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What Strengthens and Weakens Our Integrity – Part I: Why Small Choices Count

Integrity. It’s a quality every man worth his salt aspires to. It encompasses many of the best and most admirable traits in a man: honesty, uprightness, t

Click to view the original at artofmanliness.com

Hasnain says:

"What this means is that if you want to maintain your integrity, the best thing you can do is to never take that first dishonest step. No matter how small and inconsequential a choice may seem at the time, it may start you down a path that tarnishes your moral compass, leads you to commit more serious misdeeds, and causes you to compromise your fundamental principles."

Definitely looking forward to the next few parts in the series.

Posted on 2013-08-07T16:27:27+0000

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Schneier on Security: Restoring Trust in Government and the Internet

In July 2012, responding to allegations that the video-chat service Skype -- owned by Microsoft -- was changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, Corporate Vice President Mark Gillett took to the company's blog to deny it.

Click to view the original at schneier.com

Hasnain says:

"Since the Snowden documents became public, I have been receiving e-mails from people seeking advice on whom to trust. As a security and privacy expert, I'm expected to know which companies protect their users' privacy and which encryption programs the NSA can't break. The truth is, I have no idea. No one outside the classified government world does. I tell people that they have no choice but to decide whom they trust and to then trust them as a matter of faith. It's a lousy answer, but until our government starts down the path of regaining our trust, it's the only thing we can do."

Posted on 2013-08-07T16:08:07+0000

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Sarah Stillman: The Use and Abuse of Civil Forfeiture

The basic principle behind asset forfeiture is appealing. It enables authorities to confiscate cash or property obtained through illicit means, and, in many states, funnel the proceeds directly into the fight against crime. But the system has also given rise to corruption and violations of civil lib...

Click to view the original at newyorker.com

Hasnain says:

Really long, equally horrifying.

"It involved, in Guillory’s analysis, “a government entity that enjoys the benefit of most doubts, and a D.A. who enjoyed the most gold-plated kind of immunity there is: absolute prosecutorial immunity.” That was why, he thinks, authorities in Tenaha had managed to keep their dirty work largely obscured from public view—“shitting in high cotton,” he calls it."

Posted on 2013-08-05T20:54:58+0000

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Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents · D. Kriesel

In this article I present in which way scanners / copiers of the Xerox WorkCentre Line randomly alter written numbers in pages that are scanned. This is not an OCR problem (as we switched off OCR on purpose), it is a lot worse – patches of the pixel data are randomly replaced in a very subtle and da...

Click to view the original at dkriesel.com

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The Factoring Dead: Preparing for the Cryptopocalypse

A talk at Black Hat USA 2013 discussing recent advances in academic research that imperils two critical algorithms upon which Internet trust rests: RSA and Diff

Click to view the original at slideshare.net

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Sprites mods - Hard disk hacking - Intro

Apart from this article, I also gave a talk at OHM2013 about this subject. As soon as the video recordings made at that time are available, I'll link there.

Click to view the original at spritesmods.com

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Michael Lewis: Did Goldman Sachs Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?

With Sergey Aleynikov in prison for lifting computer code from Goldman Sachs, Michael Lewis convenes a private “jury” to determine what he actually did wrong.

Click to view the original at vanityfair.com