Security quotes of the week

Google are wrong about the root cause of online trolling and other forms of sociopathic behaviour. It's nothing to do with anonymity. Rather, it's to do with the evanescence of online identity. People who have long term online identities (regardless of whether they're pseudonymous or not) tend to protect their reputations. Trolls, in contrast, use throw-away identities because it's not a real identity to them: it's a sock puppet they wave in the face of their victim to torment them. Forcing people to use their real name online won't magically induce civility: the trolls don't care. Identity, to them, is something that exists in the room with the big blue ceiling, away from the keyboard. Stuff in the glowing screen is imaginary and of no consequence.

Researchers from UCSD pointed thermal cameras towards plastic ATM PIN pads and metal ATM PIN pads to test how effective they were at stealing PIN numbers. The thermal cams didn't work against metal pads but on plastic pads the success rate of detecting all the digits was 80% after 10 seconds and 60% after 45 seconds. If you think about your average ATM trip, that's a pretty wide window and an embarrassingly high success rate for thieves to take advantage of.

It's basically like having root on the device, and that's like having root on the chemistry of the human body.