Data security and the sin of hubris

Hayek wrote in his Nobel lecture – “I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge. . . to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.” One of the biggest sins of man is hubris. The Obama administration is guilty of hubris. As an American living outside the US in the […]

Ethics and data loss prevention

Are we loving  the attackers and prosecuting the victims? In data security – I don’t subscribe to utilitarian ethics (which attempts to balance the benefit versus the damage of an act) and can lead to the ends justifying the means. For data security and compliance – I personally implement the “Ten commandments” approach – if […]

Reducing risk of major data loss events

Martin Hellman (of Diffie Hellman) fame maintains the Nuclear Risk web site and has written a very insightful piece on risk analysis of nuclear war entitled Soaring, cryptography and nuclear weapons Hellman proposes that we need a  third state scenario (instead current state – > nuclear war) where the risk of nuclear holocaust has been […]

US Military firms recruiting hacker soldiers

It seems that the GFC is creating a movement of migratory hi-tech workers from Silicon Valley to the Beltway. I’m not sure that an unemployed IT security analyst turned hacker is the best choice for a defense contractor – the really good guys and gals are always in demand – and those DC summers are […]

The death of regulation

I recently ran into a 2 year old post that decried the use of the term extrusion prevention calling it the “worst tech term of the year” I will cut the author of the article some slack as it was back in 2007 and a lot of folks were just coming to grips with the […]