As something of a follow-up to my last post on Aviation Safety, I heard this story about Toyota’s now very public quality concerns on NPR while driving my not-Prius to work last week. Driving a Toyota may seem like a pretty risky idea these days. For weeks now, weve been hearing scary stories about sudden [...]
In his ongoing role of “person who finds things that I will find interesting,” Adam recently sent me a link to a paper titled “THE HUMAN FACTORS ANALYSIS AND CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM–HFACS,” which discusses the role of people in aviation accidents. From the abstract: Human error has been implicated in 70 to 80% of all civil [...]
In a comment, Wade says “I’ll be the contrarian here and take the position that using pie charts is not always bad.” And he’s right. Pie charts are not always bad. There are times when they’re ok. As Wade says “If you have 3-4 datapoints, a pie can effectively convey what one is intending to [...]
http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/about/presskits/SES_report_Feb2010.pdf Thanks to big yellow for not making us register! Oh, and Adam thanks you for not using pie charts…
In Verizon’s post, “A Comparison of [Verizon's] DBIR with UK breach report,” we see: Quick: which is larger, the grey slice on top, or the grey slice on the bottom? And ought grey be used for “sophisticated” or “moderate”? I’m confident that both organizations are focused on accurate reporting. I am optimistic that this small [...]
In December, Andy Jaquith and I had a fun conversation about info security with Bill Brenner listening in. The transcript is at “Meeting of the Minds,” and the audio is here.
The New School approach to information security promotes the idea that we can make better security decisions if we can measure the effectiveness of alternatives. Critics argue that so much of information security is unmeasurable, especially factors that shape risk, that quantitative approaches are futile. In my opinion, that is just a critique of our current methods [...]
They say that Y equals m-x plus b (well, when you remove the uncertainty). So let me reveal a secret confession: You’re the solution to my least squares obsession. stolen from the applied statistics blog
Open Security Foundation – Advisory Board – Call for Nominations: The Open Security Foundation (OSF) is an internationally recognized 501(c)(3) non-profit public organization seeking senior leaders capable of providing broad-based perspective on information security, business management and fundraising to volunteer for an Advisory Board. The Advisory Board will provide insight and guidance when developing future [...]
I don’t like the term “Best Practices.” Andrew and I railed against it in the book (pages 36-38). I’ve made comments like “torture is a best practice,” “New best practice: think” and Alex has asked “Are Security “Best Practices” Unethical?“ But people keep using it. Worse, my co-workers are now using it just to watch [...]