Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

2013 PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies

You are invited to submit nominations to the 2013 PET Award. The PET Award is presented annually to researchers who have made an outstanding contribution to the theory, design, implementation, or deployment of privacy enhancing technology. It is awarded at the annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS). The PET Award carries a prize of 3000 […]

 

How to Ask Good Questions at RSA

So this week is RSA, and I wanted to offer up some advice on how to engage. I’ve already posted my “BlackHat Best Practices/Survival kit. First, if you want to ask great questions, pay attention. There are things more annoying than a question that was answered while the questioner was tweeting, but you still don’t […]

 

Is there "Room for Debate?" in Breach Disclosure?

The New York Times has a “Room for Debate” on “Should Companies Tell Us When They Get Hacked?” It currently has 4 entries, 3 of which are dramatically in favor of more disclosure. I’m personally fond of Lee Tien’s “ We Need Better Notification Laws.” My personal preference is of course (ahem) fascinating to you, […]

 

HIPAA's New Breach Rules

Law firm Proskauer has published a client alert that “HHS Issues HIPAA/HITECH Omnibus Final Rule Ushering in Significant Changes to Existing Regulations.” Most interesting to me was the breach notice section: Section 13402 of the HITECH Act requires covered entities to provide notification to affected individuals and to the Secretary of HHS following the discovery […]

 

New School Blog Attacked with 0day

We were hacked again. The vuln used was 0day, and has now been patched, thanks to David Mortman and Matt Johansen, and the theme has also been updated, thanks to Rodrigo Galindez. Since we believe in practicing the transparency we preach, I wanted to discuss what happened and some options we considered. Let me dispense […]

 

Guns, Homicides and Data

I came across a fascinating post at Jon Udell’s blog, “Homicide rates in context ,” which starts out with this graph of 2007 data: Jon’s post says more than I care to on this subject right now, and points out questions worth asking. As I said in my post on “Thoughts on the Tragedies of […]

 

Privacy, Facebook and Fatigue

Facebook’s new Graph search is a fascinating product, and I want to use it. (In fact, I wanted to use it way back when I wrote about “Single Serving Friend” in 2005.) Facebook’s Graph Search will incent Facebook users to “dress” themselves in better meta-data, so as to be properly represented in all those new […]

 

HHS & Breach Disclosure

There’s good analysis at “HHS breach investigations badly backlogged, leaving us in the dark” To say that I am frequently frustrated by HHS’s “breach tool” would be an understatement. Their reporting form and coding often makes it impossible to know – simply by looking at their entries – what type of breach occurred. Consider this […]