Author: Maverisk

Merely convicted by PPT

Hm, there was this meme about Death By Powerpoint. Now, the toned-down version, conviction (attempt) by PPT, has been found in the wild. As in this here article. Where the prosecutor was too dumb to not hide the culpose text behind the 24-images-per-second visibility screen. [Is that ‘stego’ ..?]

Incentives, incentives…
DSCN1210[Vic chic]

HTTP status 418 against unpersonation

Though we’re halfway towards granting legal person rights to animals (as this and this show), and you know a lot of co-workers for whom this presents a nice little bit of progress, I’d say we have also moved great strides in the opposite direction.
Which is far more dangerous.

It all started, throughout the ages over and over again, with the already-responsibility-deprived weasels (a.k.a. ‘mere employees’ and ‘leaders’) wiggling out from under the burden of guilt for, e.g. most recently, the Sony hack, the financial crisis; you name it. With excuses ranging all the way from “I wasn’t important enough to had been able to make any noticeable difference anyway” to “If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have and at least now it was me with still some consciousness that did it” – where one’s character speaks through one’s actions …
Which in sum total, through a particularly nefarious twist of aggregation and emergence (read back this little badly unnoticed gem and you’ll get it) leads to … dehumanization of these speakers, and corporations seeking personhood as well.
Which is far more dangerous.

All of you that behave this way: You’re not underestimating the dystopian version of the Singularity, but actively bringing it on … by degrading your own independence, freedom (of mind and action!), identity, humanity, and value. By suppressing any questioning of the Überbureaucracy, actively, by frowning of much worse on those that want to remain human and social (i.e., exchange ideas). Etc. To no end.
To the end of letting the force of nature, the beast within, to explode out through the most deviant, unthinkably inhumane, behavior in particularly with the ones that were most and first in line with ratio, bureaucratic petty rules, i.e., the ones holding sway over all others including you. With the explosion hitting you, too – and you have no answer either now or then…

Complexity, of the world, of societies, of your immediate environments (Sloterdijk’s spheres, yes), of yourself, is no excuse to shut down. It should be a wake-up call, a call to arms, a sacrifice … not to ritually celebrate past developments, but to progress out of the complexity …!
My fabourite option: a healthy dose of status code 418 for all, not always, but every now and then, here and there. Life is too important to always take seriously!

Well, I’m off to some very dense prose, where mere text lines are ever more narrow in their description of the richness of the ideas and constructs to be discussed. Hence will part ways, with:
DSCN1441
[Bam! Out explodes the force of nature]

Short Insight: The Economic Triad

Yes a sudden microrevelation again:

Sedláček, Piketty and Graeber form a triad of social economics; possibly the Way Forward for the global society.

I mean, let’s connect the start and end ideas and conclusions, and the intermediate ones, of Economics of Good And Evil, Capital in the 21st Century, and Debt, the First 5000 Years, and you get my drift. Or not. But the latter is on you, half-joke only.

I cannot but leave you with:
20140917_092755_HDR[2][When you see it (the above), you may need one. At the Fabrique, of course]

Risk of being Duds

Wow, the new year starts of with … failure. I mean, apart from your inability to keep your New Year’s resolutions (already – if you need such a specific date like Jan 1 and the motivation of a ‘fresh start’ which, on the whole, it isn’t since calendars were invented as easy shorthands not life (so exactly) defined turning points) to change habits, … why didn’t you just change when the need arose ..? You’d be much further with it – the year is really off to a traditional start when failures of the past, are repeated ad nauseam… [As interlude: No, writing shorter sentences isn’t and wasn’t on any of my resolutions’ lists…]

Which one might expect from less-clear thinking professions. Though this post isn’t meant to address the precious few, the exceptions to the rule, I do mean ‘accountants’ and ‘IT-auditors’ (IS auditors that don’t understand) to be among those. That, apart from the slew of other vices you can easily sum up, tend to instruct others to do risk analysis this way:
R6 model
Yeah that’s in Dutch but you probably can make out the (actual) content and meaning. Being that the risk analysis is (to be) carried out top-down indeed, analyzing how lower layers of the model will (have to) protect against risks in the layers above, after the controls at any layer may have failed to ‘control’ the risks… [About that ‘control’ quod NON: See this here post of old.]

See? This just perpetuates the toxic myth of top-down analysis. The more one would follow this model, the more deluded one’s risk estimates would become… And this is proposed to lead the way in financial audits…
If you think this limits the Spectre of errors – this thinking permeates, and will permeate, the audit / inspection environment, leading to ‘Sony’. Yes, this erroneous thinking is at, or near, the root cause of that mess-up. [Anyone has seen proof that the NK actually did it, I mean, not the ‘proof’ trumped up by the most biased party ..?]

Whereas a bottom-up approach would show all the weaknesses that would create logically impossible effectiveness of higher-up ‘controls’. Controls just aren’t put in place to build a somewhat reliable platform to build higher-order controls on… Controls are put in place to try (in vein) to protect same-level risks throughout, as well, and higher-level controls were (are; hopefully not too much anymore) put in place to try to protect against all the lower-level controls failures not remediatable there… [‘Mitigation’ as the newspeak champion]
Hence, the distribution of error ranges (outside the acceptable sliver in the middle of the distribution of, e.g., transaction flows – hopefully that sliver is the intentional one) is ever wider the higher one goes in the ‘model’.

Rightfully wrecking your approach to financial audits, where not the risks of misrepresented true and fair views are managed, but the risks that the auditor is caught and found guilty of malpractice by not doing the slightest bit of the checking promised. ‘Assurance’ hence beginning with the right first three letters. Risk management to cut down the enormous workload (due to the overwhelming risks percolating up the model, as in reality they do..! hence having to check almost everything) to nicely within the commercial cutthroat race-to-the-bottom budget which is supplanted with ridiculously attractive (by bordering(!?)-on-the-fraudulent hourly rates) consulting business.

Now, the only hope we have is that the R6 model will not spread beyond … oh hey, googling it returns zero results – let’s keep it that way! Let’s not follow BAD guidance…

Jeez… And that’s only two of 124 pages of this…

I’ll leave you with …
20141101_155144[1]
At the door to
20141101_160525[1]
– if you know what these are, you know why they’re here…

ID card house coming down

With the ‘eavesdropping’ or whatshallwecallit of the German Defense Minister’s fingerprint, it seems that yet another card was pulled from the infosec card house of solutions. It looks like a distant relative in infosec land, on the ID side, has faltered. Or, has shown to be not 100% perfect. Dunno if that is newsworthy; apparently is.
Though apparently, in unrelated (?) news reports, not all tools out there have (yet) been cracked by TLAs. With Tor and Truecrypt as shining examples, but haven’t vulnerabilities in the schemes of those been demonstrated (at least theoretically)? So, are the leaked documents just bait to pull in as many ‘script’/privacy kiddies into environments where they actually can be tracked? If the leaked docu are false admittance of uncrackability … who can you trust, then?

Or is it all The Return To Normalcy, where we know all and every tool and method are not 100% perfect, let alone in themselves, and we will have to return to do a risk weighing for every action we take – allowing the Other Side(s) to also be relatively lax and fetch only the clearest of wrong-doer signals. This would require:

  • the boys-cried-wolf to tone down a little. Maybe selling less tools, maybe achieving more by more carefully spending the budget; a Win;
  • the n00b and drone mob users (think @pple users and like meek followers) to raise their constant awareness; a Win;
  • the ‘adversaries’ to not want to be perfect Big Brothers. Hard, to admit, and to not utterly destroy human rights, but necessary and sobering; a half Win.

So, … this card house tumble may turn out to be Progress.
I’ll leave you with:
DSCN1388[Fragile new, sturdy old; Cologne]

Going out / in

A final note … was meant to have some celebratory spirit. But maybe it’s also a looking-back bit in a sense, if you read between the lines; of the mess we’ve made of the world.
But then, it is a view on the actual, concrete and very Urgent problems we face in the near future, from (?) the here-and-now. So… read, and revel in the prospects of real societal progress that is possible – if all of us chip in and do something. Go ahead!

DSCN6308
[In Strasbourg, this part of a Solution was there long before the big part of the Problem was started there and in Burssels…]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord