risk
Mom lets 9-year-old take subway home alone!
The Today Show has a cover story today entitled “Mom lets 9-year-old take subway home alone.” The controversy over this — that is, the fact that there is any — is a wonderful example of how poorly people assess risk in modern society. What this woman, Lenore Skenazy, has done to stir up trouble is [...]
Deterring the Internal Attacker
On January 21st, 2008, the major French bank Société Générale lost $7.09 billion attempting to unwind unauthorized trading positions taken by Jérôme Kerviel, a futures trader with the bank. Kerviel had taken positions worth $73.3 billion, far above not only his trading limits but the bank’s entire market capitalization. The loss taken by unwinding the [...]
The Resilient Society, and How Not To Build It
Today I found a link to an article by my least-favorite current presidential candidate, Rudy Giuliani. I was expecting a cavalcade of fear-mongering — his usual stock in trade — but discovered to my surprise an article entitled “The Resilient Society.” This gave me pause, as resilience is precisely what I believe must be the [...]
Checks: The Most Dangerous Transaction
During this year’s Christmas shopping season, I made some large in-person transactions at the same time as my wife made an online transaction, and my credit card was suspended by the issuing bank for potential fraudulent activity. This happens relatively often, whenever someone’s spending patterns are flagged by the neural-network based automated fraud detection used [...]
Flash and the Same-Origin Policy
Web browsers protect the user from attacks largely through the same-origin policy: any code from one web site (such as HTML pages or JavaScript) is not permitted to interact with any code from another web site. I can make a web page that embeds a Hotmail window in the middle of it (with an IFRAME), [...]
