I read and think a lot about technology, automation and how it will impact humanity. One of the most important dynamics there is the potential for technology to increase income inequality, and for automation to take jobs from those who need them most. For some reason—perhaps my being born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area—I have…
The Single Reason Harry Potter is Better Than the Marvel MCU
I’ve been having a heated discussion with a friend about why I can only take Marvel movies so seriously, and why it’s objectively lower quality entertainment than Harry Potter. There are spoilers below for Harry Potter, Infinity War, Deadpool 2, and The Bible. The answer is death. Humans, as a rule, don’t value that which they cannot lose,…
Security Report Analysis: 2018 DBIR Report
In this Security Report Analysis (SRA) series I look at various security reports and pull out the main points. This doesn’t replace a complete and detailed read of these reports, but it exposes you to some of the key takeaways that you might not otherwise have seen. REPORT: The 2018 DBIR Report Key points These points are a…
The Waking Up Podcast: Sam Harris vs. Sean Carroll on Free Will
Sam Harris recently had Sean Carroll on his Waking Up podcast, and to my delight they arrived pretty quickly at the free will topic. You can read more of my free will content here. Carroll is both a physicist and a compatibilist, which was both surprising and exciting. It was surprising because I naturally expect hard science types…
John Gruber Wrong About the Duplex Demo
John Gruber of Daring Fireball took a big shot at Google Duplex recently. He basically said that the way the demo was conducted should make us doubt the legitimacy of the tech. Why not demo it live? Why only play recordings? When is it rolling out to actual customers? Was there a hands-on after the event where members…
The Future of Content Destroys the Middleman
I think the content creation ecosystem—especially around blogging—will be ultimately disrupted by the rise of three interlocking componets: Digital Assistants APIs Customized interfaces Google Duplex just gave us a preview of how natural it’ll soon be to interact with assistants. This is currently quite different. There is no Digital Assistant yet, and content and interface are currently merged…
America is Rotting
We in the West are in the beginning—or perhaps the middle of—a catastrophic crisis of meaning. Many of us sense it. We know it’s happening. But it’s hard to corner and identify. And it’s even more difficult when authors like Steven Pinker use all of their intellectual powers to convince us that things are in fact getting better.…
Thoughts on Podcast vs. Newsletter Content
I’m thinking of stopping my regular podcast and only doing my weekly update in Newsletter form. There are a number of reasons. Far more people consume the newsletter. The podcast is actually just the newsletter content (sometimes with some opinion added). The newsletter is hard enough to get out, let alone having enough energy on Sunday to record…
If You’re Not Doing Continuous Asset Management You’re Not Doing Security
The more a company can tell me about their assets the better their security is, and the more comprehensive and realtime the inventory is, the more mature they are. This has been true for me over 15 years of consulting across hundreds of organizations. Click here to listen to the audio version of this essay. But just try—either…
Announcing the Launch of HELIOS
For a number of years I’ve been waiting to launch a project of mine called HELIOS. HELIOS actively monitors a company’s external attack surface in near-realtime and notifies you when it finds anything dangerous. I’m super excited about it, and I think it’s going to help a lot of companies. Ping me with any questions! [ HELIOS: Know…
Facebook’s Failure is a Reflection of American Ignorance
Facebook didn’t fail anyone. We failed ourselves. Sure, they could have been a bit more careful with some settings, but it’s not like they accidentally shared data with a third party. The way Cambridge Analytica accessed the data was completely authorized—it was just what they did with the data that was bad. Facebook’s entire business model is sharing…
My Postmortem Summary of The Sam Harris & Ezra Klein Podcast
If you’re a fan of Sam Harris or Ezra Klein you know that they’ve been engaged in a year-long online skirmish that recently culminated in a direct face-off in the format of a podcast. Listening to the podcast first would be helpful, but not necessary, to appreciate this analysis. I’ve been waiting to hear this interaction finally play…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 120
This week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning is now available. Subscribe below and get this episode’s podcast and newsletter. This week’s topics: It’s 2 billion users now, Liinux beep, Digital Shadows finds fail files, cloud misconfiguration, AlterEgo, AI applications, Alexa sending payments, Tech, Ideas, Recommendation, Aphorism, and more… Listen to this week’s Podcast Become a Member to Get This…
Online Education May Be Poised to Replace Dying Universities
Higher education is in the middle of an elaborate suicide ritual. It’s implements are: skyrocketing costs to students financial failure outdated content (often by decades) an academic infrastructure that seeks tenure rather than excellence an extreme-left attack on freedom of speech These are all combining to put traditional universities at risk. It’s hard impossible to predict the future,…
The Definition of Security is “Without Worry”
A lot of people in Information Security think security means “stopping bad things from happening”. It’s understandable, given that we’ve been practicing it that way for decades now. Basically, security has been synonymous with prevention for as long as most can remember, and that’s the way the entire industry is configured and oriented. But there’s another, far deeper…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 119
This week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning is now available. Subscribe below and get this episode’s podcast and newsletter. This week’s topics: Atlanta disabled, MyFitnessPal hacked, Cambridge Analytica election tampering, Drupal, Saks, DARPA drones, Cloudflare 1.1.1.1, Slack bosses, Democratic Chinese AIs, Georgia facepalm, tech, humans, ideas, and more… Listen to this week’s Podcast Read this week’s Newsletter
Why I Switched from Patreon to Memberful
Like many people I’ve been soured on ads and sponsors for my podcast and newsletter: Unsupervised Learning. If you hav a decent following it’s actually possible to make a significant living off of both sponsors and ads—and especially sponsors. At one point I was getting a couple thousand a month from just a couple of sponsors, and I…
DevOps as the Art and Science of Deliberate Practice
The best definition I’ve ever heard for DevOps is the ability to practice frequently and well. I prefer DevOps to DevSecOps because I feel security should be part of both development and operations, but I also see the merit in calling it out where this isn’t regular practice. I think there is a powerful analog here to professional…
Analysis of the 2018 F5 Threat Intel Report
F5 just released a threat intel report that covered 433 breach cases spanning 12 years, 37 industries, and 27 countries. When companies release reports like these I go through them and extract nuggets for those who don’t have time to look at the full report. You will find the extraction for this report below. Applications were the initial…
Learn the Difference Between Real and Fake Machine Learning
There are few technologies as misunderstood right now as Machine Learning. Some think it’s 100% hype, sales, and marketing, and others think it’s humanity’s Messiah in the form of math and code. Unfortunately, there’s currently not a lot of space between those two extremes. Here’s how I think about it. Machine Learning is much like Love and Sex.…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 116
This week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning is now available. Subscribe below and get this episode’s podcast and newsletter. This week’s topics: Chinese at CanSecWest, Applebees POS, Palantir, Poisoning, TensorFlow DoD, Amazon laughing, Google 72-qbits, Amazon FinTech, Android P, and more… Listen to this week’s Podcast Become a Member to Get This Week’s Newsletter
The Two Kinds of Privacy Loss
I like to think about our impending loss of privacy as two separate issues. The first type is against the will of the victim and is caused by malice and/or negligence on the part of the entity with your data. This is where you trust your data to a company, and they sell that data to a number…
How to Download the Data Facebook Has on You
People are becoming increasingly worried about the data that Facebook and other social media sites have on them. Luckily, the platforms make it fairly easy to download that data to see for yourself. For Facebook, here’s the process. 1. Go to any Facebook page and hit the down arrow in the corner. 3. Click “Download a Copy of…
Why Software Remains Insecure
There are myriad theories as to why software remains insecure after we’ve spend decades trying to solve the problem. Common reasons include: the lack of will to secure things the lack of vendor liability the use of insecure languages insufficient developer training not enough security products not enough security professionals etc… But there’s a far simpler and more…
Success in Life is Determined Most by Parental Culture, Not the Quality of Schools
I think one of the least know truths in liberal circles is that family culture determines educational and financial success far more than school quality. I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we’ve been raised to believe that good schools have lots of resources—like new textbooks, better teachers, etc.—and that students in poor…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 115
This week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning is now available. Subscribe below and get this episode’s podcast and newsletter. This week’s topics: GitHub DDoS, Celebrite Attacks, AI warnings, Palantir in New Orleans, Grub Backspace, 4G attacks, Space Corps, Amazon wins Defense Department deal, tech news, human news, discovery, notes, recommendation, aphorism, and more… Listen to this week’s Podcast Read…
When Companies Stop Caring About Data Loss, Risk Will Be Resilience-based and Focused on Business Disruption and Human Safety
In 2013, I looked briefly at how being hacked affects a company’s stock price. More people are looking at this now, and the evidence seems to show that there is often a major dip, but after 6 to 12 months it’s hard to even notice it happened. I’ve been worried for a long time that we’re getting Breach…
Safe Schools Are the New Luxury Item Because Now Only the Rich Have Stable and Present Families
We just saw another school shooting—this time in Parkland, Florida. The shooter was some kind of foster kid with serious hate in his heart, obviously. The foster parents were devastated, and evidently tried to give him love, but the damage seems to have been too great. He had a history of violence problems, a fascination with guns and…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 113
This week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning is now available. Subscribe below and get this episode’s podcast and newsletter. This week’s topics: Parkland tampering, Avoid Huawei, Bongo S3, Facebook 2FA Spam, Android Cryptojacking, Spyware Hacking, Password Dating, Technology News, Human News, Trends, Ideas & Analysis, Data & Statistics, Discovery, Recommendations, Aphorism, and more… Listen to this week’s Podcast Read…
Expect Deep Learning to be Used By Schools to Predict Violence
Get ready for Palantir-style, AI-based violence prediction on school campuses. There are far too many situations where it happens and basically everyone knew that person would be the perpetrator. This should be used for social work as well, but the more people who get to use it the more people get the data. If the perpetrator is often…
Information Security Professionals Cannot Be Luddites
I'm starting to realize that many infosec people are luddites rather than technologists.Not a good look for us.We need to be the shepherds, not the crazy people belting out scripture at people on the street.— ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ (@DanielMiessler) February 18, 2018 I just posted this on Twitter after being frustrated again by how a lot of my fellow…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 112
This post contains the supplemental content for this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning. Some people prefer fewer stories in each show while others prefer more, so I’ve solved that problem by keeping the main show tightly curated and making all the extra stories and links available to members here. It’s basically an unabridged version of the newsletter for…
I Grow Tired of Technologists Who Don’t Understand the Internet of Things
Gizmodo just did an article about how silly smart homes are, how broken the tech is, and how it’s all annoying and creepy. This type of journalism seriously annoys me. It’s the equivalent of looking at an R&D lab at CalTech in 1973 and saying, “Wow, computers are stupid.” It’s quite sad to see a tech magazine throwing…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 111
This post contains the supplemental content for this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning. Some people prefer fewer stories in each show while others prefer more, so I’ve solved that problem by keeping the main show tightly curated and making all the extra stories and links available to members here. It’s basically an unabridged version of the newsletter for…
Why Benedict Evans is Wrong About Voice Interfaces
Worse, even if you do create hundreds or thousands of such queries (which Amazon is trying to do with Alexa Skills), you haven’t solved the problem, since there is no way for the user to know what they can ask, nor remember what skills Alexa does and does not have. The ideal number of skills for such a…
The Future of Attack and Defense is AI
I wrote recently about how AI’s biggest advantage in security—at least in the short term—will come from improving coverage rather than analysis quality. I was talking specifically about things like detection of threats within a SOC, or finding asteroids that might hit earth, or listening for dangerous conversations in millions of phone calls. Basically, any situation where there…
Third-party Questionnaires Are Security Theater
If you’ve been in InfoSec for a while you probably have significant experience with third-party security questionnaires. They’re basically the new firewall. Everyone is asking everyone else if they have one. I’ve been troubled for years by the whole charade, but I just recently put my finger on the reason. Third-party security questionnaires are the equivalent of asking…
The Ability to Fake Voice and Video is About to Change Everything
Most people think the way AI is going to significantly impact society is by taking all our jobs or creating robots that try to kill everyone. But while we focus on all the distant or unlikely impacts of artificial intelligence we’re about to get completely blindsided by a very real and practical one. The ability to imitate anyone’s…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 109
This post contains the supplemental content for this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning. Some people prefer fewer stories in each show while others prefer more, so I’ve solved that problem by keeping the main show tightly curated and making all the extra stories and links available to members here. It’s basically an unabridged version of the newsletter for…
Site Traffic Metrics for 2017
I finally took a look at my site traffic for 2017, and it was fairly respectable. ~ 3 million pageviews ~ 2 million users People hang out on the site for around 50 seconds (mostly for tutorials) I’m looking to get more traffic to my non-technical posts as well this year, but I think most people will still…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 108
This post contains the supplemental content for this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning. Some people prefer fewer stories in each show while others prefer more, so I’ve solved that problem by keeping the main show tightly curated and making all the extra stories and links available to members here. It’s basically an unabridged version of the newsletter for…
We’re Moving to the On-Demand Curated Experience (OCE) Economy
I’m not interested in technology for its own sake. I think it’s interesting precisely where (and because) it intersects with our daily lives. We’re at the beginning of many such intersections right now, but one that I’m particularly interested in is The On-Demand Experience Economy. Traditionally, we’ve done two things related to items and experiences: When we wanted…
5 Free Images Sites to Use Instead of Google Images
Google Images is still best if you want to see a picture of something. But for content creators there are a number of problems. It’s not super easy to tell when you’re allowed to use an image or not, and if you care about being courteous to artists and photographers, this matters. The site is infested with stock…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 107
This post contains the supplemental content for this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning. Some people prefer fewer stories in each show while others prefer more, so I’ve solved that problem by keeping the main show tightly curated and making all the extra stories and links available to members here. It’s basically an unabridged version of the newsletter for…
A Visual of the U.S. Generations
Finding information on the various U.S. generations (boomer, millennial, x, z, etc.) is non-trivial. I end up Googling 37 different sites—all of which disagree somewhat with each other—and then I eventually give up and pick a set of numbers for that particular piece—which I then forget the next time. Plus there aren’t really (m)any good visualizations of these…
What is Everyone In Consumer Tech Racing Towards?
I wrote The Real Internet of Things to answer the question of where all this consumer tech was eventually going to lead us. I think I mostly captured it there, but wanted to summarize here. I’m not sure where Microsoft is in this, and neither is anyone else. Right now we basically have Apple and Google fighting for…
A Simple Explanation of the Differences Between Meltdown and Spectre
Many people have pinged me asking for a dead-simple explanation of the differences (and similarities) between these two attacks. Here’s an extremely basic summary: Meltdown applies to Intel and Apple processors and takes advantage of a privilege escalation flaw allowing kernel memory access from user space, meaning any secret a computer is protecting (even in the kernel) is…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 106
This post contains the supplemental content for this week’s episode of Unsupervised Learning. Some people prefer fewer stories in each show while others prefer more, so I’ve solved that problem by keeping the main show tightly curated and making all the extra stories and links available to members here. It’s basically an unabridged version of the newsletter for…
Raw Water is the Latest Example of Lupus Liberalism
High-profile Bay Area denizens are skipping tap water in favor of drinking unfiltered, untreated, and expensive “raw” water that comes straight out of the ground, Nellie Bowles reports for The New York Times.Source: ‘Raw water’ is a pseudo-scientific craze that could make you sick – The Verge The first time I wrote about Lupus Liberalism was in reference…
My Thoughts on the Flu Shot
Ok, enough people have asked me about this that I’ll answer here. And please know that I’m not a doctor, a flu specialist, or any kind of medical professional. This is just my own line of reasoning. So, I accept the science that you can’t get the flu from the shot, but anecdotally I’ve gotten sick almost every…
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