Perilocity

Design in Security; Don't Wait to Defend

Gunnar recommends building in security instead of waiting to catch the horses after they're out of the barn:

The way out of this is for security to get involved in building better systems, getting involved in the system development, Identity management, and coding. Come to the table with useful tools such as Threat Models and Misuse Cases, and make sure you are there early enough to have an impact. Three places to focus are application development, databases, and identity. Time for security to live in code and config not in Visio drawings.

As Gandhi supposedly said about western civilization: "That would be a good idea!"

Iranian Internet Disturbances

Here's an example of some Internet routing in Iran, in this case on the way to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday 15 June 2009. Normally, routing and latency don't change much. Starting Saturday 13 June, the day after the election, routing and latency have become increasingly disturbed. More here.

Twitter Reschedules

Twitter recognizes that a network upgrade is important, but the role twitter is playing in Iran is more important, and reschedules for 1:30 AM Iranian time. Now that's risk management!

Would that U.S. states had all rescheduled Diebold and the like to the junk heap after the 2000 U.S. election.

Also notice who twitter's hosting service is: NTT America. I've been predicting for years that the U.S. duopoly's intransigence would lead to NTT and other competent international ISPs eating their lunch, and I see it's beginning to happen.

-jsq

Windows Considered Not Ready for the Desktop

R. McDougall takes the high ground for open software:

0. Premise: free and open software will stay indefinitely. Full stop. You may argue eternally, but free software is the ultimate disruptive technology, moving up from the low ground, replacing complicated and ill-fitting proprietary alternatives at every turn, such as web-browsers, e-mail clients, video players, office software, etc., which at one point cost money, but now most people find that they can no longer justify spending money to buy an upgrade for more "Clippy the Happy Assistant". Proprietary software will only be able to stay relevant by searching out ever more niche applications, or by massive expenditure on research in high-end applications for which it will take time for the ideas and algorithms to filter down to the greater community, and thus a brief window of profitability will remain. Software patents are nothing but a destructive force to retard innovation, and with more and more of the technology and legal communities realizing this basic fact, software patents are about to go away forever.

I think he's being a bit optimistic about software patents, but no more so than Windows advocates claiming that open software is a flash in the pan. Then he gets into the undeniable stuff, chief of which is:

1.1 History's greatest playground for malicious software. With unpatched machines on the internet taking only minutes to become infested with viruses, or become a slave bot for massive illegal spamming operations, Windows is a blight on the Internet's infrastructure.

And it keeps getting better. He says he wrote it just as a game, but it pretty much spells out why I don't use Windows, plus why Windows is a menace to the Internet.

Pirate Party Legitimized by Winning EU Parliament Seat

There's lots of academic and commercial effort put into stopping software and other intellectual property piracy, especially for videos. A form of risk management, I suppose, but one that ignores the much bigger risk to traditional intellectual property of causing political blowback such as what just happened in Sweden:

“Together, we have today changed the landscape of European politics. No matter how this night ends, we have changed it,” Falkvinge said. “This feels wonderful. The citizens have understood it’s time to make a difference. The older politicians have taken apart young peoples’ lifestyle, bit by bit. We do not accept that the authorities’ mass-surveillance,” he added.

Funny thing about what happens when the majority of the population participates in an illegal activity: eventually it's not illegal anymore.

At least partially, The Pirate Party puts its increased popularity down to harsh copyright laws and the recent conviction of the people behind The Pirate Bay. After the Pirate Bay verdict, Pirate Party membership more than tripled and they now have over 48,000 registered members, more than the total number of votes they received in 2006.

With their presence in Brussels, the Pirate Party hopes to reduce the abuses of power and copyright at the hands of the entertainment industries, and make those activities illegal instead. On the other hand they hope to legalize file-sharing for personal use.

Many of those abuses of power probably already are illegal; the appropriate laws just aren't being enforced. We saw this during alcohol prohibition in the U.S., and we see it now with marijuana prohibition in the U.S. The first prohibition ended, the second probably will, and meanwhile, online "piracy" is on its way to being redefined.

-jsq

Van Meter on Barabasi and Doyle on Internet topology and risks

Rodney Van Meter, co-teaching a class by Jun Murai, posts notes on why Albert-László Barabási (ALB) is both right and wrong about the Internet (it is more or less a scale-free network when considered as a network of Autonomous Systems (AS), but contrary to ALB's assumption John Doyle and others have pointed out that the bigger nodes are not central, an AS as a node would be somewhat difficult to take out all at once, there are both higher and lower layer topologies that make the Internet more robust, and the Internet's biggest problem isn't topology at all:

The most serious risks to the Internet are not to individual "nodes" (ASes), but rather stem from the near-monocropping of Internet infrastructure and end nodes, and the vulnerability of the system to human error (and political/economic considerations):

Monoculture, who would have thought it?

For that matter, the Internet's ability to reroute has been very useful to ameliorate topological link breaks at the physical layer, for example undersea cables in the Mediterranean Sea twice last year.

Cultural Risk

Or risk as culture. Malcolm Gladwell writes in his book, Outliers:

The historian David Arkush once compared Russian and Chinese peasant proverbs, and the differences are striking. "If God does not bring it, the earth will not give it" is a typical Russian proverb. That's the kind of fatalism and pessimism typical of a repressive feudal system, where peasants have no reason to believe in the efficacy of their own work. On the other hand, Arkush writes, Chinese proverbs are striking in their belief that "hard work, shrewd planning and self-reliance or cooperation with a small group will in time bring recompense."

Here are some of the things that penniless peasants would say to one another as they worked three thousand hours a year in the baking heat and humidity of the Chinese rice paddies (which, by the way, are filled with leeches):

"No food without blood and sweat."

"Farmers are busy; farmers are busy; if farmers weren't busy, where would grain to get through the winter come from?"

"In winter, the lazy man freezes to death."

"Don't depend on heaven for food, but on your own two hands for carrying the load."

"Useless to ask about the crops, it all depends on hard work and fertlizer."

"If a man works hard, the land will not be lazy."

And, most telling of all, "No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich."

As Gladwell points out, this is a bit of a different attitude to those of the nut-gathering !Kung or the medieval French peasant. Or, for that matter to the 40-hour-week office dweller. Any of them would consider working 360 days a year, which at even 8 hours a day is 2880 hours a year, to be hazardous to their health. But if you're hand cultivating rice paddies, with your family, it's a bigger risk not to work that hard.

Checks on Checks, or Shipping and Shipping Software

Paul Graham points out that big company checks on purchasing usually have costs, such as purchasing checks increase the costs of purchased items because the vendors have to factor in their costs of passing the checks.

Such things happen constantly to the biggest organizations of all, governments. But checks instituted by governments can cause much worse problems than merely overpaying. Checks instituted by governments can cripple a country's whole economy. Up till about 1400, China was richer and more technologically advanced than Europe. One reason Europe pulled ahead was that the Chinese government restricted long trading voyages. So it was left to the Europeans to explore and eventually to dominate the rest of the world, including China.

— The Other Half of "Artists Ship", by Paul Graham, November 2008

I would say western governments (especially the U.S.) subsidizing petroleum production and not renewable energy is one of the biggest source of current world economic, political, and military problems. Of course, lack of checks can also have adverse effects as we've just seen with the fancy derivatives the shadow banking system sold in a pyramid scheme throughout the world. It's like there should be a balance on checks. Which I suppose is Graham's point: without taking into account the costs of checks (and I would argue also the risks of not having checks), how can you strike such a balance?

He doesn't neglect to apply his hypothesis to SOX:

Confusopoly, or Scott Adams, Prophet of Finance

While sitting in a small room perusing a book from the bottom of the stack, The Dilbert Future, I idly looked again at Scott Adam's prediction #2:

In the future, all barriers to entry will go away and companies will be forced to form what I call "confusopolies".

Confusopoly: A group of companies with similar products who intentionally confuse customers instead of competing on price.

OK, good snark. But look at the list of industries he identified as already being confusopolies:

• Telephone service.
• Insurance.
• Mortgage loans.
• Banking.
• Financial servvces.

Telephone companies of course since then have gone to great lengths to try to nuke net neutrality.

And the other four are the source of the currrent economic meltdown, precisely because they sold products that customers couldn't understand. Worse, they didn't even understand them!

It gets better. What industry does he predict will become a confusopoly next? Electricity! And this was in 1998, before Enron engineered confusing California into an electricity-price budget crisis.

For risk management, perhaps it's worth considering that simply selling something the customer can understand can rank way up there. Certainly for the customer's risk. And given how much the FIRE companies drank their own Kool-Aid, apparently it's good risk management for the company itself. Especially given that the Internet now gives the customer more capability to find out what's going on behind a confusopoly and more ability to vote with their feet.

To actually make a product the customer wants, and then provide good customer service: how old-fashioned! And how less risky and more profitable in the long term.

Crossing the Street in Cyberspace: Michael Kaiser and the National Cyber Security Alliance

If you grew up in a small town, you'd likely cross the street without stopping to look each way. Try that in New York City, and you'll end up in the hospital. Similarly, most of us grew up in meatspace and clicking on any old link in cyberspace often ends up with our bank account in the hospital.

OK, that was my mangled simile, but it illustrates what Michael Kaiser and the National Security Alliance are trying to do: educate the public about what to do and not do in cyberspace without losing their audience with technical details or lengthy pedantic instructions. In his talk at APWG he had all sorts of interesting points, such as address different audiences (K-12, small business, elderly, etc.) differently, and that it's not just unlearning bad habits (including ones that would be good habits in other contexts), it's teaching good habits. ANd changing habits of any kind requires repetition and persistence. As Kaiser said, look at the CDC and its ongoing campaigns of prevention of HIV, domestic violence, etc.

Personally, I think staysafeonline.org could use more graphics and less text, or, more importantly, more storyline. It seems a tad pedantic to me. More poets in prevention! Or more marketing in staying safe. Or something.

But it's a useful site already.