Category: security

Q&A with Bruce Schneier

There is a very interesting Q&A with security expert and internet meme Bruce Schneier over at the Freakonomics page. While the page is a bit lengthy it is a good read and should be read by all, particularly the less internet savvy as there is a lot to take away.

He describes a very effective way of storing and using passwords. It is a technique I have been using for years and usually recommend to family and friends.

Q: How do you remember all of your passwords?

A: I can’t. No one can; there are simply too many. But I have a few strategies. One, I choose the same password for all low-security applications. There are several Web sites where I pay for access, and I have the same password for all of them. Two, I write my passwords down. There’s this rampant myth that you shouldn’t write your passwords down. My advice is exactly the opposite. We already know how to secure small bits of paper. Write your passwords down on a small bit of paper, and put it with all of your other valuable small bits of paper: in your wallet. And three, I store my passwords in a program I designed called Password Safe. It’s is a small application — Windows only, sorry — that encrypts and secures all your passwords.

Here are two other resources: one concerning how to choose secure passwords (and how quickly passwords can be broken), and one on how lousy most passwords actually are.

D’Officials – No Hoodies!

In Ireland there are two constructs, “The Man” and “A boy”, that are used by parents to corral their kids in. “A boy” is usually a person that got himself injured doing something stupid and is used as a warning to other kids, “A boy broke his legs climbing over those rocks”, or “A boy almost had his finger cut off climbing in that window”. (There is a window in the primary school of Dungeagan in Ballinskelligs, Co Kerry and I was that boy that people get warned about).

“The Man” however is the marginally empowered person that flexed it when ever he can. You meet them all the time when you go through metal detectors in airports and they take away nail clippers, or the security guards that tell you you can’t take pictures of a building. The comedian’s John Kenny and Pat Shortt, also know as D’Unbelievables, capture the phenomenon excellently at the start of the performance on D’Video :

I was reminded of “The Man” while reading Bruce Schneier blog, where in the UK a four year old girl was asked to remove her hoodie for vague “security” reasons:

“She had her hood up on her cardigan, a young lad came across and asked her to take her hood down because of security.”

When Ms Lewis learned what had happened, she spoke to the worker. She said: “He said ‘It’s policy, they don’t allow any hoodies in there.'”

While it would be great in society to slap these upside the head and tell them to stop acting the maggot that usually doesn’t help so we’ll always be stuck with them. Here’s another example of “The Man” from Father Ted :

Watch out for RoboCrooks


There are a few things in life that are scary, terrorists and clowns are obviously at the top of the list. However officials can freeze my soul from time to time. It can’t be easy running a country or even small parts of it. Some times they might be privy to information that they would rather not know. The Sydney Morning Hearld has an article today with comments from the Commissioner for the Australian Police (AFP) Mick Keelty. In it he discussed the rise of more technical savvy criminal and the challenges that it places on the Federal government to have a matching policing response. I don’t think any body would doubt that this is true, online fraud is one of the fastest and most profitable industries today.

What did give me pause however was his comments on cloning :

“Our environmental scanning tells us that even with some of the cloning of human beings – not necessarily in Australia but in those countries that are going to allow it – you could have potentially a cloned part-person, part-robot,”

Now I see two possibilities here :

  1. That the aliens that crash landed in Roswell 60 years ago brought with the more fantastic technology than just velcro. During that time the wussy public face of robotic and cloning have hidden the real fact that a full human clone can now be grown and bits of the clone that are not up to the task can be married with fully functional bonic replacements that are not only as good but better than the human body. The result of these experiments are now, obviously, just about to break out as super criminals.
  2. That the Commissioner got wasted last night while watching DVDs of “The 6 million dollar man” and “The Island“. The pizza was a bit funny and in the morning things hadn’t quite settled down so the barrier between reality and fantasy broke down briefly which resulted in the brain fart.

All jokes aside, comments like this are actually more dangerous than people might realise. Most of the Commissioners comments are entirely accurate, but when these very same comments are recorded and hit the intertubes it is no surprise when there is much dirision and the sanity gets drowned out by the nonsense.