Worst.Technology.Application.Ever. (?)

It’s occurring to me this morning that in terms of benefit/cost, purely in “damage to society” terms, the decision to put html in emails could be one of the worst ideas in the past 25 years. But that’s just me.  Your thoughts on others in the comments?

Quick Quotes For Your Morning

From Krugman (commentary is his): “Without metrics, you’re just another guy with an opinion. — Stephan Leschka, Hewlett Packard When I hear words from almost anyone about how their approach is better than some other approach, I think of this quote. And as Daniel Patrick Moynihan said: Every man is entitled to his own opinion, [...]

VERIS Community Data

Seriously. Interesting.  Go check this out: http://securityblog.verizonbusiness.com/2011/04/12/veris-community-project-update/ Take a look, impact information!

Why Do You Write The Way You Do?

Hey Kids, Reader Mark Wallace wrote in a comment to the blog yesterday, and I wanted to answer the comment in an actual blog post. So here goes: – Mark, Thanks for reading! There’s a point where publicly writing forces me to answer a few questions that I’m not ready to make a quick decision [...]

What is Risk (again)?

The thread “What is Risk?” came up on a linkedin Group. Thought you might enjoy my answer: ———————- Risk != uncertainty (unless you’re a Knightian frequentist, and then you don’t believe in measurement anyway), though if you were to account for risk in an equation, the amount of uncertainty would be a factor. risk != [...]

Why The New School Is Important

I participated in another security metrics and risk discussion yesterday (yeah, me talk about metrics & risk –  you don’t say).  As part of this discussion someone echoed a sentiment I’ve been hearing more and more of recently.  A casual acceptance of the logic of metrics and data followed quickly by a dismissive, skeptical statement [...]

NewSchool Zombies, Moneyball, & Metrics

Hey!   Tomorrow at 1pm ET reg now: @joshcorman & I redux our (in)famous ‘Metrics are Bunk!?’ debate from RSAC 2011: http://bit.ly/i6z1BL              

Hey! SourceBoston is going to be CRAZY!

Not crazy like Sammy-Hagar-has-clearly-abused-his-brain-and-its-giving-him-bad-information-to-come-out-of-his-mouth crazy, but crazy like, there-are-so-many-good-talks-you-can’t-possibly-not-get-value-out-of-the-conference crazy. For example, I’ll be talking twice. Once with Dan Geer and Greg Shannon about Prediction Markets in InfoSec.  Then I’ll be giving one of THE FIRST EVER (!) debriefings of the 2011 DBIR (which is going to be crazy like both of the above). I’m [...]

Back to You, Rob!

Rob is apparently confused about what risk management means. I tried to leave this as a comment, but apparently there are limitations in commenting.  So here go:   Rob, Nowhere did I imply you were a bad pen tester.  I just said that you should have a salient view of failure in complex systems (which [...]

Actually It *IS* Too Early For Fukushima Hindsight

OR – RISK ANALYSIS POST-INCIDENT, HOW TO DO IT RIGHT Rob Graham called me out on something I retweeted here (seriously, who calls someone out on a retweet?  Who does that?): http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2011/03/fukushima-too-soon-for-hindsight.html And that’s cool, I’m a big boy, I can take it.  And Twitter doesn’t really give you a means to explain why you [...]