here. ] Please give your feedback on the list here. The OWASP Internet of Things Top 10 has not been updated since 2014, for a number of reasons. First of which was the fact that we released the new umbrella project that removed focus from the Top 10 format. This, in…
Humanity’s Ultimate Red Pill
Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills. Arthur Schopenhauer One of the most powerful concepts in the Matrix was the idea that people were separated into two groups: those who could only see the world as it appeared, and those who could see its true form. I am saying 5% because of…
How I Reduced My Spam Phone Calls by 90%
Many of the calls are actually in Mandarin, which I don’t speak. Over the last few months I’ve seen my spam phone calls go from around one a week to like ten a day, and it’s been infuriating. After a good bit of Googling, I ended up coming up with two solutions that reduced the problem by around…
Stop Trying to Violently Separate Privacy and Security
I just stumbled upon an article by Mark R. Heckman, Ph.D, CISSP, CISA that—like so many others in the industry—wildly contorts himself to make a distinction between security and privacy. He writes: I argued here why I don’t think this difference matters as much as people think. Without a clear understanding of the difference, data security and privacy…
Feedly Feature Request: Custom Long-press
This post will serve as a feature request for my preferred news reader—Feedly. The feature is called: Custom Long-press Custom Long-press pro Custom Long-press is a feature that allows users to assign an arbitrary function to the long-press action within Feedly. Examples might include sending to the Safari Reading List, Sharing on Buffer, etc. My current workflow for…
How Technology Increases Production Without the Need for Humans
Over the last several years I’ve been reading extraordinary amounts about the future of artificial intelligence, and how it’ll affect human work. I’ve written about this extensively here, so feel free to explore if you’re interested. Recently a reader reached out and pointed me to a video by Moshe Vardi of Rice University. The reader was himself a…
My Analysis of the Disconnect Between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson
If you follow the work of either Jordan Peterson or Sam Harris you’ve no doubt seen them engage each other in various ways over the past year or so. Jordan has been on Sam’s podcast, which didn’t go well. They talk about each other to their respective audiences, and now they have a new video podcast series together…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 141
Subscribe here to get this in your inbox every week. Security News 😮 The governments of the “Five Eyes” (US, Australia, UK, Canada, and New Zealand) have asked the world’s largest tech companies to build encryption backdoors into their systems. But more than just asking, they also said, ”Should governments continue to encounter impediments to lawful access to information…
My Current Top 3 Intellectual & Creative Challenges
Just on a personal note, I want to capture three of my top projects right now: Learning and implementing machine learning. This includes getting a decent understanding of the math that goes into it, but not going too deep there. The primary focus is to be able to make real-world predictions for real-world problems. Making electronic music. Specifically…
Concise Argument and Evidence That Steven Pinker is Wrong About How Good Things Are
As I covered in this earlier piece, despite having massive respect for Steven Pinker, and loving his latest book, Englightenment Now, I think he’s very, very wrong about the current state of America. My opinion on this is best described as a feeling of increasing unease—which is an emotion—but I only arrived at that emotion after consuming a…
5 Things You Didn’t Know You Could do with Nmap
For those who have been in information security for a while, nmap is like a warm and familiar blanket. Except this blanket kicks ass. It is—without question—the most versatile portscanner ever. A lot of people know that. Read my masscan tutorial. What fewer people know, however, is that with NSE scripting functionality nmap can do things you wouldn’t expect from a portscanner.…
The Most Important Questions
I think it’d be a useful exercise to try to capture the most important questions in the world. Here’s an initial attempt: If we don’t have free will, how should we build a society in such a way that both accepts this truth yet doesn’t descend into nihilism or other negative philosophies?If we were designed by evolution, and…
The Future of Work is Everyone Running the “Work” App
Let me propose one potential future to you—a future where most everything is done through the gig economy. Here is roughly how that might take place. Companies get rid of many or most of their employees, and decide to go with short-term contracts instead. There is extraordinary data showing that 94% of job growth (jobs created vs. jobs…
The Future Belongs to Those With Grit
If you’re not imbuing your children and friends with grit—as a core part of their identity—they will soon be driving rich people around and bringing them food. Rich people who probably have grit themselves. Grit /’grit’/ noun A positive, non-cognitive trait based on an individual’s perseverance of effort combined with the passion for a particular long-term goal or…
Rewards Programs Are Another Way We Pay for Things With Our Data
There’s a famous, often-misattributed quote in the tech scene that says something like: If you’re not paying for a given service, then you’re not the customer—you’re the product.Many people, going back to the 70’s This is fairly well understood for services like Google and Facebook, where the service is basically free but the companies make most of their…
The Difference Between Deductive and Inductive Reasoning
Pretty much anyone who thinks about how to solve problems in a formal way has probably run across the concepts of deductive and inductive reasoning. As with all my tutorials, the purpose of this article is to explain the differences between these two approaches as clearly as possible. Both deduction and induction are often referred to as a…
A Chromium-based Command-line Alternative to Curl
If you’ve spent any time coding in InfoSec, you’ve probably used a ton of curl to pull websites, check them for various issues or attributes, etc. This will follow redirects and provide a non-curl User Agent. curl -LA 'Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5' reddit.com…
Companies Are Relaxing Their Degree Requirements to Find Top Talent
Glassdoor just compiled a list of top companies that are dropping college degree requirements. There are a couple of different ways of looking at this. One is to say that the job market is so hot—in favor of employees—that companies are relaxing standards just to get people in. Another way to see it is that the correlation between…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 139
Subscribe here to get this in your inbox every week. Security News TLS 1.3 is finalized and should start rolling out everywhere soon. Adoption is expected to be quick. Link Burp continues to impress with its massive campaign of improvements and blog posts describing them. They recently just talked about how they’re adding point-and-shoot scan functionality, where you…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 137
Subscribe here to get this in your inbox every week. Security News The DHS is launching a new group to protect critical infrastructure. Link Cisco is buying Duo Security for $2.35 billion. Link Reddit had a security incident related to SMS 2FA, and their write-up on it is quite solid. I can actually gain trust in a company…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 136 (Member Edition)
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 &…
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…
New Study Shows You Can Predict Credit Rating From Your Online Tech Fingerprint
For anyone who’s been worried that their online fingerprint was going to be used against them, this paper will provide them their vindication. Here’s how they describe the analysis: As a simple example, every website can effortlessly track whether a customer is using an iOS or an Android device; or track whether a customer comes to the website…
What The Code of Hammurabi Can Teach Us About Hardware and Software Liability
The Information Security community has been debating software reliability for decades. Some say software is too advanced to place guarantees on it. And others say that unless we hold creators/builders responsible, nothing will improve. Nassim Taleb’s Skin in the Game is what got me thinking about this topic. As it turns out, the most ancient law that we…
My Thoughts on America in June of 2018
I’ve been writing more defined and concise posts lately—usually clean ideas that have a beginning and an end. I like it, and I plan to keep doing it. But not today. Today I just need to write. Today this will be an old-school blog, or a journal. There are a lot of things happening in America right now.…
Tactical Advice for Clearing Depression
I have been drawn to questions of happiness and fulfillment for much of my adult life. I’m not sure the reason for that, but I think it’s a combination of some things in my family history, it being an extremely hard problem, and the fact that so many people I know are deeply unhappy. The suicide rate in…
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