Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • December 11, 2020 7:58 PM

@ Bruce,

Without “Supply Chain Security” the rest is for naught.

But as I’ve been saying for decades now,

Security is a Quality Process.

That is for any endevor / project security has to be in place and have full managment buy in “before day zero”. If it’s not or does not have full managment buyin then it will with high probability be an insecure endevor or peoject.

It’s no different from a one man project all the way through to the largest of departments, security as a process has to be in place “befor day zero”.

Clive Robinson • December 12, 2020 4:16 PM

@ Internet Individual,

We need to backup a bit and start by asking some tough questions about the “internet” and its intended purpose(s).

A question for you,

“Who earns the interest or benifit of the cash in your pocket, or otherwise floating around outside a financial institution?”

It has a name, but that’s not realy important, the effect of who profits and who loses however is.

In effect the question is “What’s the value of money in transit and to whom?”

Now ask the same question about those bytes of data whinging their way around the Internet.

The fact they have value of some form even it’s just that byte that puts a twinkle in the eye in that picture of a cute kitten is not in dispute.

But how about “your bsndwidth” and all thay javascript pulling down all that Marketing Malvertising?

It’s your bandwidth, thus it’s reciprocal your time, thus your irreplaceable life, that is being stolen from you[1]. As well as PPI and heaven alone knows what else like bitcoin mining killing your CPU with heat death and larger electricity bills.

They in effect claim they own not just your data bytes but your computer, your personal data and what ever else they can steal from you.

When you start viewing things this way, you start to realise not just that the Internet companies are more repacious than loan sharks, they actively bribe the legislature to make it mandatory.

So in a way the Internet is becoming an illegal tax to turn you from a “freeman” to a “serf”[2] tithed in forms most can not comprehend.

So, when you say,

From the mindset of being an American Citizen, in my opinion the internet has overall negatively affected life in the US for the average citizen.

You are perhaps understating the situation rather more than you might at first think.

[1] If you doubt this try turning off both cookies and javascript in your browser. You would be surprised how many web sites still deliver the content you want with no click through “Accept our sacrifice your first born terms, click here to die” boxes. Also just how much faster, especially the likes of news sites that do you the real favour of not downloading high res photos etc as punishment 😉

[2] Serf : noun, 1) a person in a condition of servitude, required to render services to a lord. 2) a person commonly attached to the land owned by the lord and transferred with it. 3) a person held in bondage or slavery without the benifit of slavery of food and shelter.

Clive Robinson • December 13, 2020 5:41 AM

@ xcv,

Cash in my pocket gives me the option to spend it now on something or save it for later.

That only works in low inflation economies. Don’t try living in a hyper inflation economy on cash in your pocket.

Quite a few years ago I had to go on business to a failed economy country in Africa. The advice I’d been given was only carry low denomination USD don’t take anything above a ten and pay the hotel in advance before you fly there. Also to buy anything I needed as soon as I could as early morning was better, as you could haggle/bargin as the shop keeper “marked up” for the new day, as they would two or three more times during the day…

Luckily the USD I carried saw me through, but I’m glad I’d paid the hotel bill in advance, the room was nice being part of an international chain. But each morning walking through the lobby to meet the driver I’d see the room rate had jumped from the day before by around 10% and after my less than a week stay if I’d paid at the end it would have cost as much again, and I’d have needed a suitcase just to carry the cash.

Watching the prices rise around 5%-15% a day in the shops was back then a little under a decade and a half ago shocking. One side effect was it “cut the stock lines” down to just one or two basics, there was no choice, you just payed as in thinking about looking in another shop the price would go up long before you’ld get there…

But as you can look up it got worse a lot worse and within a couple of years due to Presedent Robert Magabe so mismanaging the country[1] you did not have sufficient fingers on both hands to count the number of zeros in the inflation rate, and ATM machines were crashing because they could not have enough zeros typed in to get enough money out to buy a loaf of bread…

At that rate of inflation money becomes effectively meaningless as people do not want it almost halving in purchase power in the length of time it takes to pull it from your pocket… There was a joke about “how you could not burn money fast enough to keep up with inflation”.

Even though at one point illegal, most people used money from other countries. As far as I’m aware even now Robert Mugabe is dead his legacy is still hyper inflation with something like ten or so other countries currancies in use. With the USD being used by around 60% of the population.

[1] You can look the history up but basically Robert Mugabe was determined to stay in power any which way he could. And the price of that was “Danegeld” not to invading hords but to soldiers that had faught in the wars Mugabe had in effect started. Because the ex-soldiers demanded “land” Magabe kicked out those that owned and ran the farms successfully and which were realy the only people keeping the country afloat. Those that got the land only knew how to “lord it up” not run a farm. So food production dropped dramatically down to bellow starvation for the populous. And so the “buy off to stay in power” policy went on and on in a downward spiral all due to one man’s desperate clinging to power…

Clive Robinson • December 13, 2020 2:40 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing, xcv,

This is now a global economic problem teetering over the edge and will no doubt start to occupy governments after they can stop thinking about COVID-19 (or wishing they could stop thinking about COVID-19).

Don’t as they say “hold your breath on it” Western politicians actually in power appear to be more than somewhat blind these days when it comes to “A tide lifts all boats equally” and in effect running around like lunitics knocking the bottom out of small boats in favour of large, as we have seen with the “Stimulus Packages” and “Quantative easing” etc in recent times.

But I like your other explanations of the effects of hyper-inflation.

Especially,

We see the inflation in the number of bills or ciphers in the account but the real value is in what will it buy?

Yes it’s a concept that you would have thought people could relatively easily comprehend but…

Hence my comments in the past about “fiscal wealth” (in ledgers) and “real wealth” (in natural resources) and how the “value added chain” both works to add utility (industry) and in other hands creates no real increase in utility just inflation (banking/finance).

I used to use the example of a “ton of coal” but a lot of people nolonger see that intuatively. And people seeing intuatively as you’ve no doubt noticed is getting harder around here these days, so much so you have to dumb things down and that creates problems of it’s own…

That is, there is a problem with trying to explain wahat what needs explaning on this blog these days which comes about from peoples assumptions of what they think you are…

@ SpaceLifeForm for instance can be brief to the point of being cryptic to many whilst succinct and to the point to others.

I still remember trying to get across to some one the difference between “failure modes” and “failure probability”… I still think the person did not want to think, just say their assumptions.

After all how hard is it to get the hang of if you have four items that have a binary state then there are 2^4 = 16 modes. With the system always being in one of those modes. But slightly more difficult is each mode has a probability of the systen being in that mode. And slightly harder that often the four items are not independent of each other even though the four items may be identical. Thus think of four switches in a line on a console, the outer two switches have a greater probability of being knocked or state changed than the inner two switches. How much that might be “depends” but it’s something I thought would have been intuitively obvious.

Apparently not… So how to remedy,

If you make a long but accurate description –like this is becoming 😉 — almost like an academic paper nobody reads it… If you say instead say “this is a simplification” and produce something that is more accurate than many news sites including science ones, but short. Even though you warn of simplification and use of a little editing out of real but messy and mostly irrelevant details to get the idea across in paraphrase form, some people jump on it claiming things based on their tiresome assumptions…

I must admit I’ve just about given up dealing with them because they will not stop, they keep trying to find fault or even make false allegations and to be honest I’m getting fed up with it, in effect they are little other than “better dressed Trolls”.

The problem is getting worse and appears to be in part due to the dearth of general commentors like yourself, myself and one or two others these days so the better dressed ones tend to go for the hectoring / bickering approach to “make noise”… Which I’m thinking is best answered by sticking in an over abundance of detail… Because when you tot up the “column inches” it actually takes up less space than all the noise making…