security
Nearly 40 years ago, my family moved to a typical Maritime neighbourhood. Something that stands out in my memory (aside from the nightmarish floral-print wallpaper in my bedroom), was that my bedroom door and the bathroom door each had skeleton keys in their locks. I’d only seen skeleton keys in movies before.
It wasn’t long before I discovered that these keys — while not quite identical — were interchangeable: each key could unlock the other door.
I’ve been considering doing this for a while. The controversy surrounding Apple’s decision to enable third-party ad blockers in iOS 9 made me think more about the underlying tracking that (to me) represents one of the most objectionable elements of online advertising. As a result, I have removed Google Analytics from this site.
Last year, Ars Technica gave three experts a 16,000-entry encrypted password file, and asked them to break as many as possible. The winner got 90% of them, the loser 62% — in a few hours. It’s the same sort of thing we saw in 2012, 2007, and earlier. If there’s any new news, it’s that … Read more
This post has been replaced by Passwords 101.
Security expert Bruce Schneier has a post describing photocopiers that have hard drives and retain copies of the documents they’ve scanned. The security implications of this for government, business, education and health care institutions — especially those who have policies about scrubbing data from discarded or recycled computers — are enormous. Of course, all organizations … Read more