Information Security – Page 22 – Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord

Last night a … saved me (updated)

As @swiftonsecurity (and of course @meneer of #ditchcyber fame) and others may improve since the rhythm is only almost perfect, already this:

[To the music but outdated lyrics of Indeep — but what style …
(Hey @ESCIA is that you with the mic ..?)]

You gotta reboot ~~get up~~
You gotta reload ~~get on~~
You gotta restore ~~get down~~ girl
You know you drive me #DIV/0! ~~crazy~~ baby
You’ve got me turning to another OS ~~man~~
Called you on the VOIP ~~phone~~

No one’s pinging back ~~home~~
Baby why ya leave me all >dev/null ~~alone~~
And if it wasn’t for the endless GitHub surfing ~~music~~
I don’t know what I’d do

Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC ~~life~~
Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC ~~life~~ from a broken pipe ~~heart~~
Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC ~~life~~
Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC ~~life~~ with a patch ~~song~~

You know I hopped into my notepad ~~car~~
Didn’t need to leave the coffee shop ~~get very far no~~
Because I had you on my stash of data-breached X-rated pics ~~mind~~
Why only give you a ticket and secretly close it immediately ~~be so unkind~~?

You’ve got your hapless users ~~women~~ all around
All around this AD ~~town~~, boy
But I was trapped in the SLA from hell ~~love~~ with you
And I didn’t know what to do
But when I turned on my RTFManual ~~radio~~
I found out all I needed to key in ~~know~~
Run the diagnostics kit ~~Check it out~~

Hey listen up to your local information risk / security management professional
You better hear what he’s got to type so fast you can’t keep track ~~say~~
There’s not a problem that I can’t fix
Cause I can do it in the rogue exploit suite ~~mix~~
And if your crappy ol’ XP machine ~~man~~ gives you trouble
Just you step away from the keyboard ~~move~~ out on the double
And you don’t let it trouble your ‘brain’ ~~brain~~
Cause away goes PEBKAC ~~troubles~~
Down the drain
I said away goes PEBKAC ~~troubles~~
Down the drain

Last night an information risk / security management professional saved my desktop PC ~~life~~
There’s not a problem that I can’t fix
Cause I can do it in the rogue exploit suite ~~mix~~
There’s not a problem that I can’t fix
Cause I can do it in the rogue exploit suite ~~mix~~

Quite an improvement indeedp … And leaving you with, of course:

You must, you mustn’t

Strange. The last couple of weeks, months, have seen a resurgence of “Anything that is not explicitly forbidden, is allowed.”
Which was, well, true in only the most devolved, twisted (pejorative sense) means/ends ethics and morals discussions. And still is. But suddenly, there’s a new angle: All that aren’t involved in the spoils of such tactics (not being rich enough to have used Panama Paper style constructions, even when not aware as such vulgar ‘money’ things had been handled by sycophant minions (of mind, certainly)), want the overthrow of the said sad sentence, by including that all that is permitted, should not be done when (not if) the moral higher ground would forbid it, still.

I can agree. Being in the category of … well mostly having first-world problems and not (much) more. But then again, it strikes me as odd that somehow, we don’t have good handles to straighten out the wicked ones — bar revolution. Because our legal system doesn’t seem to be as strict as it once was; forbidding all that was not allowed for a proper functioning of society. There have been changes to society… Where theft is still impermissible if of physical stuff, but in many ways is perfectly good to go when by failure to act, like many 1%ers. Though Aristoteles (Ethica Nicomachea; read the damn thing!) rightly would frown upon such dimwittedness but there.
So, actually, law would have to change but hasn’t. The very ones to be controlled by it, of course, are the first through the escape vents. And, Pikettyan or Elysium style, might prevent catching up categorically.

We could discuss on and on. But prevalent is: Now what ..? So, for the time being:

[‘Coloured in, otherwise too bleak your future is’; The Hague]

I am Satoshi Nakamato

… If only to dilute the discussion. And to all be Spartacus. Let the Craigs be the fools (not even meant lightly; rather pejorative here) they are. The absolute hard-math sides of Bidkoyn coming full circle to the mysteries to be kept mysteries for the very sake of it for once you dumb.ss! of its origins.

To keep it real:

[Mining precedes, but the use side is in transport ..? <Think that one over> at Utrecht]

Rien vous ne pouvez plus …?

When business is about betting, hopefully educated guessing, the near and bit further future developments of <somethings>. Educated, of course with a pinch of theory — but then, only the parts that are actually true, and still valid, for the future, too so throw away all (seriously) but a few nuggets of the most absolute que sera, sera of economics / business administration (sic) — and a healthy dose of experience — but not too much as it would lead to a lachrymose same as the (true) theory and we still need Action, don’t we ..?

Then totalitarian bureaucracies, like the banking world (in a suffocatingly tight grip, including the regulatory-captured but also holier-than-thou regulators), will try to squeeze all involved so thoroughly that no business is feasible anymore. But will fail, as the spirit has been out of the bottle since the Apple; Original Sin is about being human, above animalistic sustenance-supporting instinctive compliance with the laws of nature. Again and again, the stupidity of belief that Apollo wins out over Dionysos ..! They’re equal in all respects, certainly in the spirit of Man, and remember that even Zeus was forced to break marital laws (what a player he was, by necessity …:) because at the End of Times, the titans, the powers of Chaos, will almost win out. A trope so powerful that all belief systems have it (but a few exceptions) so to be held for certain; until proven wrong…?

Even more: The higher the pressure (that the straightjackets on subjects can take), the more fluid everything becomes. The more zealous, zealotic, crazy (outright that word, yes) compliance efforts micromanage (lest the ‘manage’ part which is utterly ridiculous if used in this sense), the more devious and deceptional will the business be, caused by this very reason of compliance efforts. LIBORgate, anyone ..?

‘Trust, but verify’ is a lie. Since only the slightest hint of the latter, immediately completely destroys the former ..! As the former is a two-way street! Seek out those that support this lie, and you’ll find the true culprits of the above.

So far, so good for a Monday morning’s rant, right ..? I’ll stop now, with:
20151008_123437
[Rigid, but colourful, the max you can achieve; Nieuwegein]

Disciplined away from bureaucracy

After some thought on bureaucracy on either side of the Big Pond, it suddenly dawned on me how to explain the seeming (of course) paradox:

At the Western shores, a lot of military with front line battle experience (and some, only a bit less so), possibly out of reserve functions in mundane business, have gone (back) over to the dark side of commercial business, with their discipline and cutthroat ‘competition’ (using not secondhand car salespeople but live ammo) as main assets / gathered experience to bring to bear.
On the East oceanboards, not so much, and a love for egalitarian Rhineland ideas might have persisted, giving flexibility and care for customers (‘s souls), and much room for ‘Millennials’ (let’s all drop that most empty of phrases though you get my drift) in the workplace.
On the point of competition effectiveness, Westeros beats Essos hand down.

But, the critical points for resolution are:

US businesses have been taken away from petty-rule-based (only) bureaucracy that they were in (yes they were, even with the freedom-seeking escapism rampant throughout), by the infusion with serious doses of Mission Command (a.k.a. Commander’s Intent) flexibility in goal achievement over procedural justice / form-over-substance.
European corps had nothing to counter Power Corrupts style demise unto totalitarian bureaucracies with their headless-chicken compliance.

So, it really is no contest but we would need a (not present) ref to break it off. To bad, and:

[Oh how cutiepie, Doesburg defenses]

Untrained accountants

Somewhere in Rise of the Robots (approximately p.253, 2nd line from the top), ever infamous [but very, very right] Carr is ideaquoted about pilots not getting enough experience with flying and (well, mostly: continue to keep on …) flying in adverse conditions and hence are paradoxically (much) less capable to handle the few exceptional situations for which they are kept aboard on ever more fully automated flights. [Except from the passengers’ comfort, but if only they knew the previous…] The Shallows, indeed…

Now, how would this compare to accountancy …? Ever encountered an assistant auditor that would recognize, let alone be able to do himself, double-entry bookkeeping ..? Which is of course already quite fully automated or will be in the very near future. All of accountancy/audit (in many worlds except a few slackers, this can and will be used mixedly though the latter is so much more ..!) that is stacked on top of such simple things, like checking on the bookkeeping let alone at the other end of the spectrum concluding that ‘the books’ represent a true and fair view (to the dime) of business performance (sic; more that just having debit=credit; author knows of a bank where this proved literally Impossible to do, with all the latest overfully automated bookkeeping information systems with a margin of € 1B e-ve-ry month, wiping the slate clean with a one-sided journal entry…!!), will come into question qua ability — in particular where the once usual decades of training was needed to establish sufficient experience to be able to, with an error margin always still!, declare the True and Fair parts, and now, such experience can be had less and less, with the disruption starting from the bottom with audit automation turning into big data (process) analyses supported by IT audits and what have we.

There simply aren’t the entry-level experience gainers jobs anymore; any complete-greenhorn (and uni grads are that, more and more it seems; just ask them to write a simple business report…) will have to jump to an immediate medior-level performance level. So what does one end up with? Mostly n00bs posing as l33ts. Posing, as content-wise performance is … well …

Oh well, it’ll get worse, much worse before it gets better. And:

[Graciously having opened my back garden to the public (but this is Het Loo of course)]

This time will be different

… If only for the following reason(s):

So far, Technology has been developed by humans, willy-nilly mostly as also fitting in the Selfish Memes sort of way (including Blackmore’s Meme Machine), to alleviate and overcome the very humans’ weaknesses that set us below a great many respective animals, and Nature.
Now, I(o)T slash AI (ASI) will soon be overcoming humans’ only few strengths in Thinking. At once leaving us vulnerable to become, at best, prey for <something> but with no place to hide (sic) nor any defenses…

So, this time will be different and the Luddites (actual sense, not the loom-smashing caricatures) will be right. For the one time they ‘need’ to be and then immediately need be no more. No more ‘but past technological innovations bringing temporary unemployment have all been overcome with growth of something new’. Read Martin Ford and you see that this will simply not be true — if only for the failure, this time of the Comparative Advantage mechanism but actually quite something more pervasively.
As a simple hint: What would you advise your 8yo nephew to be good at in school, to find … what kind of job or career later …!?

Don’t be discouraged! The End Is Nigh! Until it is:

[They look cute but will outdo you in an instant….; Het Loo]

Emerging degrees of privacy

Given that ‘privacy’ is a property that emerges from good Security, more particularly from Confidentiality (and Integrity), there’s two avenues to succeed in this field:

If quick and maybe even too dirty: Data minimalisation (as e.g., here, in Dutch)
Else (OR?): Fine-grained protection, also against the default Read all down the stack (user / end point / comms channels / applications / middleware / servers / storage — with the latter maybe crawling up and down the stack again when virtualizing in the cloud)
Because binary’s not my thing and keeping it real (i.e. (!) not being consistent) is: Would any of you have pointers to some science on possible degrees or levels of privacy ..?
The idea keeps floating around in my skull. Including degrees of invasion! Where sometimes, the required degree (as set by the subject) would be less than the degree for some government agency so everything goes … for this some data point only. Yes, Value creeps in as a boring subject but isn’t everything. Should be a field of study …?

Thanks anyway for all your pointers on the last item… (none); hence:

[It’s watching over your shoulder….! Het Loo]

Repeat: Trawling for noise

So… Legal developments go at glacial ‘speed’, thus mumbling critical oversight to sleep. Happened, once again, in NL. Mass collection (sic) of and trawling through all sorts of data ‘out there’ is free game for gov’t agencies.
NO the oversight committee will not do anything. Anyone saying so, plainly and simply lies under oath to overthrow the constitution (isn’t that high treason?)

But what will happen of course, is that those that in the past weren’t able to connect the dots (proven fact), will now be swamped in enormously bigger piles of noise data. At the very very best (??) they’ll find bucketloads of false positives — ruining perfectly normal, perfectly legally operating citizens’ lives, of course without any serious recourse or restitution of lost life’s pleasure and happiness…
And the false negatives will also explode, induced by the very ‘countermeasures’.
So, also those that propose and implement and work with such ‘solutions’ quod non, will be culpable to.

Oh well Or well was right. Plus:

[I don’t want or like, but do expect, a similar thing again; for different reasons but with no really different methods — Prinsenhof Delft ya’know]

At leisure

Musing with the ideas of yersteryear, where the working class had been replaced, gradually, by the ‘managing’ class in its various forms and sizes. But everywhere, productivity being misattributed. Though appearances would have it still among ‘managers’ too, their combined overwhelming bureaucratic bloat pressing on the carbon yet not achieving diamond productivity but gravel at most. While ‘managers’ (line just behind one’s heels!) get so much credit, unearned, and earn so much income and bonuses that it deserves the gallows; the workers ‘hence’ being mis- and disregarded.
When suddenly, the already next trend shone through: The move from the Leisure Class to the Leisure Cohorts.

Yup, you are now reminded of the massive shortfall in education that so many already have … that have flown into the workforce for years already — producing ..? Not the nice workspaces that they have to hang out in. Do they..? For how long still ..? And then ..? The generations that could actually be productive of any sorts, have seen their work shipped off to places of want, of want of actual productivity opportunities but will be depleted of markets sometime soon — and then they’ll retire like in the West with not much going for them by way of either pensions or opportunities go stagger on in business life, nor of anything after them by way of experience-transfer-loaded young crews that would seriously do anything different, better. No, don’t fall for that trap of thought that this all has been said before throughout the generations… It hasn’t, not in this way, not in any comparable situation.
So, the return of the leisure class, as ‘proven’ by Graeber and others, and reality, is there. But also, the Other 99,x% might (not) shift to the Leisure Cohorts. Not good for anything (as recently in all sorts of press, if (big if) you read it well) by lack of education, formal and certainly also practical, with the few smart ones in between skating towards a bright future but the others … at best, at very best, dunce consumers; passive, living on the edge. Yes, helped a lot by AI, progressively more, but leaving … dunce consumers. Don’t kid yourselves. Leisure cohorts without anything to leisure from nor anything to leisure with — as money and (through that or directly) other necessary goods come from productive work .. that has vanished into the ASI-out-there.

I could ramble on, like I so often do. But this time, I’ll leave it to you to do the hard work, I’m off leisuring. With:
20160408_133824
[Artsy Berlage, at his Beurs; inspirational not just to consume]