Voor het geval het een paar weken terug langs u heen is gegaan; dit. Terecht. En ondertussen zitten allerlei (zeer!) kwetsbaren zonder de zorg die ze verdienen (verdiend hebben) omdat (voorgaan)de bodemloze put miljarden (sic) het zwarte gat in zuigt.
Category: Innovation (technologicallly driven)
Scaling ‘security’
Availability: 99.9% (per year).
‘Security’ (the C, the I) … nothing. Or, the infeasible 100.0% XOR nothing.
We may have a major issue here…
Well, we do have OSSTMM on one hand, and the seriously innovative, very important Secrecy stuff on the other.
But can we answer the question “How secure are we“..? Indeed, OSSTMM gives us a number – for the operational and technical elements. How ’bout integrating the tactical, strategic, and non-tech stuff like hooman behaviour ..? And still make it somewhat understandable to the clueless (Csomethings and other involved in the utterly useless nonsensical area designated by the pejorative joke label ‘governance’; all with the exceptions acknowldged of course); other than the above % per year estimates that are interpreted so badly..!
Oh and things like failure rates from e.g., FMAE, as presented like ‘dam can stand a one-in-a-thousand-year flood’ also don’t work – dam can break today, and tomorrow, and the statistic may very well still be valid!
Maybe it’s key to first find how to whack the notion of “1-in-1000yrs means I don’t have to worry for another 999 years” fallacy. Psychology it is but so security should be..! As many of Bruce Schneier-et-al’s posts prove (?), FUD and other angle fail so miserably.
The time (decades) we’ll need to turn around the psychos, allow us some leeway to develop suitable Scale(s?) of Security. But let’s not wait for the end of those decades before embarking on the exploratory first steps of that. You suggestions, please, today.
[Edited ahead of posting, to add: This here piece on the (declining) half-life of secrets; definitely something to include in the above ‘metrics’. ..?]
For the eye candy:
[Zurenborg again, slightly edited – who’ll do the colour corrections for me?]
Stale^2
Hm, wanted for once (huh?) to not be negative, deriding but …
This here piece calls for comment. Like: Instating a quality seal for products that should be considered well-matured, almost outdated tiny point solutions; isn’t that overly stale2 ..?
Because quality seals are issued for … procedural justice of the petrifying kind. And, AV – isn’t that almost the model for grossly-insufficient-in-and-on-themselves point solutions that have no field of development/progress left ..?
Oh well, not much use kicking a dead horse.
Other than the Dakota arguments… thus turning this into a sort of Golden Oldie Pic Of The Day:
[Source: Scott Wagner; no ‘automatic’ endorsement.]
The Future Plays At All Boards
There seems to be quite an interest in ‘the’ future, lately. As in, the last couple of tens of millennia but also the last couple of months. Recency Effect, maybe ..?
The thing is; discussions how the near and far future will/might be, are handicapped by industry and specialisation myopia.
- IT-angehauchten discuss ANI, AGI and ASI, with neural networks resurfacing, finally, in discussions over when (soon) we’ll have the Singularity. Yes you’ve read my great many posts about that already or go in shame and still do it (impression tracker is engaged).
- A branch of that, discusses very near future labour markets – mostly, almost exclusively, those in the furthest developed economies only.
- Biologists and eco-nuts (are they?) are on the Global Warming / Food- and Fresh Water- Starvation / Anti-GMO paths in their discussions.
- And there’s of course daily glocal wars going on, military/physical and refugee atrocities everywhere, and economic warfare as well. Of the latter which ‘cyber’ in all its forms (remember, #ditchcyber) is part.
- Simple-economically, there still is the enormous divide between haves and have-nots, now being exposed (nevertheless still growing) within countries’ local economies as well due to jobless growth and the Pikettyish 1%’ers.
- And, I probably forget some category. [Edited half a day after post release, to add: Yup, this here combi-one.]
But, … all play out on/in the same world, the one you and I inhabit [well maybe not you, alien (as physical being or just meme/information floating around over whatever physical media) listening in from the Andromeda nebula]. So, we’ll have to deal with all problems, operational, tactical and strategical, together both in people and in solutions. And as the world spins faster than ever, requiring ever more clever and ever more-dimensional solutions. Until all choke, mind-wise. Hasta La Vista, baby.
Oh well. I’m not (even) negative …
[Anywhere, everywhere.]
Schmobol
With the current uptick in interest in the ageing population … of the handful still capable of hardcore manual programming of COBOL, as e.g., here, I wondered:
- Is the code base still so enormously biased to COBOL(-based! software)?
- Why haven’t COBOL-to-e.g., C, or others converters, not caught on widely so the ‘problem’ doesn’t exist anymore ..?
Especially the latter; especially since we still have tons, too many (?), programmers available to tackle C- and more modern-language scrutiny and optimisation jobs. Jobs; high-pay jobs. And automatic testers to compare absolute 1-to-1 identity of the functionality or tractable lists of boundary conditions (possibly differing).
But with so many more (modern) code/functionality maintenance tools and capabilities available. And with integration/migration to (even) newer integrated platforms available.
And, when things get tough, AI that should be easily trainable to get to the hard, core bugs (higher abstraction sense) before/after the translation(s).
So, what’s the deal? The only deal there is, is (and was, having lost a long time) the lack of forward-looking maintenance to have already started early on modernisation. Yes, of course, there’s Not On My Watch and Après Nous Le Déluge. But real leaders would cut through that; that’s what distinguishes them from mere shopkeeper ‘managers’.
All right. Leaving you with:
[Impossible to guess I guess. Where?]
Waves of IoT
Tinkering with the great many (unknown) unknowns of the IoTsphere, it occurred to me that there are various intermediate phases to deal with before we can consider ourselves comprehensively outdone after the Singularity (dystopian with P(X)=1).
By which I mean the following ‘growth’ model:
- Current-day operations: Factory ‘robots’ or process plants being (factory-)centrally controlled from e.g., typical classical (?) control rooms. And ATMs, the robots without arms!
- IoT in its four distinct forms. With ‘robots’ moving out of their prothesis confines, as e.g., here. Possibly with some ANI.
Both these levels can be regarded to have operational level problems; ethical, security/privacy, industry-disruptions and comprehensively new business and labour models, etc.etc. but relatively definitely operational, to be solved.
- At a tactical level, there’s AGI stuff to be figured out.
Ethics, ‘robots’ like self-driving/autonomous cars [yes, yes, I know those two are very much not the same!] as proxies for humans, with all the rights and duties including how to enforce those, and Privacy on a much larger, impactful scale. Including also, all problems you thought to have solved in the previous rounds, now coming back to haunt you and be very much harder to solve. - The Strategic level, with ASI all around. To repeat, including also, all problems you thought to have solved in the previous rounds, now coming back to haunt you and be very much harder to solve.
This, as just a briefest of summaries of all sorts of dilemmas to be figured out. Sonner rather than later, or bingo (points of nu return) will have been passed sooner than you realise. I’ll try to help out with a post here and there, or course ;-]
For now:
[At what stage will AI understand the genius of this design ..?]
Self-driving hamster
There’s a self-driving angle (huh) in this somewhere but it remains just out of grasp. This being this; hamster-like ..?
Before it disappears: Told you so
Oh, before it returns to oblivion; re the Hacker Team hackback: I’ll just join the endless queue of Told You So’ers with reference to this.
Noting that there is a confusing connection to the illegalise-encryption-cum-mandated-government-backdoors stupidity that keeps coming back like whack-a-mole, to put it very, very friendly.
OK, leaving you with:
[Antwerp beauty, untiltshifted]
The need for a new security framework
… I feel the need for it. A new security framework.
Because what we have, is based on outdated models. Of security. Of organisations. Of how the world turns.
Bureaucracy doesn’t cut it no more. The very idea of hierarchically stacked framework sets (COSO/CObIT/ISO27k1:2013/…) likewise, is stale.
And the bottom-up frameworks en vogue, e.g., OSSTMM (if you don’t know what that is all (sic) about, go in shame and find out!) and core work like Vicente Aceituno Canal’s, haven’t found traction enough yet, nor are they integrated soundly enough (yet!!) into further bottom-up overarching approaches. Ditching the word ‘framework’ as that is tainted.
But what then? At least, OSSTMM. And physical security. And SMAC. And IoT. And Privacy (European style, full 100.0%, mandatory). And business-organising disruption, exploded labour markets, geopolitics, et al.
OK. Who of you has pointers to such an Utopia ..? [Dystopian angles intended]
Unrelated:
[Your guess. Not Nancy. But is it Reims ..?]
Today’s-Tech-Yesterday-Craving
As a question: What is the melancholic (sic) feeling one gets when realising how great it would have been to have had (some of) today’s technology / hype little tools, already yesterday or rather, a couple of decades back ..?
As logically flawed as the feeling is (you’d change the world of yesterday in a way that would make today’s world impossible to exist exactly like it turned out today… No-impact visits to the past even, are impossible since you’d return with the info of having been there), it still creeps up every now and then. Oddly, it concerns specific technology items, not Technology as a philosophical construct altogether. Is that where the error of thought creeps in; can’t have your tool and not eat the whole thing ..?
Please add your musings… And
[Quiz: Prato or Pistoia ..?]
