society
Broadband Steps Backwards
The recent news from broadband providers seems to be all about how to make their product less appealing to customers. First of all, the AP reports that AT&T is still considering filtering backbone traffic. They say they’ve noticed the massive amount of copyrighted data being shared over P2P networks, and feel a need to do [...]
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 [...]
New Legislation: SAFE and PRO IP
There has been some controversy over two new security-related bills in the United States Congress right now: the SAFE Act and PRO IP. The SAFE Act (Secure Adolescents From Exploitation Online; another case where the acronym almost certainly came first) aims to protect children and teenagers from exploitation by increasing enforcement of child pornography laws. [...]
Backdoored PNRGs from the NSA
Bruce Schneier has an article at wired.com about the new government-sponsored official standards for random number generators in NIST Special Publication 800-90. Apparently, it’s possible that one of them contains a back-door for the NSA; depending on how the constants in the algorithm were chosen, the NSA may have another set of constants that let [...]
The War on the Unexpected
Bruce Schneier has a good post today called “The War on the Unexpected,” about the unintended results of asking the general population to report anything suspicious. Even discounting deliberate malfeasance (reporting the neighbor you don’t like as “suspicious”), people find a lot of things suspicious, and the gatekeepers have no motivation to apply intelligent filtering [...]
