Security quotes of the week
The implications of this gladden my "right to be forgotten" hating
heart. If you're an EU user searching for Joe Blow, and the EU has forced
removal of a search result related to him on, say, google.fr, the warning
notice informing you that results have been removed for that search give
you an immediate cue that you might want to head over to google.com to see
what the EU censorship bureaucrats deemed unfit for your eyes. In essence,
it's a built in Streisand Effect, courtesy of the EU itself! Before this,
you might not even have noticed the result in question among other results
for that search .
— Lauren Weinstein
I think it provides a vivid illustration of how invasive this technology is
and how the courts regulate its use. It’s one thing to have a generic
description of how it’s used; it’s another thing to read a first-hand
account of how people are walking up to people’s doors and windows sending
powerful signals to [cell phones] inside. This transcript illustrates both
the fact
that bystanders' phones were being tracked and that the police operating
the device knew that’s what the device was doing.
— ACLU attorney Nathan
Freed Wessler on cell phone tracking devices known as "stingrays"
The question that remains is this: What should we expect in the future -- are there more Heartbleeds out there?
— Bruce
Schneier
Yes. Yes there are. The software we use contains thousands of mistakes -- many of them security vulnerabilities. Lots of people are looking for these vulnerabilities: Researchers are looking for them. Criminals and hackers are looking for them. National intelligence agencies in the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, and elsewhere are looking for them. The software vendors themselves are looking for them.
Of course, we in the real world know that shaved apes like us never saw a system we didn't want to game. So in the event that sarcasm detectors ever get a false positive rate of less than 99% (or a false negative rate of less than 1%) I predict that everybody will start deploying sarcasm as a standard conversational gambit on the internet. Trolling the secret service will become a competitive sport, the goal being to not receive a visit from the SS [Secret Service] in response to your totally serious threat to kill the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Al Qaida terrrrst training camps will hold tutorials on metonymy, aggressive irony, cynical detachment, and sarcasm as a camouflage tactic for suicide bombers. Post-modernist pranks will draw down the full might of law enforcement by mistake, while actual death threats go encoded as LOLCat macros. Any attempt to algorithmically detect sarcasm will fail because sarcasm is self-referential and the awareness that a sarcasm detector may be in use will change the intent behind the message.
— Charlie Stross