Tag: Applicable to business

Culpably deaf

All that work for a private sector organisation who take (wrong) decisions based on false information – or, essentially, dismiss accurate, helpful information that would have steered to other decision alternative(s) – will be fired when the truth of the bad decision comes out.
Which would be helpful if applied to sectors where people’s money is so abjectly abused, too. E.g., like this one. Or this one (in English, some info here, and the whole idea of usefulness of having more and more data is debunked endlessly everywhere (you search)). Or this one, completely debunked here. The list is endless.

All of which points to a serious problem. The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt (Bertrand Russell) AND the stupid (to which, ‘immensely’) seem to be masters at picking the wrong advice. Once ‘immensely’ is indeed added, one recognises the ‘politician’. Playing the role of the Fool (not the Jester), unsurpassibly perfectly.

But how now can we get those stupidestest ideas go to die, sooner rather than later ..?

The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible (BR again). That’s completely true; moreover, it’s Maverisk’s motto.

Oh, and:

[To defend the Truth; Châteauneuf not the -du-‘ish or so]

The dullness of infosec ..?

And you thought fraud detection was about bank transactions or even counterfeiting physical stuff. Boh-ring, when you read this. Takes it to another level, eh?
Which brings me to an important issue: Are we not still studying and practising infosec from the wrong angle, doing a middle-out sort of development in many directions but starting at a very mundane ‘CIA’ sort of point. Which is of course core, but there is so much to cover that some outside-onto view(point) might be beneficial. We’re in the thick of the fight, and no matter in which direction you go, when you wade through the thicket with your control measures machete, you achieve little – when you then turn around to try to clear some area in another direction, all has grown dense with state-of-the-art arms’ race bush again already.
And yes, of course one can educate, etc. in some form of hierarchical approach, top-down. But that leaves us with many, all too many that float comfortably on the canopy where the view … isn’t that great as one’s very certainly in thick fog of the monsoon rain. And nothing is being directed (ugch) deeper down. Or controlled (?). Just more, most partial world views unconnected and behaving erratically.

The e.g. in this is that link above. A tiny subset of situational scenario. Not solved pervasively, once and for all. Now think about the hugely, vastly, enormously wider scope of ‘all’ of infosec that would need to be covered to a. arrive at sub-universes of control, b. overview.

The latter remains Open.
Me not happy.

Solutions, anyone ..?

Oh, plus:
[Ah! The days when this sort of ‘defence’ was enough to conquer! Alésie of course]

Less than containerload shipping

When one would be interested to keep up with what’s happening, and where future class breaks might be, a nice intro would be this little book. Like, when virtual machines came to the fore, it was declared that this would be a solution because of course the VMs would be impenetrable. By the utterly clueless, since it was the stupidest thing possible in infosec to say that. Though it cost some time to show the real value (positive) net of the risks (that indeed showed up…). With this subject, the same will happen. Future fact.

Oh and the post title just refers to shipping single pallets across the big pond, e.g., for these. Groupage, degroupage, forwarders, stewards, you know. The old, still there. And:
[Pro question: Beaune or Dyon ..?]

Trust ⊻ Verify

You get that. Since Verify → ¬Trust. When you verify, you engender the loss of trust. And since Trust is a two-way street (either both sides trust each other, or one will loose initial trust and both will end up in distrust), verification leads to distrust all around – linked to individualism and experience [we’re on the slope to less-than-formal-logic semantics here] this will result in fear all around. And Michael Porter’s two books, not to mention Ulrich Beck in his important one. So, if you’d still come across any type that hoots ‘Trust, but verify’, you know you’ve met him.

Since the above is so dense I’ll lighten up a bit with:
Part of the $10 million I spent on gambling, part on booze and part on women. The rest I spent foolishly. (George Raft)

Which is exactly the sort of response we need against the totalitarian bureaucracy (i.e., complete dehumanisation of totalitarian control – which approaches a pleonasm) that the world is sliding into. Where previously, humanity had escapes, like emigrating to lands far far away, but that option is no more. Hopefully, ASI will come in time to not be coopted by the One Superpower but then, two avenues remain: a. ASI itself is worse, and undoes humanity for its stubborn stupidity and malevolence (the latter two being a fact); b. ASI will bring the eternal Elyseum.
Why would it b. ..?
And if it doesn’t arrive in time, a. will prevail since the inner circle will shrink asymptotically which is unsustainable biologically.

Anyway, on this bleak note I’ll leave you with:

[Escape from the bureacrats; you-know-where]

Almost but more than three bodies, still

Which is about this. Which is also about this, and others…
But wait; you’ve been misled, the above link is not about a ‘solution’ – it’s about an expansion of the problem… So, we’ll remain in doubt over the eventual logical possibility of generalisation of any solution to n bodies where n ≥ 3. Leaving the aggregation from (sub)particle physics to the Universe (and, well, how was ‘a bit onwards’ better phrased?), end up in a statistical grey noise chaos.

Too bad. Hence:
[Considerable boringly bland ..? Girona]

Pro tip: Bankers are your doormats

At least, that’s what the Quartz article comes down to, too. At least, if you don’t want to go down with the oh so often recurring banks/bankers’ demise. Indeed all that recognise Yeshua as having had at least something valid to contribute to the world, see/heard/read that the swiping the Temple clean of the money changers, was a demonstration of the ethically very worst being thrown out of civilised society. When, as a family, one would want to stay in touch with one’s rightful place (geographically; name one family that made its fortune in a fully legal and ethical way ..?) in good style, one may better not depend on bankers…
Oh well why am I complaining – we learn from history a. that we don’t learn from history b. that, with the demise of the Afterlife, those left behind (e.g., economically) in their mortal life, have no vindication in the After. Those that do allsorts of things considered (cardinal) sins, are not punished there/then… It may all be a ploy to keep the meek in check. [Pun not even intended; ed.]

Oh well part two:
[We learn from this chap that what the … is he doing on the floor of a Catholic cathedral..!?; Siena]

Arms / race coming to an end ..?

When this is still necessary and (counter)x-measures will continu to be developed, for sure, how will this little nugget of WP29 change things?
Because it has power. That may lead to a throwback. For how long? The harder the throwback, the longer to recover. But the more powerful will be that rebound ..? We’ll see. For now, canvas blockers are still the way forward, so implement them, right?

This post was brought to you as a public service announcement from the sanity of browsing for information security and privacy blog you’re reading.
But seriously, why is there so little analysis of the WP29-on-Profiling stuff ..!? And:

It doesn’t matter

A great many before me have discussed the merits pro and contra using contractors instead of perm contracted staff.
I will still give it one more go. Since lately, there has been some back and forth again about motivational issues and how certain is one in one legal contract situation compared to the other hence how motivated can one be and why the need to cater to so different audiences as ‘manager’.
The thing is
It doesn’t matter:

When investigating the differential motivators, one invariably ends up with the same motivators, and much the same demotivators (nicely depicted here of course still going strong, since tout a continué).
This, coupled with:

  • Financially, you’ll have to pay for income taxes (buy side yes), holidays, sick days, etc.etc. (welcome to Europe!) and all of the administration surrounding that when you hire someone on a perm contract. If you hire a contractor, not so much; all costs are for the contractor
  • You’ll also have to pay for continued education and a company car for perm contracters. For contractors, not so much; all costs are for the contractor
  • Add in a ton for pension contributions (we’re still in Europe). For contractors: Nope.
  • How about severance packages? (Oh, shouldn’t differ much…)
  • Going through the calculation motions, it is little wonder that fully loaded costwise, a perm contractor will cost you 2,5-to-3,5 times per hour what a contractor bills you
  • And your perm contractor is scientific reasearch confirmed actually productive for four (upper bound) to two (lower bound) of any eight-hour working day. Your contractor can only bill you for two hours slippage per day, at most
  • You can even expect to pay more for the above motivators when dealing with perm staff. Contractors behave more mature and don’t need as much of everything

clearly leads in one direction. Isn’t there a catch ..? No, only if you’re Mr Tax Man; then, you’re the one losing out. Otherwise, you as an employer can gain seriously even when paying out ‘huge’ hourly rates to contractors.

Remember that.

Your comments, please.

Norm over substance of risk management

Overheard: A major company in a relevant industry re infosec – and well-known for their good and even so recently much improved infosec posture – doesn’t follow the mantra of “risk management first, policy/standards second” but first sets some quite rigid standards and then, when vendors can’t deliver (even when the standards are strict but quite reasonable and doable), do some form of risk analysis plus compensating controls / acceptance or what have we.
Because otherwise, everything gets so mushy (hey, normal (?) risk analysis is business driven, what do ‘they’ know ..!?) that the end result is a chaos of quasi-accepted risk all on one huge unmanageable infra heap of backdoors and byways (those in particular) which results in zero security. And because this way, standardisation is encouraged and security plus manageability hugely increased i.e. big bucks are saved.

So, it’s an interesting High Baseline Minus approach. Though I guess you may have some comments, so take it away …:

Oh, and already:

[Maybe green, but not fond of blaugrana ..? M’drid]

Maverisk / Étoiles du Nord