Group items tagged

I think it's pretty interesting that one of the world's largest internet corporations is going to find the security vulnerabilities of our modems and routers. Will they just be helping us fix them, or using the errors for their own gain?

I think it's pretty interesting that one of the world's largest internet corporations is going to find the security vulnerabilities of our modems and routers. Will they just be helping us fix them, or using the errors for their own gain?

Recently China blocked the Facebook app "Whatsapp," and I find this interesting because by the decision of their government, they can decide your intake of content from the outside world and where to cut it off. Some parts of this relate to Cryptography because people have become very creative in getting around firewalls and accessing blocked sites anyways.

This article on how the CIA is using crowdsourcing to make intelligence more accurate is particularly well written because if its inclusion of a quick attention draw with the reference to the new James Bond movie, good historical background, an inviting writing style that includes rhetorical questions, and interviews with experts that add to the legitimacy of the article. 

This article describes an ongoing project to build an artificial organism that integrates biological parts with electrical components. The article, while introducing scientific jargon, does a great job of explaining technical terms in depth. It also quotes members of the project team, presenting a realistic assessment of the project's progress and odds of success. Lastly, the article includes several links to videos and pages of extremely interesting and relevant content.

I thought the author of this post did a great job explaining the experiment and the point of his research. Additionally, he was able to clarify complex scientific words and processes, without spending too much time explaining every detail. The overall structure of the blog post is well done, as the author progresses from an explanation of the experiment, to the meaning of certain results, to the results themselves.

"The problem of securing biological research data is a difficult and complicated one. Our ability to secure data on computers is not robust enough to ensure the security of existing data sets. Lessons from cryptography illustrate that neither secrecy measures, such as deleting technical details, nor national solutions, such as export controls, will work. "

I found this article and liked it because it gave me a lot of information about the Beale Cipher and treasure, even more information than Singh. I especially was interested in the reasons describing the possibility of it being real or a hoax.

This writer did a good job of keeping an informal tone without being too casual. It was an easy read and they connected the topic to other areas of science. The little bit of humor was a really nice touch too!

Quote: What you are looking at is one of the many undersea cables that carries inside it, to put it simply, the magic of the Internet. This particular cable, which runs aground on the coast of Florida, has been tapped by the NSA according to Paglen's research. Paglen, an artist who has been documenting the physical footprint of surveillance for years, got scuba-certified in order to go diving "at several locations off the coast of Florida," he says, to find and photograph the cables.

This doesn't quite follow the guidelines of the blogging assignment, I don't think, but I found it pretty interesting, so I'll share this one too. This is basically about the people who are going to be holding the keys to the building blocks of the internet. I'm not sure I understand it completely, but it sounds fascinating!

Excellent find! I heard about this security system when the author of this piece, James Ball, was interviewed for the "On the Media" podcast: http://www.onthemedia.org/story/so-many-keys/. Great stuff.

Interesting that ~35% of 1000 surveyed have upped the strength of their passwords, but only 6% turned on two-factor ID, which was a major cause of the iCloud hacks going undetected for so long.

It seems that two-factor authentication would not have prevented those iCloud hacks (according to this piece: http://www.tuaw.com/2014/09/02/think-iclouds-two-factor-authentication-protects-your-privacy/), but since Apple has now changed the triggers for two-factor to include things like iCloud access, two-factor will be more helpful going forward. So it is a little surprising that more people haven't enabled it.

I'm also reminded of the ACLU's Chris Soghoian's point (https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/lessons-celebrity-icloud-photo-breach) that one reason people have crappy Apple passwords is that Apple makes you use your password so darn often. I know I get frustrated when I have to enter my (crazy long) Apple password on my iPhone just to download a free app.

"Since the dawn of the information age, we've bought into the idea that a password, so long as it's elaborate enough, is an adequate means of protecting all this precious data. But in 2012 that's a fallacy, a fantasy, an outdated sales pitch. And anyone who still mouths it is a sucker-or someone who takes you for one."

"Signage can be an important legal component in the use of video cameras in schools. As mentioned in the previous section, it is important that the presence of video cameras not lead a person to believe he or she will be rescued if attacked."

I like the way this is written because the author makes it a fun read. It is not a long boring article about the writing process of her story, but rather it breaks down her process into steps. Moreover, her writing is entertaining, which grasped my interest more so than many other posts. 

"The remains of a World War Two carrier pigeon which was lost in action 70 years ago while delivering a top secret message over enemy lines has been found in a chimney in Bletchingley, Surrey. The skeleton of the bird has a small red cylinder attached to its foot which contains a mysterious cigarette paper sized coded message. The message is deemed so sensitive, that Codebreakers at GCHQ in Cheltenham are now frantically trying to decipher it."

During one of our classes, we briefly discussed the use of cryptography to protect eyewitness and victim information during the investigation of human rights violations. The individual I mentioned that day was Patrick Ball, who now will lead a new organization focused on "the data-driven and scientific side of analyzing human rights violations around the world."

Gives a description of all of the machines used or developed at Bletchley Park for use in cryptanalysis. 

Clues left in the clumsily encrypted notes of a Mafia don have helped Italian investigators to track his associates and ultimately contributed to his capture after years on the run. The recently busted Bernardo Provenzano, reputed to be the "boss of bosses" of the Sicilian Mafia, used a modified form of the Caesar cipher to obscure "sensitive information" in notes left to either his family or underlings.

An in depth summary about Mary, Queen of Scots, and the people she encountered.

This article describes how, during the Cold War, the major distributor of cryptography machines (Crypto AG) worked with the NSA. This professional relationship provided the NSA with shortcuts on how to break ciphers created from the different machines. Also, Crypto AG was revealed as not having given the most up to date models to all countries, probably through deception. This raises the question of morality involving basic warfare. How is it moral for this supposedly trusted third party company to have special allegiances with the United States?Would the United States have the same opinion on this actions morality if they were the ones being sold out of date equipment? Or if one of their opponents had shortcuts?