Incite 5/28/2014: Auditory Dissonance
I didn’t want to become that Dad. The one who says, “Turn that crap down.” Or “What is this music?” Or “Get off my lawn!” I didn’t want that to be me. I wanted to be the cool Dad, who would listen to the new music with my kids and appreciate it. Maybe even like it. For a while, I was able to do that. Let’s backtrack a bit. I control the iTunes account in the house. That allows me to centralize apps for all the kids and their devices, and more importantly make sure we keep spending within reason. Even better, it gives me the ability to give the kids a hard time about buying an app or song. They love being scrutinized over a $1.99 app. Don’t tell them I spend more than that on coffee every day. To be clear, it’s not worth my time to even think for a minute about an app, but I still get enjoyment out of making them present a case for why they need the latest version of Clash of Clans or Subway Surfer. That also means that when XX1 wants to buy new music, she has to come through me. So about 3 or 4 times a year I get a list of 40-50 songs she wants to buy. She has her own money, so it’s not a money thing. But I won’t give her access to the account (since that would end very badly), so I have to buy the songs myself. Which means I have to listen to some of them. For quite a while, I was fine with that. I like some of the stuff XX1 listens to – statistically about half the pop music she listens to is tolerable with a decent groove and melody. But over the weekend I hit my limit. I was checking her song list before camp, and 90% of the music was just awful. And at that moment, I became that guy. The guy who just doesn’t understand the noise kids are listening to today. Of course I couldn’t let it go. I had to ask, “What the hell is this stuff?” She just shrugged. It’s her money, so I couldn’t tell her not to waste it on crap music. And I think I saw her chuckle the “you just don’t understand, old dude” chuckle. You know that chuckle because it’s how you reacted when your folks wondered about Elvis or the Beatles or Pink Floyd or Springsteen when you were growing up. I guess I am that old dude. And I just don’t understand. Though that doesn’t make it any easier to explain to my friends why I have Bieber songs in my iTunes library. Those songs are for XX1, really! That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. –Mike Photo credit: “Noise” originally uploaded by richardoyork The fine folks at the RSA Conference posted the talk Jennifer Minella and I did on mindfulness at the conference this year. You can check it out on YouTube. Take an hour and check it out. Your emails, alerts and Twitter timeline will be there when you get back. Securosis Firestarter Have you checked out our new video podcast? Rich, Adrian, and Mike get into a Google Hangout and.. hang out. We talk a bit about security as well. We try to keep these to 15 minutes or less, and usually fail. May 19 – Wanted Posters and SleepyCon May 12 – Another 3 for 5: McAfee/OSVDB, XP Not Dead, CEO head rolling May 5 – There Is No SecDevOps April 28 – The Verizon DBIR April 14 – Three for Five March 24 – The End of Full Disclosure March 19 – An Irish Wake March 11 – RSA Postmortem Feb 21 – Happy Hour – RSA 2014 Feb 17 – Payment Madness 2014 RSA Conference Guide In case any of you missed it, we published our fifth RSA Conference Guide back in February. Yes, we do mention the conference a bit, but it’s really our ideas about how security will shake out in 2014. You can get the full guide with all the memes you can eat. Heavy Research We are back at work on a variety of blog series, so here is a list of the research currently underway. Remember you can get our Heavy Feed via RSS, with our content in all its unabridged glory. And you can get all our research papers too. Understanding Role-based Access Control Advanced Concepts Introduction NoSQL Security 2.0 Understanding NoSQL Platforms Introduction Newly Published Papers Advanced Endpoint and Server Protection Defending Against Network-based DDoS Attacks Reducing Attack Surface with Application Control Leveraging Threat Intelligence in Security Monitoring The Future of Security Security Management 2.5: Replacing Your SIEM Yet? Defending Data on iOS 7 Eliminating Surprises with Security Assurance and Testing Incite 4 U At least there is consistency: Love those survey-based media campaigns, where a company sponsors a survey to determine that a certain industry is vulnerable. Just like every other industry. It’s awesome. So I enjoyed the FUD-tastic writeup of a survey paid for by ThreatTrack, which showed (through a whopping 200 person survey) that energy companies are vulnerable to attack. 61% said the biggest threat comes from email. Shocker. Web is next at 25% and mobile at 3%. Yup, that sounds about right. Even better, 40% thought they’d be targeted by advanced attacks. The other 60% have an appointment on Thursday to see their therapist to deal with the self-esteem issues. – MR That’s WEAK: eBay users are noticing for the first time – post breach of password hashes – that eBay does not allow long passwords. eBay sent email instructing users to reset passwords this week; one week after we heard about the data loss. But those are pesky details, right? Those who took it seriously enough to create strong passphrases to resist brute-force password cracking noticed their long passwords were not allowed. Worse, passwords longer than 20 characters were labelled ‘weak’. Not cool, but remember that eBay – like many firms – only uses passwords as one hurdle; they rely on fraud analytics and monitoring
