Category: Security

Security is immunity from the will of others.

Obama climate interview

Thomas Friedman interviews Obama on climate change, and the president explicitly states that we can’t burn all the world’s remaining fossil fuels and that we should keep to the target of keeping warming below 2˚C.

He also endorses a price on carbon.

This makes it seem that Obama does understand the key dimensions of climate change; he just hasn’t made dealing with it a high enough priority to produce the kind of progress that is necessary for achieving the 2˚C target.

Ghost in the Wires

A friend of mine recently lent me Kevin Mitnick‘s book Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker. It’s an entertaining story that highlights how the willingness of people to trust and help others who they assume to be co-workers is often the greatest weakness in security systems.

It also highlights some of the characteristics of obsessive behaviour. I had no idea how many separate times Mitnick was caught. It reminded me of Marc Lewis’ Memoirs of an Addicted Brain, in terms of how repeated contact with agents of authority was insufficient to interrupt a longstanding pattern of behaviour.

The book is also a reminder of what seems like a more innocent era of global interconnectivity – when phone phreaks with blue boxes were a cutting-edge threat, and when the FBI would have real trouble tracking you down if you assumed the identity of someone who died in childhood. Now, attacks against computer systems seem associated more with governments themselves than with curious amateurs, and it’s difficult to imagine someone like Mitnick evading the surveillance state for long.

The heartbleed bug is bad news for internet security

Many websites rely on SSL / TLS to encrypt communication: everything from passwords to credit card numbers to emails. OpenSSL is a very widely used implementation of these encryption protocols.

Right now, the internet is abuzz with the news of the ‘hearbleed’ bug. Because of a flaw in OpenSSL, attackers can extract 64 kilobytes of information from a webserver for each ‘heartbeat’. This information can include secret encryption keys, usernames and passwords, and other kinds of sensitive data.

In response, the Canada Revenue Agency has stopped accepting online filing of tax returns. There is a lot of other discussion online: Schneier, XKCD. A tool for testing webservers for the vulnerability is also online.

One take-away from this is that once various web servers are fixed, we will all need to change our passwords.

Pushing back against internet surveillance

An international effort is being made today to fight back against internet surveillance.

If you wish to take part, I suggest doing so by downloading a version of the GNU Privacy Guard for your operating system, in order to encrypt your emails. Gpg4Win is for Windows, while GPGTools is for Mac OS.

Downloading the TOR Browser Bundle is also a good idea.

Lastly, you may want to learn how to use your operating system’s built-in disk encryption: BitLocker for Windows and FileVault for Mac OS.

None of this is likely to protect you from the NSA / CSEC / GCHQ, but it will make ubiquitous surveillance a bit harder to enforce.

Open thread: naval warfare

There have been a number of interesting developments in the area of naval warfare recently: Chinese efforts to develop anti-ship ballistic missiles, American experiments with broad area marine surveillance, China’s declaration of an air defence identification zone, the launching of a Japanese destroyer seemingly designed for possible conversion into an aircraft carrier, the launching of China’s first aircraft carrier, and the development of supercavitating torpedoes, to name a few.

Particularly in Asia, the coming decades seem likely to involve considerable developments in marine military technology and deployments.

Odd fact about the yakuza

Yakuza operate much more openly than their counterparts in other countries. Crime syndicates have offices registered with local public-safety commissions. Membership is not in itself a crime. The biggest and richest group, the Yamaguchi-gumi, shelters behind a high-walled compound in a grand neighbourhood of Kobe.

See also: Yakuza

Also: “These lesser [sokaiya] cousins of the yakuza extract tens of millions of yen from companies in return for not disrupting annual meetings”.