Incite 4/21/2010: Picky Picky
My kids are picky eaters. Two out of the three anyway. XX1 (oldest daughter) doesn’t like pizza or hamburgers. How do you not like pizza or hamburgers? Anyway, she let us know over the weekend her favorite foods are cake frosting and butter. Awesome. XY (boy) is even worse. He does like pretty much all fruits and carrots, but will only eat cheese sticks, yogurt and some kinds of chicken nuggets – mostly the Purdue brand. Over the weekend, the Boss and I decided we’d had enough. Basically he asked for lunch at the cafe in our fitness center and said he’d try the nuggets. They are baked and relatively healthy (for nuggets anyway). The Boss warned him that if he didn’t eat them there would be trouble. But he really wanted the chips that came with the nuggets, so he agreed. And, of course, decided he wasn’t going to eat the nuggets. And trouble did find him. We basically dictated that he would eat nothing else until he finished two out of the three nuggets. But he’s heard this story before and he’d usually just wait us out. And to date, that was always a good decision because eventually we’d fold like a house of cards. What kind of parents would we be if we didn’t feed the kid? So we took the boy to his t-ball game, and I wouldn’t let him have the mini-Oreos and juice bag they give as snacks after the game. He mentioned he was hungry on the way home. “Fantastic,” I said. “I’ll be happy to warm your nuggets when we get home.” Amazingly enough, he wasn’t hungry anymore when we got home. So he went on his merry way, and played outside. It was a war of attrition. He is a worthy adversary. But we were digging in. If I had to lay odds, it’s 50-50 best case. The boy just doesn’t care about food. He must be an alien or something. At dinnertime, he came in and said he was really really hungry and would eat the nuggets. Jodi dutifully warmed them up and he dug in. Of course, it takes him 20 minutes to eat two nuggets, and he consumed most of a bottle of ketchup in the process. But he ate the two nuggets and some carrots and was able to enjoy his mini-Oreos for dessert. The Boss and I did a high five, knowing that we had stood firm and won the battle. But the war is far from over. That much I know. – Mike Photo credits: “The biggest chicken nugget in the known universe” originally uploaded by Stefan Incite 4 U From fear, to awareness, to measurement… – Last week I talked about the fact that I don’t have enough time to think. Big thoughts drive discussion, which drives new thinking, which helps push things forward. Thankfully we security folks have Dan Geer to think and present cogent, very big thoughts, and spur discussion. Dan’s latest appeared in the Harvard National Security Journal and tackles how the national policy on cyber-security is challenged by definition. But Dan is constructive as he dismantles the underlying structure of how security policies get made in the public sector and why it’s critical for nations and industries on a global basis to share information – something we are crappy at. Bejtlich posted his perspectives on Dan’s work as well. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least lift Dan’s conclusion verbatim – it’s one of the best pieces of writing I’ve seen in a long long time… “For me, I will take freedom over security and I will take security over convenience, and I will do so because I know that a world without failure is a world without freedom. A world without the possibility of sin is a world without the possibility of righteousness. A world without the possibility of crime is a world where you cannot prove you are not a criminal. A technology that can give you everything you want is a technology that can take away everything that you have. At some point, in the near future, one of us security geeks will have to say that there comes a point at which safety is not safe.” Amen, Dan. – MR Phexting? – Researchers over at the Intrepidus Group published a new vulnerability for Palm WebOS devices (the Pre) that works over SMS (text messaging). These are the kinds of vulnerabilities that keep me up at night since I started using smart phones. As with Charlie Miller’s iPhone exploit from last year, sending a malicious text message could trigger actions on the phone. Charlie’s attack was actually more complex (and concerning) since it operated at a lower level, but none of these sound fun. For those of you who don’t know, an SMS is limited to 160 characters of text, but modern phones use that to support more complex actions – like photo and video messages. Those work by specially encoding the SMS message with the address of the photo or video that the phone then automatically downloads. SMS messages are also used to trigger a variety of other actions on phones without user interaction, which opens up room for manipulation and exploit… all without anything for you to notice, except maybe the radiation burns in your pocket. – RM Time to open source Gaia – With additional details coming out regarding the social engineering/hack on Google, we are being told that the source code to the Gaia SSO module was a target, and social engineering on Gaia team members had been ongoing for two years. While attackers may not have succeeded in inserting a Trojan, easter egg, or other backdoor in the source code, the thieves will certainly perform a very thorough review looking for exploitable defects. If I ran Google I would open up the source code to the public and ask for help reviewing it for defects. I can’t help laughing at
