Category Archives: Security

Energy, Poetry, Security

Karma and the Winter’s Edge

Leave a comment

With that video in mind, Fisker recently took the top design award from Fast Company.

The judges praised the design’s boldness. “The Fisker shows what you can do by taking risks in sedan design,” says judge Erica Eden, a Femme Den founder at Smart Design, “and that’s really what consumers want.”

Risks in sedan design? Soon after recieving their award for “innovation” many Fiskers in NY exploded (due to hurricane Sandy).

We have confidence in the Fisker Karma and safety is our primary concern. While we intend to find the cause as quickly as possible, storm damage has restricted access to the port. We will issue a further statement once the root cause has been determined.

Ooops. Perhaps not what they meant by risky? I say design fail.

I point out the award and the explosion because another finalist in the same competition was a Faraday electric bicycle that weighs only 40 lbs.

We’re very excited to announce that the Faraday Porteur has been selected as a finalist for the Fast Company “Innovation By Design” awards, the winner of which will be announced October 16th in NYC.

Now imagine going backwards in time and adding resilience/survivability metrics to the design award criteria for innovation…

Here’s my suggestion to Fast Company and Faraday for a new promotion that would resonate in NYC: “Bicycles. They carry you around the city faster then automobiles, they cost a small fraction, and they don’t explode.” Performance, reliability, affordability. What else do you want?

Porteur

I’ve written before about the increase in bicycle sales after disasters and the social benefits of cycling. Fast Company really missed an opportunity to recognize the future direction of transportation.

A gasoline automobile gets the award? Really? Not innovative. But giving the award to a $100K gasoline vehicle that increases the risk of failure or injury…?

At least Consumer Reports had some usability perspective in their review of the Fisker.

We buy about 80 cars a year and this is the first time in memory that we have had a car that is undriveable before it has finished our check-in process.

Fast Company should do a retraction. Or maybe that’s too risky?

History, Poetry, Security

Just Say No to Cyber

Leave a comment

Bloomberg Businessweek sat down a couple months ago with five security experts including Robert Rodriguez, chairman of the Security Innovation Network and senior adviser to the Chertoff Group. The five were asked questions like “Is it important to determine who’s responsible for security? Is it the seller of the computer, the way that a seller of an automobile is responsible for a level of safety? What’s the alternative?”

An answer from Rodriguez, which built on an answer from Brvenik, recently was brought to my attention.

[SourceFire VP] Brvenik: We can make it harder, we can make it more expensive for the adversary, but they still have entry points. In order to truly solve this problem, we have to educate everybody from the start. Elementary schools should be teaching children before they’re ever online about the risks of it, and safe behaviors and how to identify bad things.

Rodriguez: I totally agree with you. Education, increasing awareness, and starting with a national ad campaign, almost like Nancy Reagan did with “Just Say No to Drugs.” It sounded silly to people in the beginning, but it was highly impactful.

While I am all for user education, I can hardly believe someone would cite Nancy Reagan’s program as “highly impactful.” I assume he means that in a positive way. I’ve always considered Reagan’s slogan a complete and abject failure due to the emphasis on an inflexible and unthinking response to a complex problem. We might as well tell people to just say no to anything “cyber” because it can cause harm.

Perhaps Michael Hecht, a Penn State professor of crime, law, and justice, put it best:

Critiqued by some for reducing a complex issue to a catch phrase, Reagan’s campaign is generally considered to have been unsuccessful, and the phrase “just say no” has become a pop-culture joke.

Hecht makes an interesting point about the slogans that work best and why:

…it is clear from a large body of research that students are more receptive when their peers are involved with delivering the message.

The nuance on these political issues is probably important. While I am for user education I am against a “Just Say No” program. Here’s another example: while I am for passenger screening I am against the Chertoff Group lobbying to sell their own product a millimeter wave scanner into airports.

I guess I would have given Bloomberg’s question a different response. I would agree with Brvenik and Rodriguez on user education but also would have disagreed with them. I would have emphasized don’t blame the victim (different from Brvenik), don’t be top-down and inflexible in reasoning (different from Rodriguez) and I would have said a reasonable level of liability should be put on manufacturers (more direct answer to the question).

History, Security

This Day in History: 1962 Cuban Missle Crisis

Leave a comment

Two days before October 16th, 1962 an american spy plane taking photos of Cuba recorded the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles. This not only revealed a clear danger but also gaps in American intelligence operations. The missiles posed an immediate threat.

President Kennedy first saw the sobering photos on this day, 50 years ago, which started a series of events that brought the country to the brink of nuclear war. Over the next eight days the US moved towards launching its own missiles, as re-told by veterans of the incident.

“We are very near going to war, you will launch your missile to DEFCON 2,” Johnson, 77, [ballistic-missile analyst technician for the 578th Strategic Missile Squadron supported by Dyess Air Force Base] recalled the sound of the alert and then the message to raise the Atlas F-series missile 185-feet to a launchpad and wait for the Defense Condition 1 (DEFCON 1) alert to push the button and send the weapon into a nuclear holocaust.

Kennedy gave a strong stance publicly during the crisis but as we know today he actually resolved the crisis peacefully through compromise; the President led a series of intense and secret diplomatic meetings with the Soviets, the United Nations and other countries. A direct phone line was installed that enabled Kennedy and Khrushchev to talk; through November they worked out how both sides would reduce their arsenal and quit the forward positions.

Foreign Policy refers to the crisis as “The Myth That Screwed Up 50 Years of U.S. Foreign Policy”

American leaders don’t like to compromise, and a lingering misunderstanding of those 13 days in October 1962 has a lot to do with it.

In fact, the crisis concluded not with Moscow’s unconditional diplomatic whimper, but with mutual concessions.

[…]

For too long, U.S. foreign-policy debates have lionized threats and confrontation and minimized realistic compromise. And yes, to be sure, compromise is not always the answer, and sometimes it’s precisely the wrong answer. But policymakers and politicians have to be able to examine it openly and without fear, and measure it against alternatives. Compromises do fail, and presidents can then ratchet up threats or even use force. But they need to remember that the ever steely-eyed JFK found a compromise solution to the Cuban missile crisis — and the compromise worked.