Incite 7/18/2012: 21 Days
21 days. It doesn’t seem like a long time. In the day to day grind of my routine, 3 weeks is nothing. I basically blink and that much time passes. But when your kids are away at camp it is a long time. For us day 21 is a lifesaver because it’s the first visiting day. So last weekend we packed up the car and made the trek to Pennsylvania to see the kids. For 21 days, we were in parental purgatory. We wait and we worry and we look at pictures and we make up all sorts of stories about what the kids are doing, based on thos pictures and a couple 2-sentence letters. That’s what parents do. So after 21 days, we finally get to compare reality to our made-up vision of what they are doing. Just to give you a little flavor for the kinds of letters we receive, XX2 wrote this missive to her Grandma (slightly edited for readability, but not much): Grandma, Please send make-up. I need lipstick and eyeshadow and hairspray. I’ve had to borrow from the other girls. I’m helpless without makeup. Love, XX2 Helpless?!? What a character. Though we had a decision to make – to send the make-up or not. Of course we sent her make-up. Actually, the Boss was very surprised because at home I’m very anti-makeup. My kids are beautiful without needing to look like street walkers. But they are at camp to find themselves. To do the things they want to do, without their parents micromanaging every move. Even if it involves wearing make-up – so be it. The good news is the kids are doing great. Really great. Even the Boy, who is away for the first time. His counselors said he was quiet for the first two weeks, while he figured out which end was up. But now that he’s comfortable with everyone, he’s pretty talkative. The girls are camp pros by now, and they are having the time of their lives. XX2 got a big part in the play, and XX1 has made the Boss very happy by being in the middle of every picture she’s in and flashing a huge smile. In another 21 days, we’ll return to camp for the second visiting day and to pick up the girls. Then we’ll do the long drive back to GA and get back into the routine of school and activities. For us, the next 21 days will be agonizingly slow. For them, they will pass in the blink of an eye. And they’ll enjoy every second of it. –Mike Photo credits: Welcome to Camp originally uploaded by Altus Wilder Incite 4 U Security vs. Convenience: This post on scaling by one of the Dropbox ops guys was very interesting. Counter-intuitively adding “fake” load prematurely only to remove the extra load when you run out of capacity is an interesting tactic to buy some time. Also the ideas of actually testing the edge cases and logging all sorts of stuff (even if you don’t know how you’ll use the data) will help to put our scaling efforts in perspective when we have Nexus scaling problems, that is. But it’s the last paragraph that is pretty problematic (and explains how privacy issues and obfuscation happen). He says that “security is really important for Dropbox,” but then goes into a riff on making trade-offs based on how important security is to the service. Let’s be clear, security isn’t important to any emerging service until they screw something up. Then security is very important. Which is why trying to build a security program in an organization that’s never had a security problem can be the Impossible Dream (h/t to Don Quixote). – MR Cry havoc and let slip the honeypots of war:: Playing defense all the time is a real pain in the behind. No one enjoys just sitting there until some dumb ass wielding Metasploit comes by and owns you. At the same time, never underestimate the marketing power of the latest security meme. One of these hot topics is the concept of active defense, which can technically mean a whole host of things as described by Chris Hoff in his latest post (that also references one of my posts). As this conversation picks up I think it’s important to remember that these principles, and even sometimes technologies, have been around for a while. The problem has often been they lack the automation to make them truly useful. Too complex, too manual. That’s starting to change, and I think most organizations will adopt active defenses fairly soon. As for Chris’ OODA loop reference… well let’s just say I have more to write on that. – RM Browser Security is more than sandboxing: Reading the Which Browser is Safest on nakedsecurity I was non-plussed as there are several important ways to judge browser security not even discussed in the post. Sandboxing is certainly one element, but there is no discussion of XSS or CSRF. And there are the reputation based protections, to detect things like malware and bad certificates. Perhaps more importantly, there is still no real equivalent to NoScript on Chrome or IE, which is the last reason I continue to cling to Firefox while most people I know have long since moved to Chrome. Then there is the rest of the privacy side of the equation. Ironic that someone on nakedsecurity is discussing browser security when their site source cross-links to eight or so other sites and feeds your browser with another 8 ghost cookies. As bad as Firefox is, at least my add-ons allow me to block most of the data I don’t want sites having on me and my browser. – AL The challenge of asymmetry: Greg Ferro summarize the issues of doing security pretty effectively in Basics:Threat Asymmetry and Security Posture. Yes, it’s a pretty simple concept, but when you spend all day in your reversing tool or knee deep in PCAP files, sometimes
