Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

Incentives, Insurance and Root Cause

Over the decade or so since The New School book came out, there’s been a sea change in how we talk about breaches, and how we talk about those who got breached. We agree that understanding what’s going wrong should be a bigger part of how we learn. I’m pleased to have played some part […]

 

Journal of Terrorism and Cyber Insurance

At the RMS blog, we learn they are “Launching a New Journal for Terrorism and Cyber Insurance:” Natural hazard science is commonly studied at college, and to some level in the insurance industry’s further education and training courses. But this is not the case with terrorism risk. Even if insurance professionals learn about terrorism in […]

 

Open Letters to Security Vendors

John Masserini has a set of “open letters to security vendors” on Security Current. Everyone involved in product or sales at a security startup should read them. John provides insight into what it’s like to be pitched by too many startups, and provides a level of transparency that’s sadly hard to find. Personally, I learned […]

 

Etsy's Threat Modeling

Gabrielle Gianelli has pulled back the curtain on how Etsy threat modeled a new marketing campaign. (“Threat Modeling for Marketing Campaigns.”) I’m really happy to see this post, and the approach that they’ve taken: First, we wanted to make our program sustainable through proactive defenses. When we designed the program we tried to bake in […]

 

Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS)

The 13th annual Workshop on the Economic of Information Security will be held at Penn State June 23-24, and the call for papers is now open. I’m on the program committee this year, and am looking forward to great submissions.

 

What's Copyright, Doc?

I blogged yesterday about all the new works that have entered the public domain as their copyright expired in the United States. If you missed it, that’s because exactly nothing entered the public domain yesterday. Read more — but only commentary, because there’s no newly free work — at “What Could Have Entered the Public […]

 

What Price Privacy, Paying For Apps edition

There’s a new study on what people would pay for privacy in apps. As reported by Techflash: A study by two University of Colorado Boulder economists, Scott Savage and Donald Waldman, found the average user would pay varying amounts for different kinds of privacy: $4.05 to conceal contact lists, $2.28 to keep their browser history […]

 

Workshop on the Economics of Information Security

The next Workshop on the Economics of Information Security will be held June 11-12 at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. Many of the papers look fascinating, including “On the Viability of Using Liability to Incentivise Internet Security”, “A Behavioral Investigation of the FlipIt Game”, and “Are They Actually Any Different? Comparing 3,422 Financial Institutions’ Privacy Practices.” […]

 

Lunar Oribter Image Recovery Project

The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project needs help to recover data from the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft. Frankly, it’s a bit of a disgrace that Congress funds, well, all sorts of things, over this element of our history, but that’s besides the point. Do I want to get angry, or do I want to see this […]

 

Should I advertise on Twitter?

Apparently Twitter sent me some credits to use in their advertising program. Now, I really don’t like Twitter’s promoted tweets — I’d prefer to be the customer rather than the product. (That is, I’d like to be able to give Twitter money for an ad-free experience.) At the same time, I’m curious to see how […]

 

Taxpayers Stuck With Tab, but not in Seattle

In an article with absolutely no relevance for Seattle, the New York Times reports “With No Vote, Taxpayers Stuck With Tab on Bonds.” In another story to which Seattle residents should pay not attention, the city of Stockton is voting to declare bankruptcy, after risking taxpayer money on things like a … sports arena. Of […]

 

Will People Ever Pay for Privacy, Part XVI

Every now and then, a headline helps us see the answer to the question “Will people ever pay for Privacy?” Quoth the Paper of record: The seclusion may be the biggest selling point of the estate belonging to Robert Hurst, a former executive at Goldman Sachs, which was just listed by Debbie Loeffler of the […]

 

Washington State Frees Liquor Sales: some quick thoughts

I hate to let an increase in liberty go by without a little celebration. For the past 78 years, Washington State has had a set of (effectively) state-operated liquor stores, with identical pricing and inventory. Today, that system is gone, replaced by private liquor sales. The law was overturned by a ballot initiative, heavily backed […]

 

How to get my vote for the ACM Board

I’m concerned about issues of research being locked behind paywalls. The core of my reason is that research builds on other research, and wide availability helps science move forward. There’s also an issue that a great deal of science is funded by taxpayers, who are prevented from seeing their work. One of the organizations which […]

 

It's a Lie: Seattle Taxpayers Will Pay for a Staduim

The Seattle Times carries a press release: “Arena plan as solid as it looks?” The intricate plan offered for an NBA and NHL arena in Sodo hinges on the untested strategy of building a city-owned, self-supporting arena, without the aid of new taxes, and with team owners — not taxpayers — obligated to absorb any […]

 

Threat Modeling and Risk Assessment

Yesterday, I got into a bit of a back and forth with Wendy Nather on threat modeling and the role of risk management, and I wanted to respond more fully. So first, what was said: (Wendy) As much as I love Elevation of Privilege, I don’t think any threat modeling is complete without considering probability […]

 

"Pirate my books, please"

Science fiction author Walter John Williams wants to get his out of print work online so you can read it: To this end, I embarked upon a Cunning Plan. I discovered that my work had been pirated, and was available for free on BitTorrent sites located in the many outlaw server dens of former Marxist […]

 

I'd like some of that advertising action

Several weeks back, I was listening to the Technometria podcast on “Personal Data Ecosystems,” and they talked a lot about putting the consumer in the center of various markets. I wrote this post then, and held off posting it in light of the tragic events in Japan. One element of this is the “VRM” or […]

 

Copyrighted Science

In “Shaking Down Science,” Matt Blaze takes issue with academic copyright policies. This is something I’ve been meaning to write about since Elsevier, a “reputable scientific publisher,” was caught publishing a full line of fake journals. Matt concludes: So from now on, I’m adopting my own copyright policies. In a perfect world, I’d simply refuse […]

 

Unmeddle Housing More

Last month, I wrote: But after 50 years of meddling in the market, reducing the support for housing is going to be exceptionally complex and chaotic. And the chaos isn’t going to be evenly distributed. It’s going to be a matter of long, complex laws whose outcomes are carefully and secretly influenced. Groups who aren’t […]

 

Unmeddling Housing

For a great many years, US taxpayers have been able to deduct interest paid on a home mortgage from their taxes. That made owning property cost roughly 20% less than it otherwise would have (estimating a 25% tax rate on interest on 80% of a property). So everyone could afford 20% “more” house, which meant […]

 

Israeli Draft, Facebook and Privacy

A senior officer said they had found examples of young women who had declared themselves exempt posting photographs of themselves on Facebook in immodest clothing, or eating in non-kosher restaurants. Others were caught by responding to party invitations on Friday nights – the Jewish Sabbath. (“Israeli army uses Facebook to expose draft dodgers,” Wyre Davies, […]

 

It's not TSA's fault

October 18th’s bad news for the TSA includes a pilot declining the choice between aggressive frisking and a nudatron. He blogs about it in “Well, today was the day:” On the other side I was stopped by another agent and informed that because I had “opted out” of AIT screening, I would have to go […]

 

Money is information coined

In the general case, you are not anonymous on the interweb, but economically-anonymous, which I propose to label “enonymous”, and that’s not the same thing at all. If you threaten to kill the President, you will be tracked down, and the state will spend the money it takes on it. But if you call Lily […]

 

Databases or Arrests?

From Dan Froomkin, “FBI Lab’s Forensic Testing Backlog Traced To Controversial DNA Database,” we see this example of the mis-direction of key funds: The pressure to feed results into a controversial, expansive DNA database has bogged down the FBI’s DNA lab so badly that there is now a two-year-and-growing backlog for forensic DNA testing needed […]

 

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 […]

 

It's Hard to Nudge

There’s a notion that government can ‘nudge’ people to do the right thing. Big examples include letting people opt-out of organ donorship, rather than opting in (rates of organ donorship go from 10-20% to 80-90%, which is pretty clearly a better thing than putting those organs in the ground or crematoria). Another classic example was […]

 

Women In Security

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. For Lady Ada Day, I wanted to call out the inspiring work of Aleecia McDonald. In a privacy world full of platonic talk of the value of notice and consent, Aleecia did something very simple: […]

 

Some Chaotic Thoughts on Healthcare

Passage of this bill is too big for my little brain, and therefore I’ll share some small comments. I’m going to leave out the many anecdotes which orient me around stupid red tape conflicts in the US, how much better my health care was in Canada (and how some Canadian friends flew to the US […]

 

"We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship."

That’s the key message of Ethan Zuckerman’s post “Internet Freedom: Beyond Circumvention.” I’ll repeat it: “We can’t circumvent our way around internet censorship.” It’s a long, complex post, and very much worth reading. It starts from the economics of running an ISP that can provide circumvention to all of China, goes to the side effects […]

 

Ignorance of the 4 new laws a day is no excuse

The lead of this story caught my eye: (CNN) — Legislatures in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico met in 2009, leading to the enactment of 40,697 laws, many of which take effect January 1. That’s an average of 753 laws passed in each of those jurisdictions. […]

 

768-bit RSA key factored

The paper is here. The very sane opening paragraph is: On December 12, 2009, we factored the 768-bit, 232-digit number RSA-768 by the number field sieve (NFS, [19]). The number RSA-768 was taken from the now obsolete RSA Challenge list [37] as a representative 768-bit RSA modulus (cf. [36]). This result is a record for […]

 

Some thoughts on the Olympics, Chicago and Obama

So the 2016 Olympics will be in Rio de Janeiro. Some people think this was a loss for Obama, but Obama was in a no-win situation. His ability to devote time to trying to influence the Olympics is strongly curtailed by other, more appropriate priorities. If he hadn’t gone to Copenhagen, he would have been […]

 

Rebuilding the internet?

Once apon a time, I was uunet!harvard!bwnmr4!adam. Oh, harvard was probably enough, it was a pretty well known host in the uucp network which carried our email before snmp. I was also harvard!bwnmr4!postmaster which meant that at the end of an era, I moved the lab from copied hosts files to dns, when I became […]

 

Make the Smart Choice: Ignore This Label

He said the criteria used by the Smart Choices™ Program™ were seriously flawed, allowing less healthy products, like sweet cereals and heavily salted packaged meals, to win its seal of approval. “It’s a blatant failure of this system and it makes it, I’m afraid, not credible,” Mr. Willett said. […] Eileen T. Kennedy, president of […]

 

Ten Years Ago: Reminiscing about Zero-Knowledge

Ten years ago, I left Boston to go work at an exciting startup called Zero-Knowledge Systems. Zero-Knowledge was all about putting the consumer in control of their privacy. Even looking back, I have no regrets. I’m proud of what I was working towards during the internet bubble, and I know a lot of people who […]

 

What Are People Willing to Pay for Privacy?

So I was thinking about the question of the value of privacy, and it occurred to me that there may be an interesting natural experiment we can observe, and that is national security clearances in the US. For this post, I’ll assume that security clearances work for their primary purpose, which is to keep foreign […]

 

Moore's Law is a Factor in This

I remember when Derek Atkins was sending mail to the cypherpunks list, looking for hosts to dedicate to cracking RSA-129. I remember when they announced that “The Magic Words are Squeamish Ossifrage.” How it took 600 people with 1,600 machines months of work and then a Bell Labs supercomputer to work through the data. I […]

 

Color on Chrome OS

New things resemble old things at first. Moreover, people interpret new things in terms of old things. Such it is with the new Google Chrome OS. Very little I’ve seen on it seems to understand it. The main stream of commentary is comparisons to Windows and how this means that Google is in the OS […]

 

Do Audit Failures Mean That Audit Fails In General?

Iang’s posts are, as a rule, really thought provoking, and his latest series is no exception. In his most recent post, How many rotten apples will spoil the barrel, he asks: So we are somewhere in-between the extremes. Some good, some bad. The question then further develops into whether the ones that are good are […]

 

The Cost of Anything is the Foregone Alternative

The New York Times reports: At least six men suspected or convicted of crimes that threaten national security retained their federal aviation licenses, despite antiterrorism laws written after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that required license revocation. Among them was a Libyan sentenced to 27 years in prison by a Scottish court for the […]

 

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 […]

 

"No Evidence" and Breach Notice

According to ZDNet, “Coleman donor data breached in January, but donors alerted by Wikileaks not campaign:” Donors to Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman’s campaign got a rude awakening this week, thanks to an email from Wikileaks. Coleman’s campaign was keeping donor information in an unprotected database that contained names, addresses, emails, credit card numbers and those […]

 

Will People Ever Pay for Privacy, Redux

A few years back, I gave a talk titled “Will People Ever Pay for Privacy.” As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words: Tiger Woods’s Boat, Privacy, Attracts Plenty of Onlookers. Photo: Tiger Woods’ Yacht, TheLastMinute.

 

Three on the Value of Privacy

First, the Economist, “Everybody Does It:” WHY is a beer better than a woman? Because a beer won’t complain if you buy a second beer. Oops. There go your correspondent’s chances of working for Barack Obama, America’s president-elect. (Ironically, the Economist’s articles are all anonymous.) Second, Fraser Speirs, “On the Flickr support in iPhoto ‘09:” […]

 

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 […]

 

Will Proof-of-Work Die a Green Death?

In the Cryptography mailing list, John Gilmore recently brought up and interesting point. One of the oft-debated ways to fight spam is to put a form of proof-of-work postage on it. Spam is an emergent property of the very low cost of email combined with the effect that most of the cost is pushed to […]

 

Happy Repeal Day!

Today is the 75th anniversary of the repeal of the blanket prohibition of alcohol sales in the United States. Go pour some Champagne, Cava, or fine California bubbly and read Radley Balko’s excellent “Lessons of Prohibition.” Photo: Jensen.Pernille. Thanks to Sama.

 

The Costs of Fixing Problems

I enjoyed reading Heather Gerkin’s article: “The Invisible Election.” I am one of the few people to have gotten a pretty good view of the invisible election, and the reality does not match the reports of a smooth, problem-free election that have dominated the national media. As part of Obama’s election protection team, I spent […]

 

You versus SaaS: Who can secure your data?

In “Cloud Providers Are Better At Securing Your Data Than You Are…” Chris Hoff presents the idea that it’s foolish to think that a cloud computing provider is going to secure your data better. I think there’s some complex tradeoffs to be made. Since I sort of recoiled at the idea, let me start with […]

 
 

Checking in on the Security of Chequing

I remember a conversation back in 1995 or 1996 with someone who described to me how the Automated ClearingHouse (ACH) for checking worked. He explained that once you had an ACH merchant account, you sent in a message of roughly the form (src, dest, amount, reason) and money got moved. I argued with him that […]

 

You talk like a delinquent

This is interesting. Not sure how robust the finding is, but according to an analysis of LendingClub data on all past loans, including descriptions of the use for the money, applicants using certain words in their descriptions are much more likely to default. For our purposes define a Delinquency as either being late in your […]

 

Fake Fish and Security

There was a very interesting article in the New York Times, “Fish Tale has DNA Hook,” in which two high school students used DNA testing to discover that nearly 1/4 of the sushi they tested and identified was mis-labeled. The article only identifies one of the vendors: Dr. Stoeckle was willing to divulge the name […]

 

Buffett Vs Paulson

I was listening to Joseph Stiglitz on NPR this morning, and he had a very interesting comparison. (Quoting from an op-ed in the Guardian): For all the show of toughness, the details suggest the US taxpayer got a raw deal. There is no comparison with the terms that Warren Buffett secured when he provided capital […]

 

Investing in the finance crisis

The Wall Street domino has toppled just about everything in sight: U.S. stocks large and small, within the financial industry and outside of it; foreign stocks; oil and other commodities; real-estate investment trusts; formerly booming emerging markets like India and China. Even gold, although it has inched up lately, has lost 10% from its highs […]

 
 

Regulations, Risk and the Meltdown

There are obviously a large set of political questions around the 700+ billion dollars of distressed assets Uncle Sam plans to hold. If you care about the politics, you’re already following in more detail than I’m going to bother providing. I do think that we need to act to stem the crisis, and that we […]

 

TSA’s Brand

Passing through Portland’s PDX Airport, I was struck by this ad for SeaPort Airlines: Things are pretty bad for TSA when right after “faster travel,” a company lists “No TSA” as its second value proposition. (Bottom left corner.) It’s actually sort of impressive how much hate and resentment the TSA has built in the few […]

 

TSA Breaks Planes (and a link to infosec)

Aero News Network has a fascinating story, “ANN Special Report: TSA Memo Suggests That Agency ‘Encourages’ Damaging Behavior.” It covers how a TSA goon climbed up a plane using equipment marked “not a handhold,” damaging it and putting the flying public at risk. It continues: While this may be terrifying on a number of levels, […]

 

The Omnivore's Hundred

I find it interesting that security people and foodies are strongly correlated. Or at least are strongly correlated among the ones I know. Very Good Taste has a list of things called The Omnivore’s Hundred, a list of things worth trying, modulo this and that. You mark things you have tried, and mark things you […]

 

Black Hat (Live) Blog: Keynote

Ian Angell from the London School of Economics gave a great keynote on complexity in systems and how the desire to categorize, enumerate, and add technology can break things in interesting ways. An example of his: there’s an increasing desire among politicians and law enforcement to create huge DNA databases for forensic purposes, to aid […]

 

London’s New Transit Card

Transport for London is trying to get as many people as possible to use Oyster Cards. They are cheaper — and theoretically easier to use — than traditional tube / bus tickets. However, using one means that TfL has a record of your journeys on the transport system, which is something that not everybody is […]

 

Freakonomics and Data

There’s a really interesting article in the New Republic, “Freaks and Geeks:” In 2000, a Harvard professor named Caroline Hoxby discovered that streams had often formed boundaries to nineteenth-century school districts, so that cities with more streams historically had more school districts, even if some districts had later merged. The discovery allowed Hoxby to show […]

 

On Gaming Security

Adam comments on Dave Maynor commenting on Blizzard selling authentication tokens. Since I have the ability to comment here, I shall. This isn’t the case of a game having better security than most banks (as Maynor says). This is a game company leaping ahead of some banks, because they realize they have bank-like security issues. […]

 

I’d bet on security prediction markets

In his own blog, Michael Cloppert writes: Adam, and readers from Emergent Chaos, provided some good feedback on this idea. Even though the general response is that this wouldn’t be a supportable approach, I appreciate the input! This helps me focus my research intentions on the most promising theories and technologies. I’m glad my readers […]

 

What’s up with the "New and Used" Pricing on Amazon?

So having a book out, you start to notice all sorts of stuff about how Amazon works. (I’ve confirmed this with other first time authors.) One of the things that I just can’t figure out is the pricing people have for The New School. There’s a new copy for 46.43. A mere 54% premium over […]

 

Security Prediction Markets: theory & practice

There are a lot of great comments on the “Security Prediction Markets” post. There’s a tremendous amount of theorizing going on here, and no one has any data. Why don’t we experiment and get some? What would it take to create a market in breach notification prediction? Dan Guido said in a comment, “In security, […]

 

Security Prediction Markets?

In our first open thread, Michael Cloppert asked: Considering the contributors to this blog often discuss security in terms of economics, I’m curious what you (and any readers educated on the topic) think about the utility of using prediction markets to forecast compromises. So I’m generally a big fan of markets. I think markets are, […]

 

The Costs of Security and Algorithms

I was struck by this quote in the Economist special report on international banking: There were navigational aids to help investors but they often gave false comfort. FICO scores, the most widely used credit score in America, were designed to assess the creditworthiness of individual borrowers, not the quality of pools of mortgages. “’Know your […]

 

Spending to Protect Assets

There’s a story in the New York Times about a bike rental program in Washington DC. It’s targeted at residents, not tourists, and has a subscription-based model. Improved technology allows programs to better protect bicycles. In Washington, SmartBike subscribers who keep bicycles longer than the three-hour maximum will receive demerits and could eventually lose renting […]

 

Why Aren’t there More Paul Grahams?

Paul Graham has an interesting essay “Why There Aren’t More Googles.” In it, he talks about how VC are shying away from doing lots of little deals, and how the bold ideas are the ones that are hardest to fund: And yet it’s the bold ideas that generate the biggest returns. Any really good new […]

 

Center for Innovative Financial Technology Launches at Berkeley

Congratulations to Berkeley on setting up a “Center for Innovative Financial Technology“, but I wonder why their mission is so conservative? The mission of the Center is to conduct and facilitate innovative research and teaching on how new technologies impact global electronic markets, investment strategies, and the stability of the financial system. The information people […]

 

The FDIC's Cyber Fraud Report

The FDIC’s Division of Supervision and Consumer Protection didn’t release a report titled “Cyber Fraud and Financial Crime” on November 9, 2007. That release was left to Brian Krebs, a reporter with the Washington Post, in early March, who blogged about it in “Banks: Losses From Computer Intrusions Up in 2007” and “The FDIC Computer […]

 

The Principal-Agent Problem in Security

There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times, “At Bear Stearns, Meet the New Boss.” What makes it fascinating is the human emotion displayed: “In this room are people who have built this firm and lost a lot, our fortunes,” one Bear executive said to Mr. Dimon with anger in his voice. “What will […]

 

Bear Stearns

Dan Geer is fond of saying that financial risk management works because everyone knows who owns what risks. Reports are that JPMorgan just bought Bear Stearns for $236MM, a 93% discount to Friday’s closing price, with $30BB of US taxpayer money thrown in (as guarantees) for good measure. Bloomberg also reports that the Bear Stearns […]

 

Quantum Progress

What is it about the word “quantum” that sucks the brains out of otherwise reasonable people? There has to be some sort of Heisenberg-Schödinger Credulity Principle that makes all the ideons in their brains go spin-up at the same time, and I’m quite sure that the Many Worlds Interpretation of it has the most merit. […]

 

Credit Ratings for Governments?

Last week, I talked about consumer credit in “The real problem in ID theft.” Yesterday, the New York Times had a story, “States and Cities Start Rebelling on Bond Ratings:” A complex system of credit ratings and insurance policies that Wall Street uses to set prices for municipal bonds makes borrowing needlessly expensive for many […]

 

A++++ Fast and Professional!! Would Read Again!

In “Crowd control at eBay,” Nick Carr writes: EBay has been struggling for some time with growing discontent among its members, and it has rolled out a series of new controls and regulations to try to stem the erosion of trust in its market. At the end of last month, it announced sweeping changes to […]

 

Parking Meters are Reverse Slot Machines

Raymond Chen has an amusing blog post, “When computer programmers dabble in economics: Paying parking tickets.” This is further dabbling in economics, and I hope you find it amusing. I believe that parking meters–the old fashioned kind where you put coins in and hope to not get a ticket–are precisely the opposite of slot machines. […]

 

Working on the Traveling Band

If you travel a lot, you’re used to dealing with many network difficulties. For a while now, I’ve been traveling with an Airport Express, which has made life a lot easier. I set it up to use DHCP, plug it into the hotel Ethernet, and go. At the very least, it means I can work […]

 

Thoughts on "Internet Miscreants"

I’ve been thinking about Franklin, Perrig, Paxson, and Savage’s “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Internet Miscreants” for about three weeks now. This is a very good paper. For the infosec empiricist, the dataset itself is noteworthy. It consists of 13 million public IRC messages (that is, in-channel stuff, not […]

 

The costs of liability

It’s become common for people thinking about security economics to call for liability around security failures. The idea is that software creators who who ship insecure products could be held liable, because they’re well positioned to address the problems. I don’t think this is a trouble-free idea. There are lots of complexities. As one example, […]

 

Links of the day

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/economics/ http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~rnau/choice/whoswho.htm (Also useful as a reading list for a possible upcoming cage match between Hutton and Bejtlich ;^))

 

Security Advantage? I Don’t Buy It.

As quoted in Ken Belva’s blog, Larry Gordon writes: However, the above is not the end of the information security story from an economics perspective. If an organization can distinguish itself as having much better information security than its competitors, then that organization may well derive a “competitive advantage” (at least in short-run, until competing […]

 

NYT Reporter Has Never Heard of Descartes

Or perhaps more correctly, did not internalize Descartes when he heard of him. In “Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch,” John Tierney writes: Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent […]

 

"An Empirical Approach to Understanding Privacy Valuation"

Luc Wathieu and Allan Friedman have an article in Harvard Business School’s ‘working knowledge,’ titled “An Empirical Approach to Understanding Privacy Valuation.” In it, they present the results of a survey of 647 people with regard to a number of privacy hypotheses. Their results include: Contrary to some research, the chief privacy concern appears based […]

 

The War on Cash?

There’s a war on cash? Who knew? Dave Birch uses the phrase in “More from the war on cash” without a whole lot of surprise. Here he’s quoting a McKinsey study. (Unsurprisingly, you need to login to read it.) I liked this gem: Cash needs to be priced appropriately. The fact is that, today, the […]

 

A Market To Be Tapped

I’ve often talked about how people will pay for privacy when they understand the threat. In that light, the New York Times article “Phone Taps in Italy Spur Rush Toward Encryption” is fascinating: Drumming up business would seem to be an easy task for those who sell encrypted cellphones in Italy. All they have to […]

 

One Third of McAfee Survey Respondents Are Not Paying Attention

So reports Sharon Gaudin in Information Week. Actually, I think she picked up the story as McAfee spun it: “Companies Say Security Breach Could Destroy Their Business:” One-third of companies said in a recent poll that a major security breach could put their company out of business, according to a report from McAfee. The security […]

 

Save Chocolate

“Don’t Mess With Our Chocolate,” says Guittard. Summary: the FDA is considering changing the definitions of “chocolate” and “chocolate flavored” and “chocolaty” so that they don’t have to put as much cocoa solids in it to make it be “chocolate.” The FDA is soliciting comments, and the cutoff is April 25, so that’s not much […]

 

Users force Dell to resurrect XP

The Beeb reports. This means that if you want to start speculating in copies of XP, you probably have even longer to wait.

 

Micropayments Company Bought or is that Sold?

Micropayments company Peppercoin, started with technology by Rivest and Shamir has been bought by Chockstone, a company doing loyalty programs. Supposedly, they bought Peppercoin because it will “increase consumer ‘stickiness’ and brand affinity” and “increase average ticket price more than 12%.” Okay…. I thought that the reason for bearer-level micropayments was the opposite. Right here […]

 

Investment Opportunity of the Year

El Reg reports that Microsoft claims to be sticking to its timetable for shutting down XP. No fewer than three people told me yesterday, “This means I have to buy that Mac Book Pro this year. They can’t be alone. I have several co-workers running Vista running on laptops, and even without the overhead of […]

 

Cleaning Up

If you haven’t read Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map, you should. It’s perhaps the most important book in print today about the next decade of computer security. John Snow was a physician who was a pioneer in anaesthesia who turned his attention to cholera when the worst epidemic hit the London where he lived in […]

 

How to Allocate Resources

The other day, I wrote: I also don’t buy the bad management argument. Allocating resources to security is an art, not a science. I’ll offer up a simple experiment to illustrate that shortly. So here’s the experiment. It works better in person than in blog comments. Ask two experts to write down how they’d allocate […]

 

Holding a Lighted Brand up to Damage

Adam comments on some breach commentary, and quotes Nick Owen saying that breaches are a sign of incompetence. I can’t let this stand un-commented-upon. I believe that that is a dangerous comment, and one that needs to be squashed early. It’s like saying that a bug tracking system with lots of bugs in it is […]

 

"Free the Grapes" Externalizes Risk

Or so “Shipcompliant” would have us believe, with a blog post entitled “Free the Grapes! Updates Wine Industry Code for Direct Shipping Practices.” The new addition to the Code is step 4, which specifies that wineries should verify the age of the purchaser of the wine at the time of transaction for all off-site transactions […]

 

Must-Read Article: The Ecstasy of Influence

This is in Harpers, “The Ecstasy of Influence.” It is an interesting meditation on the nature of art itself and how art is composed of other art. However, not only must you read this, you must read it all the way through to understand it and why it is important.

 

Non-Tangible Security

eBay is stopping all sales of “virtual artifacts.” Maybe. This story comes from a Slashdot article in which Zonk talks to Hani Durzy, of eBay about it. They are handling this by merely enforcing an existing policy which says: “The seller must be the owner of the underlying intellectual property, or authorized to distribute it […]

 

It’s a Flawless Plan for Making Money

First, you take a business away from legitimate enterprises, claiming only the state can run it without it sinking into a wretched hive of scum and villany. Then, you ban competition. Then, you decide that you’re better off selling the monopoly rights to the highest bidder. It’s what Illinois is doing with their state lottery. […]

 

When a 0% Success Rate is Worthwhile

There’s an article in Zaman.com, about “Turkish Hacker Depletes 10,000 Bank Accounts ” A criminal enterprise comprised of 10 individuals who drained the accounts of 10,580 customers by sending virus-infected e-mails was busted in Istanbul. … The suspects reportedly sent virus-infected emails to 3,450,000 addresses, and subsequently drained 10,850 bank accounts. That’s a hit rate […]

 

New Year's Resolution Dept. — Protecting Against Identity Theft

It’s the MLK Day holiday weekend. That means that one’s headache has subsided to the point that one can no longer hear one’s nose hair growing, and the cat is padding rather than stomping. It also means that it’s time for New Year’s Resolutions! If yours is to get better control over your information privacy, […]

 

The Price of Nothing and the Value of Everything

In the Christmas double issue of The Economist, there is an interesting article about Google’s new domain-level email services and their applicability to business. I’m traveling, so I listened to the podcast version. I’m not going to criticize Google today. I think Gmail is a good service. I have several Gmail accounts. I am personally […]

 

Chip, Pin and Tetris

Saar Drimer and Steven Murdoch will be getting lumps of coal from the banking industry, and amused laughter from the rest of us: It is important to remember, however, that even perfect tamper resistance only ensures that the terminal will no longer be able to communicate with the bank once opened. It does not prevent […]

 

Fines, Settlements in Privacy Invasions

Topping the list, Vodaphone has been fined $100M (€76M) for failing to protect 106 mobile accounts. “Greek Scandal Sees Vodaphone fined” at the BBC, via Flying Penguin. On this side of the Atlantic, Choicepoint, Experian and Reed-Elsevier are looking to pay $25 million to settle claims that they invaded the privacy of 200 million drivers […]

 

Infosec Incentives for People

So there’s been discussion here recently of how to motivate security professionals to do better on security. I think it’s also worthwhile to look at normal people. And conviniently, Bruce Schneier does so in his Wired column this month, “MySpace Passwords Aren’t So Dumb.” He looks at how MySpace users do in their passwords versus […]

 

Cost-Benefits, Incentives, and Knowing What to Do

Adam quoted some interesting thinking about infosec incentives. However, I’m not sure it’s that simple. Gordon and Loeb say that you shouldn’t spend more than 37% of an expected loss. However, at last summer’s WEIS (Workshop on the Economics of Information Security), Jan Willemson published a paper, “On the Gordon & Loeb Model for Information […]

 

Wikid cool thinking on Infosec incentives

First, assume that you believe, as discussed in Gordon & Loeb’s book Managing Cybersecurity Resources: A Cost-Benefit Analysis and discussed here that an organization should spend no more than 37% of their expected loss on information security. Second, assume that you agree with the Ponemon Institute on the cost of business data breaches: $182 per […]

 

Privacy For Hedge Funds

In “Citadel, Sensitive Data, and Plusfunds’ Bankruptcy” Paul Kedrosky looks at the impact of youthful chattiness on an industry: Apparently hedge fund Citadel is trying to purchase data from bankrupt Plusfunds that would detail trading strategies at some of its major competitors. The latter company had run a hedge fund index underlying which were trading […]

 

Gift Giving Advice: Cash Trumps Cards

At MSNBC, Bob Sullivan writes about Gift Cards: Why Cash is Still Better: I’ll show you how a $50 bank card will cost you $60 and could easily be worth only $40 to the recipient. We know, it’s the practical tips that keep you coming back day after day. Image by rgluckin.

 

Live Poultry!

If you’ve ever lived in Cambridge, Mass, you’ve probably seen the sign. I recognized it instantly, seven years after I left Boston. It’s on Cambridge St, in East Cambridge. Boston’s Weekly Dig dug in: It’s one of the more puzzling quirks of the local cultural consciousness that Gould’s shop is almost universally known, yet few […]

 

Fanning the flames, security metrics style

Amidst the to and fro over insider v. outsider threats, whether security metrics can be “gamed”, and so on, and in recognition of the best buddies that security geeks and economists have now become, I offer the following.  The saying often quoted from Lord Kelvin (though the substance, I believe, ismuch older) that “where you […]

 

Halvar on Vulnerability Economics

Back in July, I wrote: If fewer outbreaks are evidence that things are getting worse, are more outbreaks evidence things are getting better? Now, I was actually tweaking F-Secure a little, in a post titled “It’s Getting Worse All The Time?” I didn’t expect Halvar Flake would demonstrate that the answer is yes. Attacks getting […]

 

The Kristian Von Hornsleth of the Blogosphere?

Apparently, artist Kristian Von Hornsleth has been paying Ugandans to rename themselves Hornsleth, as a way of drawing attention to aid failures. His exhibit is sub-titled “We want to help you, but we want to own you.” I think it’s brilliant. Regular readers know that we talk a lot about identity, id cards, and economics. […]

 

The Value of Location Privacy

There is a Workshop on Privacy in The Electronic Society taking place at the beginning of November. We (George Danezis, Marek Kumpost, Vashek Matyas, and [Dan Cvrcek]) will present there results of A Study on the value of Location Privacy we have conducted a half year back. We questioned a sample of over 1200 people […]

 

A Thousand Tiny Shackles on Innovation

In many cities, real estate agents have tried to restrict access to M.L.S. information or to limit its use on the database. Some have asked state legislatures to pass laws forcing brokers to offer certain levels of service, a move that Mr. Kelman [CEO of Redfin, an online brokerage] sees as intended to squeeze out […]

 

Hamming it Up

(or “The New York Times Gets Self-Referentially Ironic“) … he recognizes that plenty of people must think that rounding up friends and family members to go in on a thousand-dollar ham that he envisions hanging in his living room is crazy. But food lovers like him understand, he says. And in the end, the elaborate […]

 

DHS Has Nothing Better To Do, Apparently

A federal Department of Homeland Security agent passed along information about student protests against military recruiters at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz, landing the demonstrations on a database tracking foreign terrorism, according to government documents released Tuesday. From San Francisco Chronicle, “Terror database tracks UC protests U.S. agent reported on ’05 rallies against military […]

 

Return on (Other People’s) Investment

‘The Australian’ has a great story on “Focus key to crack money-laundering.” Its focused on the testimony of a British expert on “money laundering” and includes: Last year, British banks, accountants and lawyers made some 200,000 reports to the authorities. But in the three years since Britain’s law was implemented, there had been only one […]

 

What Me Data Share?

I completely have to support Chris in his analysis of the latest CSI/FBI Survey. He sums it up nicely with: “there is no reason to give this survey any credence.” The survey, does an excellent job of highlighting a general problem within the security industry, the sharing of data. If we’re to make real progress […]

 

Innovation, Emerging From Chaos

Following up on Friday’s internet innovation post, I’d like to clarify a few things: First, net neutrality is about regulating a set of regulated monopolies, whose services and profits are protected by the state against new entrants. The regulatory apparatus has fairly clearly been captured by the regulated. The discussion about larger packets misses the […]

 

"Internet isolationism is bad for business"

Dan Kaminsky has a good essay on internet isolationism, which is his name for the opposite of net neutrality. It starts: Oh, sure, there’s UPS and DHL and the US Postal Service. But imagine if they were all proposing that, because people make money based on the contents of packages other people shipped, that they […]

 

Risk Appetite or Volatility Appetite?

Over at “Not Bad For A Cubicle,” Thurston (who is always worth reading) manages to tickle a pet-peeve of mine in “A super-size risk appetite?” No rational business has a risk appetite. They accept risk. They may even buy risk in fairly explicit ways (some financial derivatives) if they think that those risks are mis-priced […]

 

How Damaging is a Breach?

Pete Lindstrom is looking at an important set of questions: How likely is it that a given breach will result in harm to a person? What’s the baseline risk? Data is nonexistent on these questions, which means we get to throw around our pet theories. For example, we know of 800 ID thefts from the […]

 

The Persistence of SSNs, and The Persistence of Thieves

Pete Lindstrom, who knows a good phrase when he reads one, puts forward the claim that the theft of veterans SSNs doesn’t put them at increased risk of fraud. His basic argument is that there’s a lot of people out there with access to lots of SSNs, and monetizing an SSN takes effort. He’s right. […]

 

Vulnerability Markets: Under a Cloud

After some great conversation with Ryan Russell in the comments to “Economics of Vulnerabilities: Markets,” I saw Pascal Meunier’s “Reporting Vulnerabilities is for the Brave:” So, as a stubborn idealist I clashed with the detective by refusing to identify the student who had originally found the problem. I knew the student enough to vouch for […]

 

Economics of Vulnerabilities: Markets?

When I drew that picture for Don Marti, he suggested a market in software vulnerabilities. People who had invested in knowledge about a program could then buy or sell in that market. I think that the legal threats and uncertainties are probably sufficiently market-distorting to make such a market hard to operate and hard to […]

 

The French Chef Model Of Intellectual Property

For the week since Brad Feld published it, I’ve been trying to find something to enhance “Norms-based IP and French Chefs:” Norms-based IP systems are an alternative (or a complement) to legal based IP systems. The Case of French Chefs is a superb example of how this works. If you care a lot about IP […]

 

The Internet Channel, at Risk

Lack of trust in online banking among U.S. consumers is a serious constraint because of doubts about banks’ security measures, according to eMarketer’s new report, “Online Banking: Remote Channels, Remote Relationships?” The result is a slowing rate of adoption, with online banking households increasing by only 3.1% in the last quarter of 2005 — the […]

 

Economics of Vulnerabilities

Lately, I’ve been playing with an idea. Work by both Microsoft and certain open source projects has made finding and exploiting vulnerabilities in their code substantially harder. So, the effort needed to find a vulnerability has gone up. The effort needed to build a working exploit has gone up. Thus, the willingness of a vulnerability […]

 

Boarding Passes, Privacy, and Threat Models

There’s a great article in the Guardian, “Q. What could a boarding pass tell an identity fraudster about you? A. Way too much:” This is the story of a piece of paper no bigger than a credit card, thrown away in a dustbin on the Heathrow Express to Paddington station. It was nestling among chewing […]

 

High Assurance Certificates and the Fake NEC

So I’ve seen the story in a bunch of places, but something about Bruce Schneier’s posting on “Counterfeiting an Entire Company” made me think about certificates, and the green URL bar. In the name of NEC, the pirates copied NEC products, and went as far as developing their own range of consumer electronic products – […]

 

Homo Economicus?

Researchers have identified brain cells involved in economic choice behavior: The scientists, who reported the findings in the journal Nature, located the neurons in an area of the brain known as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) while studying macaque monkeys which had to choose between different flavours and quantities of juices. They correlated the animals’ choices […]

 

Consumer-Grade RFID Analysis

In “Why Some People Put These Credit Cards In the Microwave,” the Wall St. Journal incidentally captures everything you need to know: Makers of products using RFID say privacy and security safeguards are being built into the chips to prevent abuses. MasterCard International says multiple layers of security are available to prevent MasterCard data from […]

 

Market Efficiency from an Evolutionary Perspective

I missed this article when it first came out, but Andrew W. Lo’s “Market Efficiency from an Evolutionary Perspective” is fascinating and readable. The abstract: One of the most influential ideas in the past 30 years of the Journal of Portfolio Management is the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, the idea that market prices incorporate all information […]

 

How New Ideas Emerge From Chaos

There’s an interesting contrast between “The Problem With Brainstorming” at Wired, and “Here’s an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas” at the New York Times. The Problem with Brainstorming starts out with some history of brainstorming, and then moves to its soft underbelly: The tendency of groupthink to emerge from groups: Thinking in teams, and pitching […]

 

The Emergent Field of War and Economics?

There’s a fascinating new paper available from West Point’s Combatting Terrorism Center, on “Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting al-Qa’ida’s Organizational Vulnerabilities.” What I found most fascinating about the paper was not the (apparently) new approach of reading what the terrorists are saying to gain insight into their weaknesses, but its adoption of the language of economics […]

 

My Blogging Will Be Light

I’m on the road this week, here and there, with here being, well, illustrated and there being Seattle, at Microsoft’s Blue Hat event. Some things that I’m hoping to find some time to write about include: “Person to Person Finance” at the Economist (paywall) is fascinating, and I think there’s a fascinating question of if […]

 

Economics of Detecting Fake ID

During 2005, the Vail Police Department alphabetized hundreds of drivers licenses, passports and other shoddy identification that will be incinerated at year’s end. Once the IDs come through the department’s doors, they’re gone for good, Mulson said. A liquor license allows bars to confiscate any ID that is fake or appears to be fake. Glendining […]

 

Not Because It Is Easy, But Because We Can

Twelve barrels of the world’s most alcoholic whisky, or enough to wipe out a medium-size army, will be produced when the Bruichladdich distillery revives the ancient tradition of quadruple-distilling today. With an alcohol content of 92 per cent, the drink may not be the most delicate single malt ever produced but it is by far […]

 

Ephemeral port security

By now, most have heard about Dubai Ports World, a foreign entity, assuming control of operations at various U.S. ports. The arguments around this transaction are predictable and uninteresting. One thing that is clear is that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) is legally mandated to consider such deals. In fact, […]

 

Dan Kaminsky on Sony and Anti-Virus

Read “Learning from Sony: An External Perspective” on Dan’s blog: The incident represents much more than a black eye on the AV industry, which not only failed to manage Sony’s rootkit, but failed intentionally. The AV industry is faced with a choice. It has long been accused of being an unproductive use of system resources […]

 

An unethical strategy?

Voting is a means of aggregating individual preferences in order to obtain a collective choice from a set of potential outcomes. Arrow notwithstanding, various voting schemes are often used for very important decisions. Voting is also used to select the winner of the Guy Toph Award, in Hillsborough County, Florida. In this case, the voters […]

 

Breach disclosure insurance

A common argument used against state-level breach notification laws, and in favor of federal legislation overriding state laws, is that existence of these numerous state laws with their differing requirements and conditions raises the cost of compliance unacceptably. Just to be prepared to comply with potentially fifty distinct notification regimes, a firm would need to […]

 

Investing in Identity Theft: The Job Fair

For Aisha Shahid and dozens of others who went to an advertised job fair in Chattanooga and got offers of nightclub work in Atlanta, Memphis and Miami, the “dream jobs” turned out to be an identity theft scam. A man who identified himself as record company and music group president William Devon took applications and […]

 

More on "A Ping" Privacy Invasion

Before I’d had much in the way of coffee, I thought that the “Firefox Ping URLs” might offer a way to scan the web for sites to avoid. It would be simple. For each site mentioned in a ping URL, add it to a blacklist. The trouble with this is that the same set of […]

 

Firefox Ping URLs

It’s all over the internet that Mozilla has added a “ping” attribute to URLs: I’ve been meaning to blog about a new web platform feature that we’ve added to trunk builds of Firefox. It is now possible to define a ping attribute on anchor and area tags. When a user follows a link via one […]

 

The Remittor and the Money Launderer

Ethan Zuckerman has a great post about the practicalities of international workers sending money ‘home,’ “Remittance – the big business of sending money home:” It’s difficult to overstate the importance of remittance income to most African nations and many developing nations. Nworah cites a figure of $300 billion dollars sent from diasporas to developing nations […]

 

More Victims of Money Laundering Regulations

In a comment on “Atlantis Resort (Bahamas) 50,000, Hacker,” Ian Grigg explains that the reason Bahamas Casinos collected 55,000 SSNs is that the various and sundry “anti-money laundering” regulations force them to, or be labeled “naughty.” Err, ‘non-compliant.’ How’s that for NewSpeak? There’s a pretty large steamroller behind such rules and regulations, and the push […]

 

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 […]

 

Illicit

Illicit, by Mosés Naím is a tragic book. It is considered, insightful, wide-ranging, deep, and so close to amazing. Had Naím gone just a little further, it could have been brilliant, and the tragedy is that he didn’t. Perhaps I should back up, and explain. Naím is the editor of Foreign Policy. He has written […]

 

Even More on the $100 Laptop

I’ve discussed the $100 laptop in “Freedom To Tinker, Freedom to Learn,” and “More on ‘Freedom To Tinker, Freedom to Learn’.” In “Tech Delusions and The Trouble with Christmas,” Kerry Howley discusses many reasons why this is a bad idea: For now, OLPC plans to sell only to governments of poor countries, not individuals here […]

 

Web Certificate Economics

In a comment on “Build Irony In,” “Frank Hecker writes:” First, note that the “invalid certificate” message when connecting to buildsecurityin.uscert.gov using Safari is *not* because the certificate is from an unknown CA (or no CA at all); it’s because the certificate is issued to the server/domain buildsecurityin.us-cert.gov (note the dash) and thus doesn’t match […]

 

0Day on Ebay

“Brand new Microsoft Excel Vulnerability:” The lot: One 0-day Microsoft Excel Vulnerability Up for sale is one (1) brand new vulnerability in the Microsoft Excel application. The vulnerability was discovered on December 6th 2005, all the details were submitted to Microsoft, and the reply was received indicating that they may start working on it. It […]

 

Nick Szabo Blogging

Nick is a premier thinker about history, law and economics, and the lessons they have for security. Take this brief sample from “Origins of the joint-stock corporation:” The modern joint-stock corporation has many sources in medieval Europe. First among these was corporate law itself. Although the era is commonly referred to as “feudalism,” for the […]

 

NJ's Strong Privacy Law

Apparently, I woke up on the right side of the bed, and am just handing out kudos left and right today. Consumers will gain strong new protections when New Jersey’s Identity Theft Prevention Act takes effect Jan. 1, but businesses and institutions are facing headaches and added expenses. Social Security numbers will be out as […]

 

Meet The New Browser Security, Same as the Old Browser Security?

There’s a thread developing in several blogs about web browser security, and I think it is dangerously mis-framed, and may involve lots of effort going down some wrong paths. At the IE Blog, Franco writes about “Better Website Identification and Extended Validation Certificates in IE7 and Other Browsers.” It’s a long, well-thought out post, which […]

 

Kill Bill's Browser (and Comments)

Some folks have put up a site, “Kill Bill’s Browser,” based on Google’s offer to pay up to $1 for each Firefox/Google Toolbar install. It offers up both good and entertaining reasons to switch: 7. It will make Bill Gates soooooooooo mad. Seriously– super, super mad. And even more than Bill, let’s think about Steve […]

 

This is convergence

A gamer who spent £13,700 on an island that only exists in a computer game has recouped his investment, according to the game developers. The 23-year-old gamer known as Deathifier made the money back in under a year. The virtual Treasure Island he bought existed within the online role-playing game Project Entropia. He made money […]

 

The Cost of Following The Money

[Update: There’s a fairly long clarification in the middle of the post, which expands on a sentence that was too brief to be understandable.] One of the fond dreams of the counter-terror community is to be able to take Deep Throat’s advice, and follow the money. In “New Anti-Money Laundering Regulations and Compliance Solutions Announced,” […]

 

White Sox futures market

For the last couple of weeks, peddlers have set up shop just outside Chicago’s Union Station to sell White Sox paraphernalia. Once the Sox were in the Series, I noticed an interesting phenomenon. Hats were selling for $10.00 after game two of the series. After game three, they were down to $5.00. After game 4 […]

 

Business lobbies engage in rent-seeking. Masses not moved. Film at 11.

Various data protection bills to be consolidated? [P]ressure to act isn’t coming from the public clamoring for protection of their private information, it is coming from the business community that fears 50 different state laws. In many ways this improves the chances for a new federal law, because while the onslaught of data breach stories […]

 

Don't Have a Cow!

Or, perhaps, in this instance, having a cow would be a perfectly fine response, as it is revealed that the average European cow gets a subsidy of $2.62 a day. About 3,000,000,000 people live on less than that. Doubtless, if cows could call their representatives and vote, the subsidy would be higher. (Research by Oxfam, […]

 

Following up "Liability for Bugs"

Chris just wrote a long article on “Liability for bugs is part of the solution.” It starts “Recently, Howard Schmidt suggested that coders be held personally liable for damage caused by bugs in code they write.” Chris talks about market failures, but I’d like to take a different direction and talk about organizational failures. Security […]

 

Liability for bugs is part of the solution

Recently, Howard Schmidt suggested that coders be held personally liable for damage caused by bugs in code they write. The boldness of this suggestion is exceeded only by its foolhardiness, but its motivation touches an important truth — alot of code stinks, and people are damaged by it. The reason good programs (which means those […]

 

Businesses For Privacy

Some prominent business organizations are complaining to Congress that the Patriot Act makes it too easy for the government to get confidential business records. These groups endorsed proposed amendments that would require investigators to say how the information they seek is linked to individual suspected terrorists or spies. The changes also would allow businesses to […]

 

Thomas Schelling, Nobel Laureate

Congratulations to Thomas Schelling, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics (with Robert Aumann). Schelling, amongst many accomplishments which Tyler Cowan discusses here, put forth the notion that there are questions with answers which are correct because those are the answers everyone would choose. (The canonical example is where do you meet in New […]

 

FedEx and Resiliency

There’s some fascinating tidbits about how Federal Express plans for the unforseen in a New York Times story, “Have Recessions Absolutely, Positively Become Less Painful?” I wonder what (if anything) information security could take away from this sort of approach? It had been a busy day for Georgia businesses, and FedEx’s regular nightly flights from […]

 

Who Has Fingers That Short?

PaybyTouch has arrived, and that finger in their logo looks awfully short to me. Maybe subconsciously, they know the truth? See my “Fingerprint Privacy” or “A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words” for some actual analysis, rather than silly sniping. (via Silicon Beat, who has notes on their unusual financing techniques.)

 

Small Bits: Clearance, Security Legislation, Schneier Pointers, Get Me An Operator

Richard Bejtlich comments on a Federal Computer Week article, “Security clearance delays still a problem” in “Feds Hurry, Slow Down.” “ITAA officials said 27 member companies that responded to a survey are coping with the backlog by hiring cleared employees from one another, sometimes paying premiums of up to 25 percent.” I’m glad to see […]

 

What's Wrong With Fingerprints?

It’s not a question you’ll hear me ask often, but when PrestoVivace sends me a link to “DOD plans to recognize more than just fingerprints:” “We’re looking for new technologies, innovators and companies that recognize that the biometrics enterprise in the Defense Department and the U.S. government in five years is going to be very […]

 

Released!

Captchas are those annoying, spamatuer “type this so we can stop spam” things that you see on some blogs. PWNtcha stands for “Pretend We’re Not a Turing Computer but a Human Antagonist”, as well as PWN capTCHAs. This project’s goal is to demonstrate the inefficiency of many captcha implementations. For an overview on why visual […]

 

Avoid Parkhill's Waterfront Grill in Allenhurst, NJ

Two diners on a date at a fancy Jersey Shore restaurant were furious when they saw the check — which listed their table as that of the “Jew Couple.” … Stein said he took the offensive bill and showed it to Jewish friends seated nearby who said they could not believe it. When the group […]

 

Don't Use Email Like a Stupid Person

[Update: A less in-your-face version is Preserving the Internet Channel Against Phishers.] In his talk at Defcon, David Cowan talked about how he doesn’t bank online anymore. Banks are now facing the imminent destruction of their highest bandwidth, lowest cost way to interact with customers. Actually, its worse than that. Bankers are killing online banking, […]

 

Costco Employees and "Market Analysts"

The job of a shareholder-owned company is to make money for shareholders, not to coddle its employees. But sometimes, being good to your employees can be good for the shareholders. In “Living the Dog’s Life at Costco,” Kevin Carson takes to task Wall St analysts who are trying to run Costco’s business for them: “He […]

 

Long Bits of Stuck in McCarran International Airport

Kudos to McCarran International Airport (Las Vegas) for having free wifi. And congrats to my fellow Defcon attendees for stealing the cookie that authenticates me to this blog off that wireless net. Tech Policy points to Bill West at Counterterror blog, in “Liberty & Security vs. Terror – an American Perspective.” Its worth reading in […]

 

Who Has Time For This, Indeed?

David Cowan has a nice post on technologies he won’t fund, and why. It’s a great post. More investors should be up front about what they’re not interested in. Bessemer has funded 16 security startups–more than any other traditional VC firm–but there are some areas of security that even we have never funded, despite the […]

 

Fingerprints at Disney: The Desensitization Imperative

The Walt Disney Corporation has started fingerprinting all visitors to their parks. They claim, incorrectly, that the fingerprint scans can’t be turned into pictures of fingerprints. True Americans understand that fingerprinting is for criminals. A presumption of guilt — of criminality — underlies a company taking your fingerprints. In “Welcome to Disney World, please let […]

 

Small Bits: Silver Linings, Presidential Game Theory, Disclosure, War

Privacy Law lists the 16 states that now have notification laws. Thanks, Choicepoint! At Balkin, ‘JB’ has a long discussion of why 2nd term Presidents all seem to be scandal ridden…since the 22nd Amendment took away what game theorists call ‘the long uncertain shadow of the future.’ I nearly said something about ‘experimental confirmation’ here, […]

 

Small Segments Stolen From Some People Surnamed "S"

The first two are from Scrivener, because he’s going on vacation, they’re good, and I’m shameless. “Iraq Swede vows to catch kidnappers, reports “The Local:” A Swede held hostage in Iraq for 67 days and released a month ago has vowed to take revenge on his captors and has hired bounty hunters to capture them, […]

 

The Next PR Speciality?

Over at Presto Vivace, Alice suggests that “Security breaches and violations of privacy are going to be the next speciality in crisis communications.” I suspect that she’s right, and hope she’s wrong. In cases like Cardsystems or Choicepoint, where the organization is violating policy, contract, or law with its data, the impact on the company […]

 

Inviting Cockroaches to the Feast?

Over at “The Security Samurai,” Eric Marvets posts on “How Do I Get My Company To Take Security Seriously? Will Liability Work?” I’ve posted my thoughts on liability (“ Avoiding Liability: An Alternative Route to More Secure Product) and hope to develop those further sometime. One thing Eric says jumped out at me: Today I […]

 

Small Bits: Soviet Realism at DHS and in China, Going Public, Lameness, and Curves

Artiloop reports on a security poster on the Marc commuter trains. Its clearly the work of a thoughtcriminal, encouraging ironic responses. I want to heroically help plan the tractor factory. I’ve been meaning to discuss the Chinese blog crackdown, but instead I’ll just juxtapose it with Soviet Realism. The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled […]

 

Teland and Wattal on Insecurity and Stock Price

At the Workshop on Information Security Economics, Rahul Telang and Sunil Wattal presented “Impact of Software Vulnerability Announcements on the Market Value of Software Vendors – an Empirical Investigation.” I’m pretty busy, so I’ll point to comments by Ed Moyle, and hefty analysis by Tom Ptacek. [Private to DM: If I say its a workship, […]

 

MoneyBall

Over at “Statistical Modelling,” Sam discusses “Sabermetricians vs. Gut-metricians:” There’s a little debate going on in baseball right now about whether decisions should be made using statistics (a sabermetrician is a person who studies baseball statistics) or instincts. Two books are widely considered illustrative of the two sides of the debate. Moneyball, by Michael Lewis, […]

 

Housing Bubble?

Kip Esquire discusses “Housing Bubble: The Non-Lessons of the Past:” Today, we get some unhelpful noise from TCS Overlord James “Always Wrong” Glassman. (Remember “Dow 36,000”? The only thing dumber than the book was his half-hearted non-apology for it.) Now he’s fanning the flames of “What, us worry?” for the housing market: Since 1950, according […]

 

Emergent Bits: Iranian Blogger, Economics, Security myths

Iranian blogger Mojtaba Saminejad has declared a hunger strike to protest his imprisonment. The Committee to Protect Bloggers has asked that we observe a media fast next Thursday, May 26th and not blog. There are also email addresses to write to to ask that Mojtaba be released. Ethan Zuckerman has some fascinating comments on the […]

 

Making Money Blogging

I was unfortunately late to the Making Money Blogging session at BlogNashville. It was run by Henry Copeland of Blogads. There was a lot of discussion on driving ads, targeting ads, complaining that RSS doesn’t allow you to demographic your audience. There was some great discussion of how Major League Baseball is drawing baseball bloggers […]

 

Drivers License Fraud

As the trust and reliance people place in drivers licenses, the greater the incentive to get fraudulently issued ones. FoxNews reports on “Workers Charged With Taking Payoffs for IDs ” (via JihadWatch.) “With a valid driver’s license, you establish an identity,” said Michael Garcia, assistant secretary of the Homeland Security Department. … The three Florida […]

 

Distributed Innovation

In the New York Times, Virginia Postrel writes about the work of Eric von Hippel, head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the Sloan School of Management at MIT, who has a new (academic) book, “Democratizing Innovation.” But a lot of significant innovations do not come from people trying to figure out what customers […]

 

"ÂŁ155,000 per instance of fraud"

Bruce Schneier writes: The UK government tried, and failed, to get a national ID. Now they’re adding biometrics to their passports. Financing for the Passport Office is planned to rise from £182 million a year to £415 million a year by 2008 to cope with the introduction of biometric information such as fingerprints. A Home […]

 

Housing Bubble?

Tyler Cowen asks, does DC have a housing bubble, and asks how can we justify the price rise: Housing can be lived in, most buyers have only one home, transaction costs are relatively high, and rarely are homes sold and resold in a matter of days. All those features militate against a housing bubble. Yet […]

 

Small Bits: Digitizing Art, Making Sense, Wages of Sin, Pookmail

Capturing the Unicorn is an article at the New Yorker about the hubris of technologists trying to capture art. (The technologists win, but the archivist in me asks: CDs?) 13 things that do not make sense is a New Scientist article about, well, 13 things that don’t make sense. Some foolish people might look at […]

 

4th Workshop on the Economics of Information Security

The Fourth Workshop on the Economics of Information Security will be held in Boston, June 2-3. The schedule is now online. I’ll be presenting a short essay on “Avoiding Liability: An Alternative Route to More Secure Products” at the rump session. I’d love feedback. Ian Grigg has talked about alternate review systems.

 

Making Steady Progress, Keep Paying Us

In this New York Times article on NASA’s “broken safety culture,” we find: In the months after the Columbia disaster in February 2003, the space agency started several initiatives to enhance safety, including the creation of an Engineering and Safety Center at its Langley Research Center in Virginia. It has worked with Behavioral Science Technology, […]

 

Disclosure Laws & Regulations

Declan McCullagh writes about new rules requiring banks to disclose breaches, as promulgated by an alphabet soup of federal regulators. A brief digression: The new guidelines seem to make sense, but it’s difficult to figure out whether they go too far or not far enough. Normally consumers can shop around and choose products based on […]

 

"A Unified Theory of VC Suckage"

Brad Feld pointed to an essay by Paul Graham, entitled “A Unified Theory of VC Suckage.” (VC is short for venture capitalist, the folks who invest in certain types of startup companies.) I used to take it for granted that VCs were like this. Complaining that VCs were jerks used to seem as naive to […]

 

Small Bits: Hell, TSA, Insurance, Mutual Funds, Telephone Privacy

Asteroid analyzes Sisyphean volunteers and the modern condition in a brilliant essay. It just goes to show, the Greeks really did invent everything. Robert Poole and Jim Harper debate the TSA in “Transportation Security Aggravation” at Reason. Tyler Hamilton looks at two schemes to cut your auto insurance premiums by monitoring your driving, and their […]

 

Bad advice on SSNs

Bad advice on use of social security numbers abounds, often in technical documentation. Credit goes to reader Jonathan Conway for digging many these out. There are a few very common errors which we can find, thank to Jonathan’s research: Social security numbers are un-changing. No, they are not. Victims of identity theft, domestic abuse, or […]

 

Small Bits: Simson, Maoists, and a ÂŁ219m Heist Attempt

Simson Garfinkel has won a Neal award for his writing for CSO. Congratulations! (His latest column is on Skype.) Whiskey Bar has a comparison between Maoists and American Conservatives in Scenes From the Cultural Revolution. Willie Sutton finds the Internet, according to this news.com story. Israeli police are investigating with British forces an attempted robbery […]

 
 

Lessig on Academic Publishing

Academic publishing is an interesting racket. An academic, probably paid by government grants, writes a paper. They submit this paper to various venues, in the hopes of getting it published. The people who review the paper are volunteers, paid in prestige. The paper is then put into a volume costing gobs of money, which goes […]

 

"Taxation Ventage"

Justin Mason has a great rant, titled “taxation ventage.” In the US, every worker is required to prepare and file their own taxes, in detail. Nowhere outside of India can do bureaucracy quite like the US, as far as I can tell — even the brits have embraced simplicity to a greater degree — so […]

 

What to do, What to do?

Over at Open Society Paradox, Dennis Bailey challenges me: Emergent Chaos documents some problems but ends with a personal slam against ChoicePoint’s CEO. [Ed Note: Technically, we call that the “middle,” not the end.] What would Emergent Chaos have us do? Should we follow the Fair Information Practices and allow 300 million citizens to be […]

 

Attackers, Disclosure and Expectations

In both military or information security situations, the position of the attacker is very powerful. An attacker can choose when, where, and how to attack. Attackers are not constrained by change management committees, operational risk, or a need to make economic tradeoffs within a budget. [1] Attackers don’t need to consider other work that needs […]

 

Small Bits: Risk Management by Law, Domain Names, and Cats

Not bad for a Cubicle has a good post on the credit card industry replacing their risk management efforts with bad law: Bad laws instead of good Risk Management. I like what he’s saying enough that I’ve added him to the blogroll. Daring Fireball links to this article on How to Snatch a Domain Name, […]

 

Small Bits: Art, Chopsticks, Security

Stefan Geens points to It Takes More Than Money to Buy a Hot Piece of Art. I Came to Japan Because of the Chopstick makes dinner plates fascinating. Thanks Rosa! Two shorts at AntiTerrorism & Security: The firm running airport security at SFO has been accused of cheating by a former manager. The lawsuit is […]

 

More on CVSS

Erik Rescorla takes note of my CVSS post, and comments that he’s not sure he likes some technical aspects of the system (emphasis added): CVSS does have a formula which gives you a complete ordering but the paper doesn’t contain any real explanation for where that formula comes from. The weighting factors are pretty obviously […]

 

Economics of Fake IDs

Some states will begin using new watermark technology akin to that used on currency for drivers’ licenses next year… While the backers of these efforts say they herald the demise of the fake ID, officers on the beat have doubts. “They find a loophole and exploit it,” said Sergeant Planeta of the New York document […]

 

Small Bits of Chaos: Advertising and The Gulag Evolution

Scrivner points out that the Golden Palace is winning all bids to advertise on people’s bodies, and asks “What is all this telling us? Ummm, Scrivner, it’s telling us…Visit Golden Palace! These foxes are being bred for tameness by scientists in Siberia. (I hope that URL is resilient?) I guess that’s what happens when you’re […]

 

Small Bits: Teen Drinking, TSA Databasing, hope, and trust.

This New York Times story discusses the “need” to submit high school students to Breathalyzer tests to ensure they’re not drinking. It’s a good thing we have all those mandatory ID checks. It seems they’re highly effective at stopping teen drinking, so there’s no need for such tests. The TSA is maintaining a secret database […]

 

Gordon on Security

There’s a good interview with Larry Gordon at SecurityPipeline. It came out in April of last year, but I’d missed it. Gordon has hosted the Security and Economics workshop. “I go to security conferences where we all sit around puzzling about what kind of metrics to use for measuring the results of security programs,” says […]

 

Software Liability by Contract, Not Regulation

While “other events” are causing me to prevaricate over data protection legislation in the US, it’s great to see this Wall St Journal story (reprinted in the Contra Costra Times) on large software buyers pushing for liability clauses in their contracts. “I’m paying the bill. Other companies are paying the bill,” says Ed Amoroso, AT&T’s […]

 

Publishing a List of SSNs Will Not Fix Anything

Pete Lindstrom suggests: My proposal: List SSNs publicly. The Social Security Agency can notify all of its intent to publish all SSNs at some point in the future – enough time for organizations to absorb and react to this news. The net result is to eliminate the notion that perhaps SSNs are “secure enough” for […]

 

Choicepoint Won't Benefit from Bank of America Leak

I wasn’t going to blog on BofA‘s little kerfuffle. But then Ian went and blogged about it, and I think he gets it partially right and partially very wrong. His actual conclusion is spot on: In order to share the information, and raise the knowledge of what’s important and what’s not, we may have to […]

 

Roger McNamee on Sarbox

Roger McNamee has an article on how Sarbanes-Oaxley is hurting public companies by making their guidance more conservative than it should be. It’s hard for executives to avoid providing some form of guidance – investors generally insist on it – but they have a big incentive to understate the outlook early in the fiscal year.  […]

 

When The Future Has No Shadow

I remember when I was in college, discussing what we’d do if we discovered we had a terminal disease. Being college students, there were lots of ways to maximize short-term fun before the disease ate you. The game theory folks talk about “the long shadow of the future,” the idea that cooperation can be rewarded […]

 

Cool Tech at RSA: i-Mature

At RSA, I didn’t get a demo, but did talk to John Brainard of RSA about i-Mature, a fascinating biometrics company. There’s been some discussion on Interesting People. Vin McClellan discusses the tech, Seth Finkelstein maps their web site, reporter Andy Sullivan plays with one, Lauren Weinstein on probable attacks, Herb Lin on the limits […]

 

Small Bits of Chaos: Passports, Financial Crypto

Ryan Singel has a good post on chipped passports: Bailey is right that the new passport will be harder to forge with the inclusion of RFID chips, especially since the chip would be digitally signed to prevent changes to the data in the chip. That’s a solid security measure. But, the chips create a new […]

 

Openness: Maps

After RSA, some friends and I went up to Russian River. I was looking at some old maps at the Quinvera Quivira Vineyard, and the caption under one said “The author of this map is believed to have had access to Drake’s secret maps.” Today, large scale maps of everywhere are easily available. But there […]

 

Felten on The Record Industry

Ed Felten has a great post today, asking “How Competitive Is the Record Industry?” How can we tell whether the record industry is responding competitively to DRM? An interesting natural experiment is about to start. MP3Tunes, a new startup headed by serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson, is launching a new music service that sells songs in […]

 

The Real-ID Theft Act of 2005

The “Real ID” act is likely to get written into law, in two ways. First, it will pass the Senate, and be signed into law. Second, it will be one of the best examples of the law of unintended consequences in a long time. The bill would force states* to fingerprint people, and do various […]

 

Purpose of a System Is What it Does?

Over at POSIWID, Richard comments on airline security, with some economic analysis of bad security and why it stays around. (I think I don’t like his title, preferring ‘systems are maintained for what they do,’ which gives more credit to the emergent qualities of systems, but I digress.) He accurately assesses some positives of the […]

 

CEOBlogger on "IT Propaganda"

There’s a new blog, from a fellow claiming to be the CEO of a public company, experimenting with blogging. Welcome! In his second post, he responds to the WikID Thoughts, Emergent Chaos, Financial Crypto series on IT breaches, calling it an example of “IT Propaganda.” I love the ‘IT propaganda’ phrase–one of the themes that […]

 

Sarbox and Venture Capital

The Sarbanes-Oaxley act is driving up the costs of being a public company. Its driving up both direct costs, in terms of investing in assurance technologies, audit, and new processes to produce (slightly) more reliable accounting. But much more important, it imposes a highly risky cost on CEOs and financial officers who must sign off […]

 

More on Economic Analysis of Vulnerabilities

Dave Aitel has a new presentation (“0Days: How Hacking Really Works“) on what it costs to attack. The big cost to attackers is not vulnerability discovery, but coding reliable exploits. (There’s an irony for you: Attackers are subject to the same issues with bad software as their victims.) The presentation is in OpenOffice format only […]

 

"The Arthur Andersen Of Banking?"

Over at The CounterTerrorism Blog, Andrew Cochran accuses Riggs Bank of being “the Arthur Andersen of banking.” Riggs is apparently pleading guilty to violating the Bank Secrecy Act, by “failing to file reports to regulators on suspicious transfers and withdrawals by clients.” I’d like to address the comparison to Arthur Andersen, and through that lens, […]

 

Small Bits of Chaos: Taxes, Orientation, Liberty, Fraudulent Licenses

Scrivner writes about the perverse nature of the AMT. Chuck Spinney at D-N-I asks “Is America Inside Its Own OODA Loop?” The article contains some very clear writing on the meaning of orientation, and applies that idea: He showed why the most dangerous internal state of an OODA loop occurs when the Orientation process becomes […]

 

Towards an Economic Analysis of Disclosure

In comments on a my post yesterday, “I Am So A Dinosaur“, Ian asks “Has anyone modelled in economics terms why disclosure is better than the alternate(s) ?” I believe that the answer is no, and so will give it a whack. The costs I see associated with a vulnerability discovery and disclosure, in chronological […]

 

More on Do Security Breaches Matter?

In responding to a question I asked yesterday, Ian Grigg writes: In this case, I think the market is responding to the unknown. In other words, fear. It has long been observed that once a cost is understood, it becomes factored in, and I guess that’s what is happening with DDOS and defacements/viruses/worms. But large […]

 

Do Security Breaches Matter?

Nick Owen posts about the stock valuation impact of security breaches. This UMD study found that a firm suffering a breach of ‘confidential information’ saw a 5% drop in stock price while firms suffering a non-confidential breach saw no impact. I read it as the market over time learning the difference between a DOS attack […]

 

Catastrophe and Continuation

Dr. David Ozonoff, a professor of environmental health at the Boston University School of Public Health who originally supported the new laboratory but now opposes it, argues that biodefense spending has shifted money away from “bread-and-butter public health concerns.” Given the diversion of resources and the potential for germs to leak or be diverted, he […]

 

Economics of Taxonomies

In his latest post on folksonomies, Clay argues that we have no choice about moving to folksonomies, because of the economics. I’d like to tackle those economics a bit. (Some background: There was recently a fascinating exchange between Clay Shirky and Louis Rosenfeld on the subject of taxonomies versus “folksonomies,” lightwieght, uncontrolled terms that users […]

 

Why I Want HTML Export (from Keynote)

Lately, I’ve been complaining that Keynote still can’t export to the web. Now, I’ve been remiss in ensuring all of my writing is in HTML. I’ve been slowly going back and converting things, as I have a few minutes, or as I want to link to something I’ve said. Today, in posting a comment to […]

 

"Thinking WiKID Thougts"

Nick Owen has a new corporate blog up. His very first post is “Why ROI is a crappy measure for Information Security.” I look forward to more.

 

Small Bits of T-Mobile

A friend wrote to T-Mobile and asked if his data was compromised in the T-Mobile break-in. A service droid sent him a press release. My comments are pointed to by the brackets. Customer, Please see the press release below regarding the hacker investigation with T-Mobile’s customer information. If your information was compromised you would have […]

 

DHS to Survey Cybercrime

In what they hope will become the premier measure of national cybercrime statistics, officials at the Homeland Security and Justice departments plan to survey 36,000 businesses this spring to examine the type and frequency of computer security incidents. This is a really exciting development. DHS seems to be taking a good approach, and in a […]

 

More on TMobile

The LA Times has a story on Jacobsen, the hacker, and the AP has a story with more technical details. The Infosec Potpourri blog has some analysis of the AP story.

 

Model Checking One Million Lines of C Code

Hao Chen, Drew Dean, and David Wagner have a paper of that name in Proceedings of the 11th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), pages 171–185, San Diego, CA, February 2004. Hao Chen’s papers page has powerpoint, PDF and PS, as well as this abstract: Implementation bugs in security-critical software are pervasive. Several […]

 

Financial Cryptography

The conference, not the blog, is now accepting registrations. The program looks really good this year.

 

T-Mobile

A sophisticated computer hacker had access to servers at wireless giant T-Mobile for at least a year, which he used to monitor U.S. Secret Service e-mail, obtain customers’ passwords and Social Security numbers, and download candid photos taken by Sidekick users, including Hollywood celebrities, SecurityFocus has learned. … T-Mobile, which apparently knew of the intrusions […]

 

Blog Spam

Stefan Geens has a long post on why SixApart’s TypeKey system is not a good solution to blog spam. He points out that the system has bad economies of scale: Here too, the spammer needs to sit down, get a key, pretend to be human for a minute and behave until he gets a comment […]

 

Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish?

The Supreme Court has just heard a case, Tenet vs Doe, over promises allegedly made to spies: Two former Soviet-bloc diplomats recruited to spy for the CIA during the Cold War say the agency later reneged on promises to compensate them for the dangerous missions they performed.  The husband and wife team are bringing this […]

 

DNA Dragnets and Criminal Signaling

In responding to my comments about Truro’s DNA dragnet, with a fascinating discussion of signaling, Eric Rescorla writes: Even if they’re not the perp, they may have other reasons not to have their DNA collected–for instance they’ve committed another crime that their DNA might match to. (The police say they’re only going to use the […]

 

Threatcode

In a post to the patch management mailing list, Jay Woody mentions Threatcode, a site dedicated to tracking and shaming badly written code. Cool! I wish the site was a little easier to read, but nice going!

 

Ban Windows, Not Cell Phones

Scrivner has another great post, this one to a study at Virginia Commonwealth University. (My link is to the study, not the press summary Scrivner links.) The press summary claims that rubbernecking accounts for 16% of accidents, looking at scenery or landmarks 10%, while cell phones account for only 5%. Clearly the answer is to […]

 

Economics of Price Discrimination

Scrivner points out that the airlines, masters of price discrimination are giving up: In response they’ve become perhaps the world’s most expert practitioners* of price discrimination, mastering the art of charging the business traveler $1,000 more than the tourist in the next seat in exchange for a short-notice booking with few restrictions. But even that […]

 

Does Ryan Singel Need A Privacy Policy?

Yesterday, I commented that Ryan Singel, in his review of Robert O’Harrow’s* new book, had an Amazon tracking URL. I was mostly noting the irony of aiding tracking in a post titled “Pay Cash for This Book,” but Ryan comments: “it got me to thinking that this site has no privacy policy.” Not to pick […]

 

Framing Effects and Apple

Until I read John Gruber’s latest Daring Fireball on “The Rumor Game,” I was firmly in the “Apple is being Ridiculous” camp, and “Apple is chilling free speech” camp. The essence of the story is Apple is suing a rumors site because they’re leaking product details. What Gruber points out, and a quick Google search […]

 

Disclosure

Adam Laurie and company continue to not release code for their Bluetooth attacks, and vendors continue not to fix them. Are we better off, with millions more Bluetooth devices out there? Do we expect that there will be no release of code, and that without POC code, we’re safe? Bluetooth is different from internet vulns, […]

 

Small Bits of Chaos

Ed Felten announced a “Clip Blog,” of short articles with no or small comments. Hmmm. Neat idea. Ian Grigg gives us his thoughts on the Abagnale controversy: [Clausewitz] said something to the extent of “Know yourself and you will win half your battles. Know your enemy and you will win 99 battles out of a […]

 

Small Bits of Chaos

Much as I hate blogging anything from Slashdot, Why the Space Station Almost Ran Out of Food is great. (The previous crew had permission to borrow the current crews’ food, but didn’t record how much they’d eaten.) Maybe they could get jobs working for the Social Security administration. John McWhorter has a new book out, […]

 

Evaluating Security

The study, published in the January issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, concluded that the estimated $7.55 million spent on [SARS] screening at several Canadian airports failed to detect one case of the disease. … “Sometimes what seems like a reasonable thing to do doesn’t turn out that way,” the report’s lead author, Dr. […]

 

Ratty Signals

So, we have a security signal that’s available, but not used. Why might that be? Is the market in-efficient, or are there real limitations that I missed? There are a few things that jump to mind: Size of code issues. More code will produce a longer report. Rats produces a line count, but doesn’t issue […]

 

Quick Links

Cory points to another example of anti-consumer activity, this time Apple disabling the high quality audio-in on the ipod. How to fix it at Hack-a-day. Also via Hack-a-day is the paper Enigma machine Scrivner discovers that Uncle Sam admits to cooking the books, in a way that the SEC would never tolerate from a public […]

 

Quick Links

John Robb has an article at Global Guerrillas about the cost of terrorist attacks and their impact on the economic equilibria at work in cities, based on a report by the NY Fed. A terrorism tax is an accumulation of excess costs inflicted on a city’s stakeholders by acts of terrorism.  These include direct costs […]

 

More on ROI

You can get ROI from security solutions by automating manual processes. Patch management and automated password resets are two solutions that don’t need “incidents” to gain a return. says Pete Lindstrom, responding to my comments that: Well, of course. ROI has enormous problems, including an assumption that technology works out, that there’s an infinite pool […]

 

Biased Reporting

News.com has an article entitled “Craigslist costing newspapers millions. Which is nominally accurate, but a better title would be “Craigslist saving consumers millions.” Craigslist, which generates more than 1 billion page-views each month, also has cost the newspapers millions more in merchandise and real estate advertising, and has damaged other traditional classified advertising businesses, according […]

 

Froomkin 1, Treasury 0

Michael Froomkin sees the idea of the secretary of the treasury investing the social security trust fund, and finds it wanting.

 

Banks issue 2 factor auth

There’s a story in today’s CNET about banks issuing authentication tokens (like SecurID cards) to customers to address customer authentication issues. While these are useful, insofar as they will make phishing harder, they won’t stop it. Phishing will transform into an online, at the moment crime, which will be easier to catch, but work by […]

 

More on SSNs and Risk

In writing about Delta Blood Bank earlier today, one of the issues I was thinking about was the unnecessary use of social security numbers, and how it’s an industry standard. One area where this is particularly evident is in the bifurcated market for cell phones. At one end are providers like Virgin and MetroPCS, who […]

 

Ripping into ROI

Over at TaoSecurity, Richard Bejtlich writes: ‘ROI is no longer effective terminology to use in most security justifications,’ says Paul Proctor, Vp of security and risk strategies for META Group… Executives, he says, interpret ROI as ‘quantifiable financial return following investment.’ Security professionals view it more like an insurance premium. The C-suite is also wary […]

 

The problem(s) with ID cards

Europhobia nails the link between privacy and economics in the UK imposes national ID cards stupidity: But usually what gets them is “what? I’ll have to pay eighty-five quid for this thing?” No, Europhobia, they’ll have to pay 85 quid for the card, and another 10 quid in taxes for the backend database. (Figuring 60% […]

 

Not Just A Good Defense

Michael Froomkin comments: We vastly overestimated the speed with which non-techies would take up the toys; the growing and enduring dominance of one software platform that didn’t take up the toys; and especially the ability of the empire to strike back via both tech (trusted user) and law (DMCA and worse). Some time about four […]

 

Econ and Security papers

Ross Anderson has added three papers to his Economics and Security Resource page: Fetscherin and Vlietstra’s DRM and music: How do rights affect the download price? shows that the prices of music tracks sold online are mostly determined by the rights granted to the purchaser – including the right to burn, copy or export the […]

 

How Much Is Risk Management Worth?

David Akin blogs that Fitch Ratings has purchased Toronto’s Algorithmics for $175M (the press release is datelined New York, so I’m guessing that’s a US dollar figure). Algorithmics makes risk management software, focusing on market risks for banks, things like hedging strategies and BASEL II compliance (based on a quick read of their site.) So […]

 

Clever criminals

Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok quotes a letter from an inmate: [Inmate:] A privately owned and publicly traded company like CCA has no incentive to rehabilitate criminals.  It is in the best interests of the company for even more criminals to exist.  Unfortunately, the same is true of government run prisons.  And contrary to […]

 

Signalling by Counting Low Hanging Fruit?

I’ve been thinking a lot about signaling software security quality. Recall that a good signal should be easy to send, and should be easier for a higher quality product. I’d like to consider how running a tool like RATS (link) might work as a signal. RATS, the Rough Auditing Tool for Security, is a static […]

 

Referrer spam: The end is ROI

The first two claim to be UNDER CONSTRUCTION, and this makes my hypothesise that they are honeypots of a sort, respectively researching whether Deep-URLs (“/friendslinks.php”) or merely Root-URLs (“/”) are most effective methods of Referrer-Spamming, plus also providing a check to see which blogs are the most valuable ones to be worth spamming. In short: […]

 

Welcome, Carnival readers!

My friend Rob Sama is hosting this week’s Carnival of the Capitalists, and was kind enough to give me a shout out. So, welcome if you’re coming in from there. I’m traveling on business, so blogging will be a little slow, but please, have a look around! I try to apply economics to security problems […]

 

Regulating Private Spaceflight

Doug Barnes writes: There is a clear basis for regulation of objects that, with great force, fling themselves into the sky and have an opportunity to subsequently land on random people and property. Even from a purely selfish point of view, it’s not going to be good for the development of a commercial spaceflight industry […]

 

What cost security?

For traditional financial services alone, compliance with the PATRIOT anti-money laundering provisions is projected to cost $10.9 billion by the end of 2005, according to the research firm Celent Communications. No wonder that the champions of forced business spying didn’t want to present even this watered down procedure for congressional review, says banking industry consultant […]

 

Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded

In 1994, Brian Arthur introduced the `El Farol Bar’ problem as a paradigm of complex economic systems. In this model a population of agents have to decide whether to go to the bar each thursday night. All agents like to go to the bar unless it is too crowded (i.e. when more that 60% of […]

 

Code analysis and safe languages

Ekr writes: These tools aren’t perfect and it certainly would be nice to have better tooling, but it’s worth noting that a lot of the bugs they find are the kind of thing that could be entirely eliminated if people would just program in safer languages. For instance, the buffer overflow vulnerabilities which have been […]

 

Privacy lessons from CIBC

The disaster over at CIBC is telling, and bears a little exploration. The real victims, whose details were faxed to never saw the violation of their privacy. It was CIBC tossing data around incompetently, all the while publicly proclaiming their commitment to privacy. Wade Peer, a scrapyard operator in West Virginia brought the three years […]

 

Canadian privacy law & CIBC

Businesses can avoid potential public relations and legal nightmares by developing privacy policies, authentication processes and using cutting-edge technology. The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce learned this the hard way last week when U.S. scrapyard operator Wade Peer went public with his story about how one of Canada’s largest banks was flooding his fax machine […]

 

Financial Cryptography: 2005 – The Year of the Snail

Ian Grigg is on a roll with good posts. See this 2005 – The Year of the Snail Since he’s doing the thinking, and I haven’t had my coffee yet, I’ll just ask, what happens when this gets 10x worse? Is there anything acting as a serious brake to that? Also, Ian says “serious money” […]

 

Amateurs study cryptography; professionals study economics.

Ian has a fine post over at financial cryptography: The only thing I’m unsure of is whether it should be economics or risk. But as I roll it around my mind, I keep coming back to the conclusion that in the public’s mind, the popular definition of economics is closer to the image that we […]

 

Worms swamp security

Security experts take it as a truism that you can’t defend everything. So you have to make choices about what attacks to worry about, and which ones to ignore. A study released today claims that unprotected hosts are attacked once per second. (USA Today reports on the study, and avantgarde.com is utterly swamped. So I […]

 

Music economics

Naxos is a classical music company. They bill themselves as the world’s leading classical label. They have a fascinating business model, which is that they find great ensembles, often in eastern Europe, have them record interesting music, and then sell it cheaply. I’ll often buy 2 or 3 Naxos CDs as experimentation. When they’re 7 […]

 

A market for journal articles, again

George Akerlof shared the 2001 Nobel prize in economics for his paper on “Lemon markets.” While reading Akerlof’s Nobel Prize essay, I was struck by the comment: I submitted “Lemons” there, which was again rejected on the grounds that the The Review did not publish papers on topics of such triviality. It seems to me […]

 

A lemons market for … anti-spyware

Anti-spyware software has many of the issues that other privacy software has had.* It’s hard to understand the technical means by which privacy is invaded. It’s hard to see that you have (some) spyware. And it’s hard to evaluate what anti-spyware software works, and what doesn’t. Well, it was. Eric Howes has started testing anti-spyware, […]

 

What's Google Worth?

I opened this blog, exactly three months and 250 posts ago, asking, “Why Did Google Pop?” (with a second post on the topic as well.) Nudecybot has two fascinating posts on Google today. The first is on Google bias, the second on gmail, and the fact that it now actually secures your email (way to […]

 

Cost, Value of government

After the election, I asked What’s a Free Election worth?.” John Robb over at Global Guerrillas has a partial answer, which is what the 2nd intifada has cost both sides over 4 years: 10% of Israel’s GDP (roughly 2.5% of GDP per year), and a stunning 300% of GDP over 4 years for the Palestinians. […]

 

Security & Outsourcing

[Inland Revenue] learned a lesson after one incident, during the previous EDS contract, when its security department found out about cost-saving plans to shut a data centre and move sensitive information to a shared site only after an internal memo was circulated. Computing has a good basic article on security issues in outsourcing of IT […]

 

A Market for Journal Articles?

In A Market for Journal Articles, Alex Tabarrok refers to a paper by David Zetland on A Market for journal articles. Zetland suggests that journal publishers should buy manuscripts in an auction.  You probably already have some objections, Where would the money come from?  Why would journal editors buy what they can get for free? […]

 

The height of logic

“The question was, why do I support a strong dollar policy? The answer is because it is our policy,” [US Treasury secretary John] Snow said. “Our dollar policy remains unchanged because a strong dollar is in both the national and international interest.” He pledged to curb the US massive budget deficit – but said the […]

 

TSA's identity obsession

US Homeland Security undersecretary Asa Hutchinson said the current practice of airlines giving the names of passengers to US officials 15 minutes after take-off did not make sense. … “If we have to have information 60 or 45 minutes before, you’ve got to close off the passengers that come in at the last second,” he […]

 

Glad to be a perfect straight man

In his response to my comments on vulnerability hunting, Pete Lindstrom discusses four ways to make things better: Legislate/enforce the law Buy exploits now and then Create Software security data sheets More honeypots I don’t think that (1) actually helps. More laws against finding vulns makes life harder for the good guys, by moving information […]

 

Blog changes

Thanks to Dave and Lisa, I’ve moved to a new host. Things may have unsettled during the move. We’ve also added a feature that closes comments after a bit, because old posts are getting nothing but blogspam.

 

A downside to data warehousing

A long story in the New York Times ends: Still, as Wal-Mart recently discovered, there can be such a thing as too much information. Six women brought a sex-discrimination lawsuit against the company in 2001 that was broadened this year to a class of about 1.6 million current and former female employees. Lawyers for the […]

 

How not to find vulnerabilities (2)

Pete Lindstrom has argued that we need to end the bug-hunt: Once evaluated, neither reason provides a good foundation for continuing the practice of vulnerability seeking, but it gets much worse when we consider the consequences. There is a rarely mentioned upside to all this bugfinding, which is that researchers use the exploit code to […]

 

Selling Security

The poll of IT network and security administrators in SMEs to determine how they persuade management to change security practice found that almost half of respondents admit to advocating the fear factor. Many respondents indicated that they have to present worst case scenarios involving confidentiality breaches, lost customers or liability charges to justify investments in […]

 

"An abundance of caution"

Hundreds of passengers were evacuated briefly Thursday from the main terminal at Dulles International Airport outside Washington after airport screeners thought a suspicious image on an X-ray monitor might be a gun. Screeners spotted the image about 4:40 p.m. EST Thursday and the terminal reopened about an hour later. Passengers went through security checkpoints again, […]

 

Two on Risk

There’s a nice interview with Kathleen Hagerty over at CSO. She’s a finance professor, talking about risk. (Speaking of business school professors, work by Martin Loeb and Lawrence Gordon on the Economics of Information security investment is outstanding, and unfortunately, not online as an html or pdf file.) Second, I just got around to reading […]

 

WTO, Bastion of liberty?

Antigua and Barbuda have won a case at the World Trade Organization, claiming that US laws against internet gambling are a violation of the WTO rules.

 

Rushed Security

Samablog, irked that Rush has stolen his joke, explains that you can get at all of Rush’s $7 a month content, just by turning off all the scripting stuff in your browser. He then goes on to say: “What it says that a celebrity of Limbaugh’s stature keeps his site so insecure, I don’t know.” […]

 

Easier to get forgiveness than permission

So when will the public be able to easily and cheaply adopt useful security technologies that cost next to nothing? Asks Nudecybot. And the answer is…NOW! Why wait? Generate some keys and use them!

 

"Better Than Nothing Security"

Eric Rescorla has a great post reporting from the IETF on the “Better Than Nothing Security BOF.” As I see it, this boils down to an understanding that paying for digital signatures is very expensive, while we’ve known for ten years that “keys are cheap.” (Thanks, Eric!) The SSH folks got this very right: You […]

 

Vonage, FCC

U.S. regulators ruled Tuesday that providers of Internet-based phone call services fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government and cannot be regulated by states. … Vonage has been battling public utilities officials in Minnesota who want the company to register in the state as a telecommunications service, subjecting it to rate regulation and other […]

 

Computer Security and The Human Factor

Nudecybot has a thoughtful post on Computer security and the human factor. He takes a discussion we had, and organizes it well. He talks about airline safety vs computer safety, and how an anonymous reporting system has helped in the airline case. I think there’s two bits that he misses that make the airline safety […]

 

Corporate governance goals impossible

There’s a fascinating article in the Register about the impact of new rules: In some cases, the law has made IT managers legally responsible for adherence to corporate governance rules. Colao says that this may not necessarily be a good thing. “CIOs are now relying on convoluted processes rather than using sound business judgement based […]

 

Corporate governance goals impossible (II)

Further quoting from that same article in the Register about the impact of new rules: Business managers becoming fed up with FUD In a separate study, more than a third of the 30 delegates to the Axis Action Forum admitted that their Board had never asked for an update on security or implications of security […]

 

"Good thing there's a monopoly"

“Unionized employees at the SAQ are launching a four day strike that will shut down Quebec liquor board stores for the weekend.” Says the Montreal CBC site. The SAQ is Quebec’s government owned liquor monopoly. Non-SAQ stores can sell only bad wine and some beer. (No, really, there’s a list of approved wines that others […]

 

Morris Worm is Sweet 16

Sixteen years ago, the first worm spread across the Internet. It used password cracking, a buffer overflow in fingerd, and a flaw in sendmail to spread. At least today, sendmail seems more secure. Passwords and buffer overflows, check back in sixteen more.

 

Canadian Privacy Law again

Last week, I commented on Michael Geist’s column. In part 2, he took an excellent direction. He suggests not only economics, but a legal structure that forbids Canadian companies’ compliance with US orders. Read it.

 

Privacy Protectionism

This month the B.C. government passed a law to prevent the U.S. from examining information on British Columbians that is in possession of private U.S. companies. The CBC reports on information about Canadians being sent to the US for processing, and the attendant legal risks. In Canada, they have strong-sounding data-protection laws that they don’t […]

 

Regulate that Arbirtrage!

An update on the Americans Stream to Canada For Flu Shots story: In eight days 3,800 people have jumped on the ship and paid their $105. Victoria Clipper’s Managing Director said the company had not expected there would be such a massive take up. The company says the day trips still continue, but the number […]

 

Online Extortion

There’s a long article by Joseph Menn in the LATimes about online extortion via DDOS attacks, and how much money it brings in. (Use Bugmenot for a login.) The threat involved massive denial of service attacks on a gambling site, using thousands of “zombie” computers sending data to the site. Its not clear how clever […]

 

Amazon (3 Comments on SteveC)

Something about a post by Steve got to me… Whenever amazon comes up in conversation I tell people how particularly behind they are but I don’t think I get the point across. Who does better? I find that it always works better to say who does well, rather than who does poorly. Let people figure […]

 

Common Criteria

Statistics gleaned from the labs’ Common Criteria work indicates that the testing is improving security, said Jean Schaffer, director of NIAP. Schaffer spoke during a session at a Federal Information Assurance Conference held this week at the University of Maryland. So far, 100 percent of the products evaluated have been approved, she said. The testing […]

 

Piscitello on Bugtraq

My frustration level with bug-traq increases in direct proportion to the frequency at which wannabes report vulnerabilities on software that has limited consumption and little business on a business network. I finally contacted some of the wannabes. I probed each for more specifics than the original bug disclosure: I think that Dave has a valid […]

 

IPod, so?

Apple announced a new Ipod that shows pictures. What I want to know is, where’s the 8-in-1 media reader to take photos directly from your camera?

 

Some explosives links

But the real issue is that the explosives can be used against civilians and soldiers in Iraq and around the world. Consider that only five grams of RDX, for example, is enough to kill a person when used in an anti-personnel land mine. When 1,000 pounds of explosives were set off by a suicide bomber […]

 

The Security/Security Tradeoff

People trying to infringe our privacy often claim that they’re making a tradeoff between security and privacy. Sometimes they’re even right. But I think today, we’re trading security for “security,” giving up real protection for an illusion. For example, the TSA is spending lots of money to build and connect databases all about travelers. For […]

 

TSA Wastes More of Your Money

WASHINGTON — The Transportation Security Administration was lax in overseeing a $1.2 billion contract to install and maintain explosives-detection machines at U.S. airports, resulting in excess profit of about $49 million for Boeing Co., a Department of Homeland Security review found. (From a Wall St Journal article, October 19th. (Sorry, subscriber-only link.)

 

Nielsen on Security

Jacob Nielsen has a very good analysis of security, followed by a not-so-great set of suggestions. He is spot on in saying that 1) it doesn’t work, 2) it puts the burden in the wrong place, and 3) this has nasty side effects. (I’d reverse 1 & 2, as the economics predict #1, but thats […]

 

Efficient Markets and Prediction

In a post below, I quoted my friend Craig commenting on the differences between election sites and the IEM. Steven Landsburg had previously commented privately that IEM together with TradeSports is inefficient. By playing one against the other you could make money on either likely outcome of the election. So, if these markets were efficient, […]

 

Security Signaling

Signaling is a term from the study of lemons markets. A lemons market is a market, such as in used cars, where one party (the seller) knows more than the buyer. There are good cars (peaches) and bad ones (lemons). The buyer is willing to pay a fair price, but can’t distinguish between the cars. […]

 

So Cynical, I Wish I'd Thought of It.

My friend Craig Sauer wrote: In the spirit of the equal time, here’s what’s keeping me from being optimistic about Kerry’s chances: The Iowa Electronic Markets. You’ll have to read on the site to get the real skinny, but basically, the IEM is a real-money futures market where people make informed “bets” about who is […]

 

Hackers sabotage Waikato (NZ) food company

Computer hackers have emailed 3000 of the company’s customers, saying a company product – lamb chips – are being recalled due to an infectious agent, and the warning has since been posted on internet message boards. Sad as it is for Erik Arndt and Aria Farm that this has happened, I think this is interesting […]

 

"What your CEO thinks about security"

Larry Poneman writes: Unfortunately, CEOs have persisted in focusing on four basic questions that too often stump the most savvy IT professionals: What is the security return on investment? What is the probability of a catastrophic security failure? What is the cost of self-insuring against security risks? What are the tangible benefits of being an […]

 

Must … extend … grasp!

Each aircraft operation … with a MTOW of more than 12,500 pounds, must conduct a search of the aircraft before departure and screen passengers, crew members and other persons, and all accessible property before boarding in accordance with security standards and procedures approved by TSA. … [Seperately, charter aircraft run as clubs…] These clubs transport […]

 

Thoughts on SB 1386

Looking for a link to SB 1386, I noticed that of the first 10 Google hits, 2 are legislative, 2 are law firms, 3 are information security portals, and 3 are for security companies. Three of the security companies, (Verisign, Threatfocus and Watchfire) are simply adding “SB 1386” to existing products, and claiming to provide […]

 

1.4 Million Californians Exposed

A computer hacker accessed names and Social Security numbers of about 1.4 million Californians after breaking into a University of California, Berkeley, computer system in perhaps the worst attack of its kind ever suffered by the school, officials said Tuesday. (This is all over the web, I found a version at News.com.com.) A few questions […]

 

Canadian Privacy Law

Michael Geist’s recent … Toronto Star Law Bytes column focuses on a recent Canadian privacy finding involving an inadvertent email disclosure. The column contrasts the finding with a similar incident in the United States and argues that for Canadian privacy law to garner the respect it needs to achieve widespread compliance, the Privacy Commissioner’s office […]

 

$103 Million

To date, the government has wasted over $100 million in a flawed effort to improve airport security by identifying passengers and, well, doing something to the naughty ones. Meanwhile, the reality is that airport screeners continue to miss items like knives, guns and bombs. Meanwhile, there’s lots of good work in computer vision systems, which […]

 

Security and Economics

Household Finance, a unit of HSBC, has sent me a $5,000 check out of the blue. Big verbage on the front indicates that “Signing this check will result in a loan…” at 23%, which over 5 years comes to an estimated $3,500 in finance charges. Most attractive. Now, ignoring Household’s record of fraud, and ignoring […]

 

Patches & EULAs

Security patches should not have licenses. There’s no fair re-negotiation under threat. If I bought your software, and am using it, then you find a bug, you should not be allowed to put new terms on the software in order for me to be safe using it. Imagine a hotel which lost a master key […]

 

Department of Justice to Focus On Key Problems!

Attorney General John Ashcroft has announced a major new effort to crack down on intellectual property theft, by which he apparently means illegally-copied DVDs, CDs, and software. (I refuse to use the term piracy to refer to illegal copying. Piracy is the violent boarding and theft of property on ships, and is a major problem […]

 

Perverse Cooperation

A new technique has won the 20th anniversary competition in iterated prisoner’s dilemma. The technique involves a sequence of moves designed to signal other players that they are competing with one of the great many other Southhampton university submissions. When they discover that, one entry will self-sacrifice such that the other can rack up a […]

 

Secondary Screening

Ryan Singel has a couple of good posts up: Why Privacy Laws and Advocates Matter and Trusty Logo Not Worth The Pixels It Is Printed On. The later explains in detail what economics predicts: Trusty won’t shaft its paying customers to make them actually enforce privacy policies, when people who rely on the trusty seal […]

 

Want to Save American Lives?

Do you want to save American lives? Stop senseless deaths? Here’s some ideas: Require real driver training, and enforce traffic laws. Ration the sale of alcohol to prevent the nasty diseases over-indulgence causes. Ban tobacco. Ban firearms. Require calisthenics in the morning, by neighborhood, and in the afternoon, at work. Ban the use of corn […]

 

Use Blogger, Be Ignored

Every now and then, I come across a blog I want to skim regularly. When its easy to do so, I add it to my list. Which is to say I drop the RSS feed at NetNewswire, and I then at least see the headlines. Blogspot/Blogger doesn’t make it easy to add RSS to your […]

 

How Banning Wireless Reduces Security

IDC’s research director, Lars Vestergaard, said their research found interest by businesses in WLAN usage was widespread, but not many of them were particularly interested. “Unfortunately IT managers are being uncertain about using this technology, but they use a lot of bad excuses,” he said. “This is because they often fear a lack of security […]

 

Economics of Information Security

Jean Camp and Stephen Lewis have done a great job of bringing together papers on Economics of Information Security in a new volume from Kluwer Academic press. (It’s even better because it has my first book chapter, which is What Price Privacy, joint work with Paul Syverson. We’ll put it online as soon as the […]

 

How about "Align with the business?"

I normally have a lot of respect for CIO Magazine. Their journalists cover the topics that matter to CIOs, they remain focused on how to make the technology support the business, etc. That’s why I was surprised to see this CIO’s Guide To Safe Computing, which starts: Ellyn believes that companies should strive for a […]

 

Why Is Private Health Insurance Such A Disaster?

Why cannot markets allocate this function to the least cost decider? Why does the usual solution — intermediation — appear to be working so badly? Asks Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution. I believe that a large part of the problem comes from a side effect of the employer subsidy. Because health insurers are selling […]

 

The Blog That Broke the Bank of England

You have to respect a man who can take on a central bank and win. The Motley Fool did a nice bio piece with background. And now, he’s blogging. [Update: Oops! Via BoingBoing]

 

A Million Deaths Is A Statistic

Matt Cordes modified the Zombie simulators to give humans a chance to fight back. Its fascinating, because with some small mods to the source, you get a much more interesting simulation. (Unfortunately, I don’t see Matt’s source anywhere, so I can’t say how long it might have taken.) The simulation makes viscerally clear how chains […]

 

Why Is Air Travel So Cheap?

The cost of last minute ticket doesn’t seem to be enough for airlines to break even. How much of this is due to a lingering fear of flying? How much of it is the extra cost to travelers, in inconvenience and hassle, of being bit players on the security stage? As long as a carrier […]

 

"Tomorrow is Zero Hour"

More than 120,000 hours of potentially valuable terrorism-related recordings have not yet been translated by linguists at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and computer problems may have led the bureau to systematically erase some Qaeda recordings, according to a declassified summary of a Justice Department investigation that was released on Monday. The problems, unsurprisingly, are […]

 
 

"Want more Secure Software?"

SecurityFocus points to a nice short article over at Silicon.com suggests that Gartner advises that for companies building their own software, developers should be pushed to put security at the head of their list. It’s not just in-house tech makers that need a word in their ears – the analysts suggest end users should give […]

 

Canadian Health Care

The New York Times reports on a lack of doctors in Canada, along with a rise in Canadians using emergency rooms to replace family doctors. (Use BugMeNot if you don’t want to register.) The basic problem is economic. Doctors are much better paid in the US than in Canada, and doctors can easily move. Its […]

 

Swire on Disclosure

Peter Swire has a new working draft A Model For When Disclosure Helps Security. Its a great paper which lays out two main camps, which he calls open source and military, and explains why the underlying assumptions cause clashes over disclosure. That would be a useful paper, but he then extends it into a semi-mathematical […]

 

Science is easier from the outside

As part of a larger project on security configuration issues, I’m doing a lot of learning about taxonomies and typographies right now. (A taxonomy is a hierarchical typography.) I am often jealous of the world of biology, where there are underlying realities that can be used for categorization purposes. (A taxonomy needs a decision tree. […]

 

Volokh commentary

this post by Todd Zywicki clearly illustrates the difference between law professors and economics professors.

 

Lock 'em up!

Over at TaoSecurity, Richard writes: Remember that one of the best ways to prevent intrusions is to help put criminals behind bars by collecting evidence and supporting the prosecution of offenders. The only way to ensure a specific Internet-based threat never bothers your organization is to separate him from his keyboard! Firstly, I’m very glad […]

 

Patch Management

Alec Muffet comments on sysadmin resistance to applying patches. As Steve Beattie and a bunch of others of us wrote about the issue is that there’s a tradeoff to be made to find the optimal uptime for a system. Its a tradeoff between a security risk and an operational risk. Organizationally, different teams are often […]

 

Why did Google pop? (II)

According to David Garrity, a technology analyst in New York with Caris & Co.: It was supposed to democratize the process and let people buy in at just a few shares, but it was a miserable failure because the organizers didn’t realize the securities regulations that require people who bid to have a certain net […]

 

Why did Google pop?

So Google popped 18% today. That shouldn’t have happened. The goal of their much-discussed auction was to ensure that they made money. The typical bubble IPO involved a “pop” of as much as 100-300% on opening day. This put huge sums in the hands of bankers and the bankers friends, sometimes illegally. Ideally, Google’s trading […]