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Tag Archive for Kimberly Unger

You’re not paranoid… enough

February 23, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on You’re not paranoid… enough

 

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/02/superfish-doubles-down-says-https-busting-adware-poses-no-security-risk/

It’s almost a rite of passage.  You buy a shiny new computer (or tablet, or phone) and the very first thing you do (well, many of us anyways) is to start killing bloatware.  Virus checkers, game suites, custom browsers that direct you to a very specific set of stores, you name it, someone has paid the fee to have it sitting right there on your desktop as soon as you boot your machine for the first time.

But you don’t tend to think of these things as malicious.  Opportunistic?  Yes.  Annoying as all h*ll?  Absolutely.  Occasionally useful?  Okay, maybe.  And, while Just about everyone on the planet thinks it’s a P.I.T.A, not a lot of people seem to regard it as a threat.

Until now.

The issue, in this case, is not so much that the company in question is allowing ads to sneak in (that’s total crap, but not beyond the pale for the kinds of bloatware you find).  The real issue is that, in order to do it, they are bypassing security.  They are opening a door that a hacker with enough time and energy can exploit (and, lets face it, if there is a hole, they WILL find it.  period.  It’s not an IF question, it’s a WHEN and what color HAT are they wearing today question).

 

Transparency and Trees on the Ground

February 19, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on Transparency and Trees on the Ground

Image from www.abovetopsecret.com

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/sep/02/paulbrown

 

Oh I love this one.  I may call Lockheed to see what the status is, because the original article is from the turn of 2k, which puts it a touch out of date.

But it’s “clever”.  I love clever.  I love the idea of re-purposing things, of taking a technology designed for a single type of efficiency and adapting it for another.  I feel there is no f*cking reason that we can’t get our sh*t together and fix things when we break them.  That’s what we DO.  As a species, we solve problems.  If we can’t adapt, we make things adapt.

At the same time, I am fascinated by what goes WRONG when you try this as well.  This seems like a perfectly reasonable plan.  Laying down tree seeds instead of mines.  It was reportedly in testing and working well, the engineering had been done, the plans had been laid.

And then *poof*.  It’s gone.  Not another word.

I’ve got reasonably strong Google-fu, so if there is anything publicly available out there, I ought to be able to find it.  But nothing, nada.

Now I know it’s never pleasant to have to go online, or in front of a board, or to your parents or boss or best friend and report that this *really* cool expensive idea just didn’t pan out.  Fail fast and silently, that’s the Silicon Valley way.  But one of the benefits of transparency is that someone out there might just have the solution to your problem.

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