Believe it or not, despite accusations that that my coverage of the Mac wireless hack is all part of some anti-Apple black PR conspiracy, I’m a Mac user. One that’s so addicted I bought my Mom one and had it shipped to me so I could “configure” it. Okay, really I had to send mine in for service and I needed another Intel Mac so I could run it off an external hard drive with an image of my MacBook Pro. I mean I might have been without it for, like, 5-7 days and that’s just not
Ah Diebold, how we’ve missed you. In yet another example of gross negligence with our most sacred political process we find our favorite manufacturer of ATMs and voting machines yet again in the news. This time with a series of failures in the Alaskan primary. From Slashdot: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/15859396/article.pl From Engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/24/diebold-machines-fail-in-alaska-primary/ For those of you that don’t follow the twist and turns of this seriously shady company, Diebold has a long history of insecure voting machines, battling any attempt to regulate better voting security, and attacking
One of the advantages of being a paranoid security geek is you slowly acquire a familiarity with consumer security tools to prevent any of the bad nastiness you comment on from happening to your own system. While I’m sure some of my remotely hosted servers will get cracked on occasion since I don’t have full control over them I’ve taken it as a personal point of honor to defend my personal computers from www.youvebeenhacked.ru to the bitter end. Every now and then on slow news days I’ll highlight some of these tools and techniques
On Friday the Mac Wireless hack issue exploded again after Apple PR issued a carefully worded press release. Next thing you know one of my favorite sites, The Unofficial Apple Weblog posts a headline that’s just wrong. There have been a lot of really bad posts on this topic, but John Gruber at Daring Fireball winds his way through the press and blog hype in a well reasoned article, The Curious Case of the Supposed MacBook Wi-Fi Hack. John’s reasoning is strong, but I believe we can take his assumptions in a different direction and finish with essentially
After posting Concerts vs. Airports: The Role and Effectiveness of Security Screening in Public Places I realized it was a tad long and I might bore some of you, so here’s the crib notes: For about ten years I worked, and eventually directed, security for large events like concerts and football games. There are some lessons we can apply to airline screening since both involve securing public spaces and large crowds: Screening is just one layer of security, but in airports it’s treated as practically the only layer.
In concerts we relied more heavily on inside security to
As previously posted I have a fair bit of experience with security screening in large facilities. With all the hype about airports these days it’s a good time to review the screening process and the role it plays in securing public areas. While one of the risks of security is believing expertise in one domain means expertise in all areas I believe large facilities/events and airports are related closely enough that we can apply the lessons of one to the other. In summary the security screening process is an effective tool at reducing risk in controlled spaces but
