Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

Learning from Our Experience, Part Z

One of the themes of The New School of Information Security is how other fields learn from their experiences, and how information security’s culture of hiding our incidents prevents us from learning. Today I found yet another field where they are looking to learn from previous incidents and mistakes: zombies. From “The Zombie Survival Guide: […]

 

What Security Folks Can Learn from Doctors

Stefan Larson talks about “What doctors can learn from each other:” Different hospitals produce different results on different procedures. Only, patients don’t know that data, making choosing a surgeon a high-stakes guessing game. Stefan Larsson looks at what happens when doctors measure and share their outcomes on hip replacement surgery, for example, to see which […]

 

Infosec Lessons from Mario Batali's Kitchen

There was a story recently on NPR about kitchen waste, “No Simple Recipe For Weighing Food Waste At Mario Batali’s Lupa.” Now, normally, you’d think that a story on kitchen waste has nothing to do with information security, and you’d be right. But as I half listened to the story, I realized that it in […]

 

Air Safety: Terrorism and Crashes

There have been two fatal air accidents this week, one in Ukraine in which 170 people died, and one in Kentucky, in which 50 people died. In neither case is terrorism being blamed as I write this. The safety engineering that makes air travel so safe is astounding. The primary activities, from pilot training to […]