Lonely Fence Is Lonely

from here (source image)

While there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, there's also such a thing as too little. If you cut corners too much you won't be able to keep the bad things out.

Do You Choose To Have Your Privacy Invaded By Using Technology?

It's nice to see PBS Idea Channel try to tackle the issue of online privacy. There are certainly those who will claim that you do make this choice when you use technology, but I tend to agree with Mike that the choice isn't as simple as it sounds and in some ways isn't really much of a choice at all (unless you're OK with cutting yourself off from a lot of the ways people interact with each other nowadays).

One nit pick, though, is that although Mike framed it this way, it's not the Internet that's necessarily insecure, it's computers themselves that are necessarily insecure. As the infosec saying goes:

If it runs software then it's vulnerable. If it's connected then it's exposed.

Big Brother's Worst Enemy

from here (source image)

Thanks to Jenni Leder for tweeting about this great face painting story. I've seen pictures before where people painted lines and funny angles on their face with the idea that it could foil facial recognition, but this example of faces within faces looks like it could make a computer throw a fit.

I Heartbleed NSA

found on Hackajar on Everything

It appears that Robert Imhoff has come up with quite a nice looking graphic that you can put on stickers (and presumably other things) to commemorate the Heartbleed bug and the theories about the NSA using it.

Unfortunately, it appears he's only doing the image and not actually setting up a store for you to buy the stickers themselves like I would have done. I guess if you want it on a sticker (or a T-shirt, or something else) you'll just have to upload the image to a printer yourselves and have it made that way.

(Hint for Robert: it doesn't cost you anything to set up a store at CafePress or Zazzle or any number of other similar sites)

There's Only One Person Creating Fear Here

from here (source image one and two)

I don't know what it is with Eugene Kaspersky and the Die Hard 4 movie plot, but as I recall from the movie, the person who vehemently warned that the country was vulnerable to attack subsequently went on to prove it by attacking the country.  He wasn't the hero that Kaspersky likes to style himself as, he was the villain. Maybe Kaspersky should keep that in mind the next time he gets the impulse to mimic the character Thomas Gabriel's reputed behaviour.

Keep It In Your Pants

found on the meta picture

The best place to hide something is somewhere that people won't or don't want to look.

You Can Pick Your Nose But Don't Pick Those

from here

Seriously, a good password manager will not only store and enter passwords for you, it'll generate them too. Choosing them yourself is so obsolete.

It's On Port 80? That Should Be Fine

link to tweet

It's true that firewalls have simply forced people (good and bad) to tunnel over ports that are most likely to be open but, despite this, the addition of a firewall in later service packs of Windows XP made a huge improvement in security for that platform.

SSL Encryption Isn't Magical Security Dust

from here (background info)

SSL encryption isn't magical security dust that solves all security problems. It does a pretty good job of preventing legitimate visitor's data from getting leaked to malicious 3rd parties, but it does absolutely nothing to protect a website against a malicious visitor. Sears clearly needs a better way to handle website vulnerability reports.

Thanks to Louis Nadeau for tweeting about this, and Andrew Leeming for bringing it to my attention.

(Update 2016/08/13: According to Louis Nadeau, everything went much more smoothly after that initial mix-up, but wow what a mix-up)

Is this really an unpickable lock?

(Thanks to Squelchtone for tweeting this)

Is this lock unpickable? Possibly, but that doesn't mean what you might think it means. Lock picking is only one type of attack one can perform on a lock. It doesn't mean the lock can't be bypassed in some other way.

Maybe impressioning would work. Here's a video by Deviant Ollam showing a 6 year old performing an impressioning attack on a lock.