Recent “be afraid of Russia” propaganda includes scary stories about Russian submarines prowling around submerged cables.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Recent “be afraid of Russia” propaganda includes scary stories about Russian submarines prowling around submerged cables.
Internet security is complicated and there are lots of dependencies – usually if you ask an internet security practitioner “is ${this thing} safe?” they’ll tell you “if you’re trying to do ${this} or ${that} then…” and carry on for a half an hour in that vein.
Congratulations to our own Shiv, whose reporting on the J20 case is in VICE. [vice]
Writing something that is timely and fact-filled, in this day of “fake news” is a huge amount of work and takes tremendous dedication. Usually I don’t have much to say about her pieces, because I’m reading them to educate myself about the oppression transpeople experience, and I’m just in absorb mode. For someone like me, who’s coming at that world from “cishet, ignorant” perspective, she’s an invaluable read.
The actions of the police state are a concern Shiv and I share, for different reasons. The stuff she’s writing about is what’s happening on the cutting end of the retro-scope and the intelligence state. All the stuff I post about surveillance is theoretical(-ish) and she’s talking about the fear that real people have to deal with, confronting the abuse of power by the state. It’s only going to get worse.
I just stumbled across this one; perhaps it’s what was going on with my browser the other day. I’ve been thinking about how to enumerate all the stuff that’s going on in a system – building a “petri dish” surrounded with sniffers, then watching and memory-scraping my browser to see what it was doing. It sounds like the answer would be “too much.”
The currency of computer security is Trust – the degree to which you can believe that your system is doing what you expect it to. There are a lot of properties that comprise trust, including integrity, reliability, etc., each of which is made up of smaller properties like non-repudiation, auditability, resistance to replay attacks, ad infinitum. We talk about trust loosely; it’s like Liberty or Good Cinematography – it’s a useful concept for describing the relationship between ourselves and the systems we use – whether they work right for any given notion of “right.”
Net Neutrality is a great big buzz-item right now, but I hate to tell you that battle has already been lost. It was lost in the late 90s, when marketing firms took over. All that the current controversy is arguing about is how much worse things are going to get.
In various postings this year, I’ve been guarded about the Russian attribution of the DNC email hacks.
It makes a certain inevitable sense that two of our topics: AI, and IQ tests, would collide. Do we have anything left but an epistemological trainwreck?
Artificial intelligence programmers are getting good results with self-training neural networks. That’s something I originally thought [stderr] wasn’t going to work, but I revised my opinion when Dota2 champion Dendi got beaten by a neural net that trained to play against a copy of itself. [stderr] [Read more…]
In computer security transitive trust is when system A trusts B, and system B trusts C – in that case system A trusts C but doesn’t usually realize it.