Adam recently sent me a link to a paper titled, “Understanding scam victims: seven principles for systems security.” The paper examines a number of real-world (i.e. face-to-face) frauds and then extrapolates security principles which can be applied generically to both face-to-face and information or IT security problems. By illustrating these principles with examples taken from [...]
This is cool. Visualization of relative storage capacities in terms of media and format. Notice that it goes all the way back into pre-digital forms, a subtle tweak that I’ll bet a lot of people miss on first inspection. Too bad, too, since the ability to seamlessly compare seemingly-different things is a valuable skill when [...]
Cormac Herley at Microsoft Research has done us all a favor and released a paper So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users which opens its abstract with: It is often suggested that users are hopelessly lazy and unmotivated on security questions. They chose weak passwords, ignore [...]
A relevant tale of medical survival over at The Reality-Based Community: Three years ago a 39-year-old American man arrived at the haematology clinic of Berlin’s sprawling Charité hospital. (The venerable Charité, one of the great names in the history of medicine, used to be in East Berlin, but it’s now the brand for the merged [...]
Since Adam started it, I’ll add a link to a nice YouTube video about how to be a good skeptic h/t BoingBoing
I’m cleaning out my pending link list with couple morbidly-thematic links. Old-but-interesting (2007 vintage) list of relative likelihoods of death compared to dying in a terrorist attack. For example… You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack You are 12 times more likely to die from [...]
Update 26 June 2009: The status of Green Dam’s optionality is still up in the air. See, for example, this news story on PC makers’ efforts to comply, which points out that Under the order, which was given to manufacturers in May and publicly released in early June, producers are required to pre-install Green Dam [...]
I haven’t had a chance to read it, but I’ll probably pick up “Absinthe and Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously” at some point, if only because of the author’s writing on the relationship between risk and happiness says something I’ve always suspected, that risk takers are happier than risk avoiders [...]
I found this short documentary about piracy around the Straits of Malaca to be an interesting view of the reality of pirate life as a last refuge of the unemployed fisherman to be an interesting counterpoint to the NPR Story, “Behind the Business Plan of Pirates, Inc.” which provides an altogether different view of the [...]
cloudenfreude — Feeling of happiness at watching the discomfort of others, especially senior management, as they accept in aggregate for *aaS the same risks which were easily accepted piecemeal over time for the analgous service internally.