Collaborate Disseminate
A new article about the philosopher Wittgenstein’s passion for reading crime stories has an important insight into both the man and his methods: That a crime has been committed, [The Maltese Falcon author] Hammett knew, does not necessarily mean that a… Continue reading SolarWinds Breach is the Rule, Not an Exception
Have you been to a theater lately? Probably not because of the pandemic, but if you remember when we all used to go (including movie theaters, of course) we would watch performance art and like it (assuming it was well done and believable, of course). … Continue reading Deepfakes are Literally Security Theater
Sometimes I am asked to review or explain the Kahneman framework of thinking systems he wrote a book about. I suppose this comes up most when I describe the same things in many of my presentations, such as my last one given at RSAC: My point usually ha… Continue reading Kahneman Himself Clarifies Thinking Systems 1 and 2
In 1952 the American OPERATION STRANGLE in the Korean War… …dropped 600K tons of bombs on DPRK and 2 million civilians perished. It had reverse effect of expected and cauterized resistance. One of the most well-known yet least connected stories to such… Continue reading The Death of Double-Agent George Blake
There’s been a problem on the Internet for a long time, as we all know, that data integrity gets ignored by security professionals. Cliff “Cuckoo Egg” Stoll in 1995 infamously called this “Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana“, which everyone basically ignored… Continue reading Goebbels Never Said THAT!
There’s an important bit of knowledge buried in an interesting new article about the history of modern communication: A portmanteau of “binary digit,” a bit could be either a 1 or a 0, and Shannon’s paper is the first to use the word (though he said th… Continue reading Did Shannon Alone Invent Our Future?
Everyone at some point reaches the obvious conclusion that putting keyboard to screen (pen to paper, brush to parchment, chisel to wood and marble, etc) is similar across disciplines. Is a coder a poet, asks a fresh long article in the news. I consider… Continue reading Are Coders Poets?
Berkeley Law announced the first global protocol has been set to aid in using social media for war crime investigations. Launched in 2016, the center’s Investigations Lab is the first university-based open source investigations unit to discover and ver… Continue reading Social Media Protocol for Evidence of War Crimes
Recently I wrote about an Enigma encryption machine that showed up in a pigsty. The argument back then surely was nobody would find it. Now we can add a new twist to the list of places thought safe for disposal: an Enigma was found in the Baltic sea. “… Continue reading Nazi Enigma Machine Discovered on Seabed
Interesting development in Germany to restore phonetics that were erased by the Nazis Before the Nazi dictatorship some Jewish names were used in the phonetic alphabet – such as “D for David”, “N for Nathan” and “Z for Zacharias”. But the Nazis replace… Continue reading Germany’s Anti-Semitic Phonetic Alphabet