Author: Maverisk

What happens when your CEO wants concrete examples of a risk you mention:

1. He’s (less often, she’s!) the “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions” kind of guy. Run. He doesn’t even understand his own role as the chief Leader. Just signing off on the preferred solution is for a middle, rather middling, manager [pejorative use; though I certainly don’t endorse that use, excepting exceptions] – don’t even bother trying to get the discussion going where you want it / where any sane person would require it to be; incompetence to think in abstractions oneself is what we have here. Whereas the solution, when it has to come from the ‘shop floor’ (relative! to the Board floor), it demonstrates the worst Peter Principle at work. Actually worse; the inverse i.e. those at the top have floated up by lack of weight the fastest, most ..!
2. He needs Gängelwagen [1] – conclusion: the same;
3. An ‘inversion of wits’ is what true Leaders demonstrate. Here, the surrounding themselves with people far smarter (obviously) may very, very well be the case but then not letting them have their way ..!? Second-guessing them ..!?
4. Hence [I’m using the numbered list style without purpose; you should know me to do such things by now] actually, one only has proper management-sometimes-ridiculously-called-governance, when communications any level up the organisation sees higher levers of abstraction being commonplace/rule. Including sanity checks along the way, of course, if that weren’t obvious as well.
5. Also, promote based on competence in thinking in abstractions, all the way up. The sheeple that come out of business schools with big-mouth blabber about how they understand and the rest not, may be relegated to literal-shop floor work. Such an increase in the quality of management!

Points 4 and 5 then, are hallmarks of Leaders. The other points, were already qualified. Did the above sound like frustration? Rightfully, yes; decades of it.

Never mind; and:

[Walls as thick as their skulls; Cordoba across the river]

[1] “So sind Beispiele der Gängelwagen der Urtheilskraft, welchen derjenige, dem es am natürlichen Talent derselben mangelt, niemals entbehren kann. (Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernuft 187 A 134, B 173-4)” [Note: the translation to ‘go-kart’ isn’t what Kant meant (read the original ..!!), ‘walker’ is the word you should use!]

Lately, there has been a slight resurge of the Leaders vs. Managers ‘debate’ [since I’m unsure it’s a debate as much as it is manager-bashing and oh the ideal is to be a Leader; later on that below], including some detail issues like language.

Contra this, first this, and then this. Plus this, and this.
( Contra that, many [of my own, and elsewhere]. )

Point being: The last This, is it. It is, since it shows that focusing on the ‘control’ element in ‘span of control’, doesn’t do much good; doesn’t help.

Leaders may be ‘above’ the fray, but they are still leading an army OR they’ll not achieve too much.
Yes, they may form the vanguard; yes, they may dwell in strategy – true leaders see that they also need to meddle in execution i.e., management and control or perish. Control, to manage the managers, and the managed messes.
Yes, the others, the not Our Kind Of People [think twice ..!!] are left to do the rear guard stuff ..? Or even the baggage train of all overhead of support functions, all of ‘GRC’ being a very, very prominent part in that. Your Head of IA is Mutter Courage, for example. With aside notes, of course.
Yes, the latter drags down. But also, the latter need to do risk management all the way, indeed. Freeing you the great Leader of the need to do that. Oh no, you only have to deal with visionary excellence – if and only if the Others do the chores of RM (being M) properly. But they don’t. And a leader that doesn’t check (s)he’s followed, will soon find himself alone, so very alone. Like these references among many others at the site of origin…

Case in point: Von Moltke the Elder’s remark re strategic plans. You go Leading in happyland; the rest of us will have to deal with the truth.

So, ‘control’ is not a dirty word. Even leaders ‘need’ to do it – true Leaders knwo they not only have to but see it is a major part of leading. No b-

Whatev’; and:

[Now there’s one; DC]

Following up on the earlier post on how GDPR is Y2k’s legal party sibling (as here and here), an evaluation – mid-term, mostly, re your compliance…:

1. You shouted loud enough. Right. That’s the Y2k escape claim in full force and colours. And untrue. The skies haven’t fallen in like they would have with the renewal of the millennium we live in, but a. things did go wrong, back then, and b. this time, non-compliance isn’t that obvious so your claim may fail, as shown in the next option:
2. There’s all sorts of under water non-compliance and you just haven’t been found out …yet. This is the dangerous one, where most of you will be…;
3. You actually are compliant and need not worry at all about possible audits, fines, etc. – that would be miraculous ..! Certainly since this.

So, all of you: Option 2 it is. ‘tMay now seem to just have been yet another law flying by to become and stay compliant with, but … are the professionals who do truly care the only ones that care somewhat, still ..?
Unfortunately, ‘privacy as a competitive differentiator’ hasn’t caught on. New-style-awareness hasn’t caught on.
Continue reading “The GDPR aftermath; your compliance from 00 to 0000”

You may have read that wrong. If so, that was my intention.

Skinny Tipping is about how tipping, e.g. in restaurants, is a balance thing. Certainly not to be overdone, like here. Nor Pittsburg blue but maybe closer to it. Yes, acknowledged, some Yanks err on the wrong side. Most ‘tourists’ err on the other wrong side, leaving only round-off change – next time, do please stay home if you think you can afford the (cattle class / cattle airliner) ticket but not proper behaviour … not defined by what you think that would be, but how it is defined where you find yourself. Fish out of the water? Don’t get out of the water, then. Bye. Don’t want to understand you, when you aren’t a proper guest. Good riddance.

The thing is, Skinny Tipping also goes for your (organisation’s) infosec. That should be done properly, but not a. close-to-zero, certainly not; b. ridiculous-spendwise, on the wrong things. Come to think of it; this also goes for organisation growth also in the private sector which by the way is a stupid name let’s revert to ‘for-profit’ that’s much clearer – why oh why must you grow into infinity where a. either you know can’t continue indefinitely or you’re a stool; b. that is in no way the purpose of your organisation nor of your existence.
Apart from the core basic full last penny’s worth of infosec you’re delivering already, right? The whole shazam, tit-for-tat [uh, no.], no holds barred. Not like this, au contraire my friend fully modern i.e. complete but leanymeany including this sort of sober wizardry but there’s more of course of this stuff to do.

But Skinny Tipping it is; sustainably doing a bit more than was strictly required; not by so slim a margin that no-one notices or feels unhappy/unsatisfied, nor by such an overshoot that anything later, or in parallel, the other ones feel undersold about and you can’t keep that up anyway.
And that is how it’s done, in infosec. True infosec, measured-bit-more than bang for the buck.

I’ll go party now. Because when you read this, it’s <something>:05 or :15, :25, :35, :45, :55 or close enough so the weekend has started.
Plus:

[I wouldn’t attempt skinny ‘tipping’ here…]

– still. Why don’t minds open up, and save a lot of lives ..?
I’m referring to this story, with this one behind it.

Imagine the cost savings if Science weren’t a. so stubborn, b. so completely tied up in commercial interests. The latter, proven over and over again to result in anti-societal behaviour. On a massive scale. If only science would be objective, reproduce claims, and then serve by whom it (?) is paid: Consumers i.e. human beings. No science doesn’t exist for the de-human shareholders nor the some of the latter that are the 0,1%.
Maybe millennials will shift society towards commusocialism. Which is dangerous in itself. Since it may lead to as many deaths as the inaction of science on this one. But the latter is more pernicious, harder to counter.

Well, let’s all stay positive, right?

[Under this starry ceiling, the chance of superbugs being present is … quite high yes; Grand Central]

It seems that LinkedIn posted a piece on how AI has taken over LinkedIn already, and <SkAInet!> they’re massaging our minds before they take over completely. Like, in this:

How you’d think that the first item is not heavily bot-driven, excusing, exonerating themselves [that word assumes agency, doesn’t it ..? 😳] ..? On command by some Power That/To Be, probably, but still.
Yes, I’m scaremongering. You’d need to, too.
Oh, plus of course:

[Don’t worry be happy, Blue Pill style all the way; Amsterdamse Bos]

Who in the world didn’t think this possible ..!? A bug it is. Google says the built-in microphone it never told Nest users about was ‘never supposed to be a secret’.
Of course, Big G claims the mics weren’t On at any point in time, it was just a (free; can you even start to think about the enormity of that claim from them!?) add-on, to be used only later … How trustworthy is that claim …? If you believe that, Santa, Bigfoot, the tooth fairy, etc.etc. are also real. No, no, I mean not only real but they all live in the White House.

Why did nobody take more care ..? Had nobody investigated the technicalities of the equipment ..? Probably Bystander Bugs.
… Not quite. Probably, the more weary already let the sheeple go first. [Disclaimer: I did, explicitly for this very / general security reason.]
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. [Abraham Lincoln? Not P.T. Barnum]
You can fool too many of the people too much of the time. [James Thurber]

Maybe laws are needed, to stop the gullible from their own lack of (prefrontal) brain capacity. Anyone who makes it possible to obtain, or conspires to make it possible to obtain either actively or by omission any personal information without consent, shall be fined all income and bonuses and other forms of compensation or renumeration as received over the past five years; in case of non-natural person(s) the fine shall be 10% of global turnover of the organisation and of any organisation that the non-natural person(s) are part of [to thwart jurisdiction shopping by conglomerates] payable in cash including all Board members being fined as natural persons as above.
Something along these lines.

Oh well. Also:

[Your coffers i.e. emptyness – last survivors have good winds; Porto / Foz do Douro]

Just a shortie again, for the weekend when you want to come back to being on top of things, things being the behavioural aspects of compliance.
As too many of us don’t seem to be well-connected enough in the Thinking that goes in in compliance-science circles.

Yes there is such a thing. Yes I know you think you’re all working in compliance the industry, maybe even too much so. But you don’t think you’re effective – as proven by your consistent complaints the ‘users’ don’t seem to ‘get’ it.

Maybe … you should do the read-up this weekend by means of these four articles plus a short vid [unfortunately, may need a professional re-take but still…].

Leaving you with:

[No fun being at the bottom, carrying the top in the clouds; La Défense a couple of years/decade ago]

As a sideline note; the evidence is mounting that the previous hype is fully over, when more and more of these kind of stories emerge [it’s not the first, and will certainly not be the last…], and only those that don’t understand the systemic impact of such ‘incidents’, the hype-laggards, still cling to the same thing as if something might still happen (not) just let those that really know the ins and outs work on it, slavishly, for years to come.

Which the latter won’t. They‘re not the stupids here. The ones you would want, have moved on [or will soon]. Since they do see that the Utopia once presented, will not work that way. The Ideal of it is infeasible; the decadent-hollow pastiche may work but is many thing just not the Ideal.

When (not if) by now you’re still unsure what I’m talking about … it’s just the Blockchain promise of ultimate security that is shown to be most-probably futile. What a way to tell, eh?

Plus:

[We need more research not on b-chains but on butterfly effects of non-compliance in day-to-day infosec without this leading to totalitarian distatorships over ’employees’ but that’s a tricky one, a thin line …; just a dagpauwoog peacock in my back garden through a 300mm]

Ah, not so long ago, I posted Lament:

Those were the days, when knowledge elicitation specialists had their hard time extracting the rules needed as feed for systems programming (sic; where the rules were turned into data, onto which data was let loose or the other way around — quite the Turing tape…), based on known and half-known, half-understood use cases avant la lettre.
Now are the days of Watson-class [aren’t Navy ships not named after the first of the class ..?] total(itarian) big data processing and slurping up the rules into neural net abstract systems somewhere out there in clouds of sorts. Yes these won out in the end; maybe not in the neuron simulation way but more like the expert system production rules and especially axioms of old. And take account of everything, from the mundane all the way to the deeply-buried and extremely-outlying exceptions. Everything.
Which wasn’t what experts were able to produce.

But, let’s check the wiki and reassure ourselves we have all that (functionality) covered in “the ‘new’ type of systems”, then mourn over the depth of research that was done in the Golden Years gone by. How much was achieved! How far back do we have to look to see the origins, in post-WWII earliest developments of ‘computers’, to see how much was already achieved with so unimaginable little! (esp. so little computing power and science-so-far)

Yes we do need to ensure many more science museums tell the story of early Lisp and page swapping. Explain the hardships endured by the pioneers, explorers of the unknown, of the Here Be Dragons of science (hard-core), of Mind. Maybe similar to the Dormouse. But certainly, we must lament the glory of past (human) performance.

And also AI into Evolve:

After the generic-AI hype will have slowed, and actual generic AI of the Normal kind gets integrated into society big time / you ain’t seen nothin’ yet time, what ..?

Apart from a huge spread of more ML algo’s than the mere Bayesian and non-linear regression (e.g., this one that I tested in a thesis already back in 1994 – it worked even when I had the feeble cpu power of the day),
And apart from the return of Expert Systems, since when the above start to become analysed everyone realises that is what ML does, on a big scale but still,
let me propose:

Evolutionary (genetic) algorithms.

Which is mentioned in this overview, I believe to recall – I’m human, and perfection is boring.
But not enough. Strange, when one considers how effective these are, and how e.g., ‘quantum computing’ actually is only a massively-parallel implementation of this.

Which made me consider even more, that we haven’t tackled the core ‘problem’ [That’s engineering-talk. Engineers find something, and solve it period. Not like those ‘alphas’ that keep on talking forever and then are very satisfied they did – notwithstanding the persistence of the problem, that’s not an issue for them; problems are to talk about not solve even when the hurt continues indefinitely hey we babbled away so who cares all are still in pain ..? Etc.].
The core problem being: How to get the I into machines ..!?
Which of course we can only do after we answered some more fundamental questions:

• What is this ‘intelligence’ thing you keep talking about? I don’t think it means what you think it means … [classic] By which I mean, where is it in the knowledge stack ..? And why do you refer to that, as it is so incredibly incomplete, e.g., it misses the idea of context completely. Whereas in this case, context is king, or emperor. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing [proof: the ‘executives’ that ‘lead’ your organisation; or, if you are one, look around you], but a lot of ‘knowledge’ without context and appropriateness of application of that knowledge, is far, far worse [proof: the ‘board room advisors’ that bypass you the real experts, of, if it’s the other way around, look around you. Or maybe you’re the Head Honcho for a reason (not)].
  Only if this ‘intelligence’ is properly defined, can we chase it. And find, that the average human doesn’t. As we consider ourselves to be above-average intelligence [Dunning-Kruger-like!], we consider also more than half of humanity to be of less wit that we ourselves – that’s how averages work [no, I know it’s not about averages but about medians but normalisation-wise it’s close enough together …];
• Context-awareness it is … How is that built into your ‘intelligent’ system? Or is the machine merely raw processing, with polishing required afterwards? Etc.; a lot of variables here. Sensors? Of what kind? Training data – with or without context data?
• Depth of intelligence; depth in field / width of field – how ‘much’ knowledge/intelligence is in your system? Also referring, in an intertwined way, back to the context: What is in, what is out?
• where on the bandwidth of structured-to-chaos? There’s classical algorithms on the one end, and full ANI/AGI/ASI even on the other. In between: Expert systems, Big Data correlations, classifier ML, more-complex ML, basic neural nets, complex neural nets, evolutionary algorithms [or are they a separate, close but parallel track?] … We need to establish a proper scale for this even when allowing for a 2^nd dimension of the above factors, to go along with it.

Which is sort-of the purpose of this post. Surely, I’m not the first one to have considered this; would any of you have pointers ..? I’d be delighted to hear / cross-post / Like (well…)

TIA, and:

[In for Skinny Tipping – “what’s that?”: Keep an eye open for next Friday’s post (22^nd). This, Resson France no you won’t be going there if you knew it]