Lots of regular, educated people are incensed about the fact that Republicans reject man-made climate change. The biggest frustration is that their opinions seem immune to evidence, and yet the solution seems to be presenting even more. It doesn’t work. But there’s a precedent here that tells us everything we need to know: Republicans don’t even believe in…
Rural America Conflated Two Separate Issues
I was talking to my friend Mark the other day about the election and stumbled upon a realization. There are two primary forces that pushed most of rural, white America to vote for Trump. The disappearance of blue-collar jobs. Overzealous political correctness. The loss of American Jobs The jobs have gone away and aren’t coming back. This has…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 69
This week’s topics: The Vault7 CIA dump, Russian shenanigans, Dahua, Verifone, mandatory genetic testing, WordPress, atomic storage, Google Kaggles, presenting at HouSecCon, fasting research, data wars, chaos, voice interfaces, tools, projects, and more… This is Episode No. 69 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 15…
The Bifurcation of America: The Forced Class Separation into Alphas and Betas
There is something monumental happening in the United States that very few people are aware of. It’s been written and talked about for decades, but the conversation is always so academic that it never reaches those who need to hear it. Our country is in the process of being ripped into two distinct classes—The Alpha Class and the…
A Response to Benedict Evans on the Limitations of Voice Interfaces
Benedict Evans wrote a great piece about voice interfaces where he argues his position that voice interface isn’t quite the future of computer interface that we think it is. He mentions a few constraints. Given that you cannot answer any question, there is a second scaling problem – does the user know what they can ask? I suspect…
First and Second Order Chaos
I was just reading Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari, and he mentioned something interesting about chaos. There are two main classifications of chaos. First Order Chaos doesn’t respond to prediction. The example he gave is the weather. If you predict the weather to some level of accuracy that prediction will hold because the weather doesn’t adjust based on…
We’ve Reached Peak Prevention
As we all know, there are two main components to risk: 1) the chance that something will happen, and 2) how bad it would be if it did. Or, probability and impact. For the last 20 years, in both terrorism and information security, we have focused on prevention (probability) and this effort has yielded some decent returns. But…
Computer Voice Interfaces Are a Combination of Voice Recognition and NLP
To a casual observer, it might appear that “voice interfaces” to computers—like Siri or Alexa—are a single technology space. In fact it’s useful to think of them as two problems combined. First, the computer needs to fully understand exactly what you said. That means deciphering mumbling, removing background noise, handling different voices and accents, etc. That’s difficult, but…
We Need Better iTunes Podcast Data
I really wish iTunes gave better (or any statistics) statistics on podcast interaction. Here’s the view for my podcast on iTunes for the last four episodes. And here’s the same four episodes within my own software, which is probably giving dramatically incorrect numbers. The most obvious discrepancy is that the latest episode, No. 68, is showing as maxed…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 68
This week’s topics: Amazon’s S3 outage, Uber greyballing, fooling AI, DNS RATs, automating human jobs, suicide and ML, post-work IQ and creativity, greatness vs. imperfection, media choice, tools, projects, and more… This is Episode No. 68 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 15 to 30…
Greatness vs. Imperfection: How Should We Rate Our Leaders?
Trump’s presidency has forced me to re-evaluate what it means to be a good or bad leader. As someone who considers himself progressive, this should be easy enough on an emotional level. He’s said and done horrible things, so he must be horrible. But things become murky when you look at some of our most revered leaders in…
The Mea Culpa Meta Game
I love the psychology that goes into post-outage write-ups. Amazon just had a doozy, with S3 going down and crippling much of the internet for a day. The image above captures their approach to the narrative, which I would classify as dense and opaque. Key attributes of the write-up include: Small text Formal language Massive paragraphs No bullets…
Governments, Markets, and Media
I was thinking the other day about an analogy between government services vs. private services and Walter Cronkite vs. cable news channels. It’s weird, but hear me out. Walter Cronkite was a lot like the BBC. It was private, but between him and Dan Rather and all those types, there were very few sources of news. It was…
Political Extremes Produce Relative Heroes
Bush is currently enjoying a surge in popularity. The second Bush, not the first. He’s the one who got us into Iraq and oversaw the Katrina disaster. Anyway, there are lots of people saying very nice things about him. And for good reason, I think. I think the guy has a genuinely good heart, and that he was…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 67
This week’s topics: CloudBleed, SHA1-1, White House Leaks, Planets, Satellites, Drones vs. Eagles, InfoSec Jobs, ExFil, IQ and Creativity in a Post-work World, Weaponized Narrative, Security Tools, Tons of Great Links, and more… This is Episode No. 67 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 15…
Companies Exist to Serve Customers, Not to Employ People
I’m not sure when it happened, but somewhere along the American history timeline people became convinced that employers owe people jobs. They don’t. Companies have employees for one reason alone: it helps them serve their customers better. The moment this stops being true is the same moment the company will get rid of employees. This is what people…
You Should Have Two Different Kinds of Hiring Interview
Most companies and managers today are making a fundamental mistake in their hiring process. They are conflating two different types of filter—the positive filter and the negative filter. When most people interview they’re actually trying to do two things simultaneously. They’re trying to filter out bad candidates. They’re trying to select the very best. Whiteboards and puzzles By…
America’s Shark Jump
The term “Shark Jump” comes from a show called Happy Days, where after many weak episodes a main character jumps a motorcycle over a shark on water skis. The moment was meaningful because it meant the show was over, and many dying TV shows have their own versions of the same. Our country’s Shark Jump was likely the…
A Summary of the General Data Protection Regulation
Here’s a quick summary for my own reference and to be used by others if they find it helpful. It’s goal is to strengthen privacy for individuals within the EU. Its focus is uniting, simplifying, and strengthening regulations around this. It was accepted on April 27, 2016, and goes into effect on May 25, 2018. The regulation extends…
IQ and Creativity Bias in a Post-work World
I think the post-work world is going to heavily favor those with high IQs, and I think this could be a major factor in the social tensions that will arise due to economic stresses. IQ isn’t magical. It doesn’t guarantee success. But it does predict success, and I think the biggest reason for that is being flexible in…
The Need for Hamilton vs. Jefferson as Society Evolves
I’m deeply in love with history right now (and especially American history) due to my reading of the Hamilton biography. It’s over 800 pages, but worth it. One of the things it has me thinking about is the disagreement between Hamilton and Jefferson about how to run a government, and a nation. In general, Hamilton was for a…
Unsupervised Learning: No. 66
This week’s topics: My recap of RSA 2017, Google’s zero-trust implementation, Trump domain hacked, robots doing your taxes, the IoT Security train analogy, the future of authentication, toolswatch best tools of 2016, and more… This is Episode No. 66 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a…
My RSA 2017 Recap
Every year I try to recap what I saw and did at RSA, so here’s the capture for 2017. It won’t be comprehensive, but should get most major things. Impressions Things are just fine for companies selling products, but not so great for the companies using them. We continue to under-emphaize fundamentals, and we get hacked as a…
IoT Security’s Train Analogy
I have an analogy I like to use for IoT Security: it’s like a giant train that seats billions of people, and it’s currently boarding. The people getting on read the marketing and they’re super excited—IoT is evidently like Disneyland, but way better. The conductor is the free market, and there is nothing stopping him from leaving the…
Violence and Terrorism Are Not the Same
We continue to hear noises about how many recent violent attacks are not being labeled as terrorism, and that this failure to label them as such is (always or usually) because of racism. I think this jump is often unwarranted, and that there’s a simple, useful distinction that can be used to determine whether or not a given…
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