Dozens of times in the last decade, I’ve encountered information security tropes about cyber-espionage, usually accompanied by a pair of pictures:
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Dozens of times in the last decade, I’ve encountered information security tropes about cyber-espionage, usually accompanied by a pair of pictures:
Are you tired of hearing about Email servers, yet? And Email leaks?
I sure as hell am; that’s the background music of my entire professional career. Once more unto the breach, dear friends…
If so: why? Unless everyone’s been born yesterday, they ought to realize that – now that those are marketing channels – there are marketing sleaze coming along to “astroturf” people’s follower lists and “maximize” their “potential” base.
Working in tech as long as I have, I tend to take pre-announcements of “great new thing coming soon” as suspicious. But prerelease teasers are a way of telling what research is being done, and/or is ready to come to market eventually. And a lot of research is being targeted at the police state, because that’s where the money is…
Transitive trust is when A trusts B, and B trusts C, A trusts C and probably doesn’t realize it.
Florian smiled around the edge of his beer and said, wryly, “We Swiss are not pacifists because we are weak; it’s because we were rental soldiers in the dark age and renaissance. Fighting for your own selfish reasons is bad marketing.”
About a decade ago, I did a series of talks at various conferences entitled “cyberwar is bullshit” – the problem, I felt, was that the US was talking about being deeply afraid of cyberattack from Eurasia (or was it Eastasia?) but there was considerable irresponsible talk about “weapons of mass destruction-like capability.” Industry insiders like myself wound up divided as to whether it was likely/practical, or good marketing/a chance to make a fast buck. There were a lot of fast bucks made.
In 1987 or so, I was working for Welch Medical Library at the early stages of the human gene-mapping project. We had funding from Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the National Library of Medicine, and had a small lab of programmers and researchers thinking hard about medical informatics and retrieval systems.
I’ve always been suspicious of power.* One of the warning signs I’m especially alert to is when I see language being bent or waterboarded in the interest of obscuring facts, rather than clarifying them. When a new word suddenly begins to take on a heavily-freighted meaning, e.g: “ethnic cleansing” instead of “genocide” I immediately ask myself “why that word, and not the other perfectly useable words?” The sudden promotion of or carpet-bombing with a new term is often an indicator that someone has decided to start using a new word with a subtly different definition – basically, lying by redefining the truth.
The contractor who allegedly took home data from NSA systems, apparently collected over 50 terabytes. But that’s not the kicker…