Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

Emergent Chaos: Romney/Ryan for America!

We here at Emergent Chaos have long been frustrated with the Obama Administration. Their failure to close Guantanamo, their failure to prosecute war crimes including torture, their choice to murder American citizens (never mind without due process), their invocation of the state secrets privilege, their persecution of whistleblowers, their TSA running rampant, the list of […]

 

Seattle in the Snow

(From The Oatmeal.) It’s widely understood that Seattle needs a better way to measure snowfall. However, what’s lacking is a solid proposal for how to measure snowfall around here. And so I have a proposal. We should create a new unit of measurement: The Nickels. Named after Greg Nickels, who lost the mayorship of Seattle […]

 

Email chaos: How to reach Adam Shostack

The servers that host my personal email have been taken offline by a surprise attack by the evil forces of snow and ice, and my email is likely to start bouncing soon. If you need to reach me, you can use nameofthisblog @ google, or first.last @ microsoft. You can also ask me to follow […]

 

Egypt and Information Security

Yesterday, I said on Twitter that “If you work in information security, what’s happening in Egypt is a trove of metaphors and lessons for your work. Please pay attention.” My goal is not to say that what’s happening in Egypt is about information security, but rather to say that we can be both professional and […]

 

Mobile Money for Haiti: a contest

This is cool: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is using its financial clout to push the Haitian marketplace toward change by offering $10 million in prizes to the first companies to help Haitians send and receive money with their cell phones… The fund will offer cash awards to companies that initiate mobile financial services […]

 

Albion

Courtesy of the BBC.

 

St. Cajetan's Revenge

For some time, I’ve watched the War on Bottled Water with amusement. I don’t disagree with figuring out how to reduce waste, and so on and so forth, but the railing against bottled water per se struck me as not thought out very well. The major reason for my thinking is that I never heard […]

 

Tifatul Sembiring Causes Disasters

The BBC reports that “Indonesia minister says immorality causes disasters:” A government minister has blamed Indonesia’s recent string of natural disasters on people’s immorality. Communication and Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring said that there were many television programmes that destroyed morals. Therefore, the minister said, natural disasters would continue to occur. His comments came as he […]

 

Vista Didn't Fail Because of Security

Bruce Schneier points in his blog to an article in The Telegraph in which Steve Ballmer blames the failure of Vista on security. Every security person around should clear their throat loudly. Security is not what made Vista unpalatable. Many people liked Vista. My tech reporter friends not only adored it, but flat couldn’t understand […]

 

Dept. of Pre-Blogging: Swine Flu edition

In no particular order, your friendly neighborhood Dept. of Pre-blogging hereby predictively reports on: Increased speculation, coupled with a spike in Twitter activity. Politicization of the event from the Right (blame Mexico and/or Big Government), the Left (if we spent money in the right places, this would not happen), and out in left field (this […]

 

Brad DeLong on the bailout

Brad DeLong has a FAQ up about Geithner’s plan to purchase toxic assets on the theory that the market has undervalued them, and will in time price them properly. Among the items: Q: What if markets never recover, the assets are not fundamentally undervalued, and even when held to maturity the government doesn’t make back […]

 

Closing the Collapse Gap

There’s a very interesting annotated presentation at “Closing the ‘Collapse Gap’: the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US.” In it, Dmitry Orlov lays out his comparison between the USSR and the USA of 2006. Posting this now because a talk he gave at Long Now is getting lots of attention. In closely […]

 

President for Ten Minutes

During a chat I had this afternoon, someone brought up an interesting situation to contemplate. The Presidency of George Bush fils ended today at noon EST, but Mr. Obama wasn’t sworn in until 12:10. Who then, the question was, President during those ten minutes. One mildly unsatisfactory answer is Ms. Pelosi. If there is neither […]

 

Disaster Preparedness by Conair

Mini-me guest posting on The Guerilla CISO tells us all some hard learned lessons in Data Centers and Hair Driers. In it we learn (yet again!) that Disaster Recovery/Emergency Response/Business Continuity rely heavily on documentation, process being followed and above all regular testing. Regular testing is more than just practicing via drills or table top […]

 

Failure of Imagination

USA Today tells us, “Sci-fi writers join war on terror,” in which, “the Homeland Security Department [sic] is tapping into the wild imaginations of a group of self-described “deviant” thinkers….” There are many available cheap shots as well as fish to shoot in that barrel. I’m going to take a cheap shot at one not […]

 

Weak Crypto Contest

The 2007 Underhanded C Contest has a marvelous theme — weak crypto. The object of this year’s contest: write a short, simple C program that encrypts/decrypts a file, given a password on the command line. Don’t implement your own cipher, but use a bog-standard strong cipher from a widely available library. […] Your challenge: write […]

 

"ist nicht verfgbar"

So we had some random DNS trouble recently. I believe everything should be back to normal, but DNS issues can take a while to propagate and be fixed. So apologies for the non-availability. We’ve made procedural changes to make these less likely in the future. Oh, and we lost the SSNs of everyone who had […]

 

DST is Coming, Run For Your Lives!

In a week, the US and Canada are changing when they go to Daylight Savings Time. It must also be a slow news time, as well, because I’ve read several articles like this, “Daylight-Saving Time Change: Bigger than Y2K?” When Y2K came around, a number of us quoted Marvin the Martian (now of the Boston […]

 
 

Seattle Weather

In “Threatening Winds Likely to Close Major Bridges,” the Washington State department of transportation declares: WSDOT has never closed Tacoma Narrows Bridge for high winds. I don’t know that I’d be braggin’ about that. Picture from Wikipedia. [Update: They did in fact close the bridge. And I’m fine. Never lost power, no trees fell on […]

 

Giant Waves

Chandler Howell has a great post about giant waves. He quotes extensively from “Monster Rogue Waves” at Damninteresting: More recently, satellite photos and radar imagery have documented the existence of numerous rogue waves, and it turns out that they are far more common than previously thought. During a three-week study in 2001, radar scanning detected […]

 

Google's Video "Store"

Justin Mason has some thoughts in “Google DRM and WON Authentication:” That’s interesting. In my opinion, given that quote, I’ll bet Google’s DRM is something similar to the copy-protection systems used for many games since about id’s Quake 3 and Valve’s Half-Life; an online “key server” which validates codes, tracks player IDs, and who’s viewing […]

 

Disaster Planning

Since Katrina, I’ve been trying to spend about $25 a week on disaster preparedness. Fortunately, I already own some basic camping gear, so I’m starting out by storing more food and water. My pantry tends to be thin on food that can be eaten without preparations. I have powerbars and snack bars so I’ve been […]