Today’s post is over at the newly re-homed, back and better than ever, tanned, rested and ready safer-computing.com! It’s a continuation of the Uptime mini-series.
Category: InfoSec and IT Page 2 of 27
Every one of us has a data center to care for. Not everyone takes it as seriously as some do.
The mouseover text for this one reads
The weird sense of duty really good sysadmins have can border on the sociopathic, but it’s nice to know that it stands between the forces of darkness and your cat blog’s servers.
Point being, what’s trivial to you or me is not so trivial to someone. And if that someone is a member of your household then you need to take it seriously, if for no other reason than shalom
Think about the things a data center does to create a fundamentally good environment for the computers it houses: climate control, power protection, redundancy, fire protection, physical security.
But Kahomono, I hear you saying, my house is not a data center! Oh no? Let’s talk about a job I had a few years ago. OK, quite a few years. But still: we were opening a new data center for a major NYC bank. We had three computer rooms: the Mainframe room had 8 IBM 390s. The Time-Sharing room had 4 Honeywell DPS-8s. And the Mini room had about a dozen computers of various makes: Data General, Pr1me, Tandem, Digital. There were also a handful of IBM PCs floating around, with which nobody was very impressed. So let’s round up and say that this “Data Center” — and it was surely that — had about 30 computers housed in it.
How many computers in your home now? Do you even know? I can say that in a typical home housing a family of four, you probably have… more than in my 1980’s era data center. 40? Maybe close to 50? Consider that your phones and tablets, your set-top boxes, DVRs, gaming consoles, “smart home” controllers and endpoints, not to mention every “smart” appliance you connected to your poor overtaxed WiFi, are all computers at least as powerful and capable as that VAX in our Mini room back in the day. So if you only counted your desktops and laptop computers, you missed the mark by around 90%, is my guess.
And every one of those computers is capable of violating at least one tenet of information security. (Remember CIA?)
- Confidentiality: it could leak information about you and your activities that you would rather it didn’t.
- Integrity: It could damage or alter information it holds, making it less useful or even harmful to you
- Availability: you could lose information you don’t want to lose. Think emails, tax returns, photos, music collections, movies, saved game progress.
So what do you do about it that doesn’t turn you into that guy in the cartoon above? More on that to come.
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And why you should too.
Introducing, The Spinner!
Warning: this video is their ad, so take it with many grains of salt. Like, the whole shaker.
The Spinner is a product that you, a shitty man, connive to have your victim wife install, unbeknownst to her, in her web browser. Then it starts guiding the articles she sees on all websites she normally visits. The intention is, to influence her to initiate sex with you. Because, being the lump of excrement that you are, you have no other way to accomplish this lofty goal.
All the different dangers and creepiness of online ads have long since gelled in my mind to the simple idea that ads are evil. In a way, I am grateful for this product. It distills that concept to its purest form yet and provides a single concrete example I can point to.
And that all said, the same ideas and techniques are touted by all major online advertising platforms as a reason why one should engage their services. They just manage to pull it off with less PUA flair.
“Now that I have read these last 17 news items, I must go do my husband immediately!“, said no woman ever.
h/t @aral
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Less than you’d think!
We do this all the time, especially with our phones. I like that Randall wants us to think about it once in a while. I want that, too.
