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Comment Re:Institutional hypocrisy (Score 1) 186

The EU regulators don't want to appear as "censors"

Legally speaking, they not only don't appear, they are not. The legal definition of censorship (at least here in Germany, YMMV) means pre-publication, government-agency control. Having a court (as opposed to a government agency) found something illegal and removing it has never been considered censorship in the legal sense.

so they don't go after the source

Actually, the reason they don't is that if the source is outside the EU, it is a very lengthy and uncertain process. Now while you hail Internet anarchy, consider what options the lawmakers have:

  1. They could sit on their thumbs doing nothing. While this option pleases the anarchist in us, you cannot expect a lawmaker to ignore lawbreakers - in fact, in most other instances of such an event, we would complain very loudly that they're lazy, corrupt bastards.
  2. They can filter at the ISP level - welcome Internet censorship infrastructure. I'm pretty sure you don't want this alternative.
  3. They understand that for 90% of the users, Google et al is The Internet, and if it can't be found in a search, it doesn't exist.

For all the whining here, the option they've taken is actually the least intrusive.

Comment Re:What about my right to search? (Score 1) 186

What about my right to search?

There is no such right, except in your imagination. There is a right (at least in my country, probably similar ones in the EU as a whole) to get information from publicly available sources. So the government cannot stop you from searching at all. But it can intervene in the information available if that information breaks laws. For example, copyrighted content, state secrets, but also information a court has found to be libel or slander.

And quite frankly speaking, for the cases this law is intended for (let's not focus only on the abuses, as most idiot journalists do because it makes for better headlines), the right of an individual to not have their life ruined by, say, completely made-up allegations of child abuse and rape quite clearly trumps your right of finding false and misleading information.

Comment Re:FUD filled.... (Score 1) 212

It sounds like this transformer had its center tap grounded and was the path to ground on one side of a ground loop as the geomagnetic field moved under pressure from a CME, inducing a common-mode current in the long-distance power line. A gas pipeline in an area of poor ground conductivity in Russia was also destroyed, it is said, resulting in 500 deaths.

One can protect against this phenomenon by use of common-mode breakers and perhaps even overheat breakers. The system will not stay up but nor will it be destroyed. This is a high-current rather than high-voltage phenomenon and thus the various methods used to dissipate lightning currents might not be effective.

Comment Re:well (Score 1) 128

I gave an example of ensuring it's not.

And I already stated in my first reply that IMHO your success has little to do with the training and a lot to do with the continuous follow-ups you do. Also with an environment that is not business-focussed.

There are numerous ways to get people involved and interested in training. Showing them a hack in progress or playing recorded calls of phishing attacks, let them put their hands on a hacking device or operate a key logger on a demo PC.

That means spending a considerable amount of time and effort on everyone. Scale that up to a 3,000 people company. Now get approval for the budget for this. Not many companies are going to spend this amount of money.

Writing policy is not the same as educating people.

That is true. But you missed the point I was making. Of course you need in-depth technical documents when you actually secure a somewhat complicated system. But the policy - the document that you expect every employee in the company to read and know - should not contain those details.

Same with almost every security awareness training I've personally seen. Half of its contents can be thrown out with no loss of vital information, and if the people who run the trainings don't do it (because if they did, they'd only get half as much money for it), then the recipients will do it via filtering. The end result is the same.

Because everyone is exposed to and knows as much about security as you do right?

No, because the wrong problems are addressed. I've given a keynote not long ago about these things as my contribution to improving the status quo. One of the points I keep repeating is that most password policies actually make passwords less secure, not more. (they follow predictable patterns because most people will build the most simple password the policy allows, for example).

What I mean is that we replace actual security with trainings and think it's a solution. Basically, instead of putting belts and airbags into cars, we tell people to not crash into each other - as if they did it intentionally, as if crashes only happened because nobody told people to not crash their cars. Yes, there's a good reason to tell people to drive carefully, but just like those roadside signs, it doesn't give any measurable gain to hammer the message in. Simple messages and time-spaced reminders work better than extensive training. In fact, if you train people too much, you can get the opposite effect, as they become annoyed by being told the same thing they already know for the 100th time.

Your problem with security awareness training is related to your own psychological problems. We all have them, I don't intend that as an insult. I work on mine every day.

Sure I have my own view and experiences and my attitude is the result of what I've seen and what I think about it. Also the result of knowing a lot of people in the IT consulting business privately, where they tell you what they really think.
I don't consider it a psychological problem, it's a simple fact of life. If your life experience is different, you'll have different expectations. By exchanging them here, we can both widen our horizon, which at least for me is the main reason I'm posting.

Comment Re:well (Score 1) 128

Ahh, so you work at one of those places with horrible culture.

I don't work there anymore, but I've been in the security industry long enough to know a number of companies, as well as the uncomfortable squirming that follows if you ask security training providers for independent evidence supporting their claims.

It's not a problem of IT security. Fire security trainings are quite similar, except that they have evolved thanks to decades of experience - in a modern company, those responsible know that the fire drill is primarily to drain the assigned helpers and floor supervisors, not the employees.

Instead of saying "this is stupid, I know this stuff" you could volunteer to help mentor people or simply grunt "yup, saw a guy get hacked by this once" instead of holding negativity.

I never said security is stupid. I am saying security awareness trainings are a waste of time, by and large. Tell me, how many people have you had in those trainings you thought before they went in that giving your password to random strangers is a good idea? 90% of the content of these trainings is either boring because everyone knows it already or boring because it's too technical and not interesting that they filter it out.

I've had the responsibility of writing or reworking existing IT security policies, and my advise has always been to make them as short and simple as possible. I've seen a multinational corporation vomit up a 300 page security policy, which was really great from an ISO 270xx POV, but aside from the guys in the security department who wrote it, I'm fairly certain I was the only other human being who actually read all of it, ever.

I love security. But I think our industries approach to users and security is fundamentally flawed and trainings are a band-aid on a broken arm - placebo treatments that don't even touch the real issues.

Comment Why use public CA an internal server? (Score 4, Insightful) 92

Who are these people, that would give a damn about this change?

You don't need an intermediary not-you authority for this job. And in fact, using one can only possibly decrease the security, in the best case scenario. Even the worst most incompetent company in the world, would make a better CA for its internal servers, than the best, most trustworthy public CA.

Comment Re:Is there an SWA Twitter police? (Score 1) 928

Whoa there. This was no mere bad judgement call. Having him thrown off the plane was over-the-top malicious, totally beyond what I ever expect from anyone who is "having a bad day." I sincerely believe such a person really shouldn't be in any sort of position where they might have that amount of power over other people.

Put a hundred random people in the same sort of bad-day position, and I don't expect one of them to behave like this one did. This one is truly exceptional, and does not merely "have bad days." This is the kind of person whose news stories are usually headlined something like "gunman kills five then self."

I might be willing to excuse them, if say, their psychiatrist were to explain how this was anomalous for their character and that their medication was defective, or something like that. OTOH that can be handled in their lawsuit against the medication manufacturer, and then this psycho will never need a job where they exercise power over other people again.

Comment Please let me explain this (Score 1, Funny) 928

I happen to be the executive who works at Southwest and made the decision, upon seeing the tweet, to call the gate and have him kicked off. Please allow me to explain my decision.

I work in the PR department, and managing publicity is my job. When I saw the tweet, I realized it was bad publicity. I don't like my company getting bad publicity, and I seek to avoid it, or replace it with good publicity.

So I threw our tweeting customer off, thereby solving the bad publicity problem! See? Now do you get it?

...

(Why is everyone looking at me like I'm a idiot?)

Comment Re:name and location tweeted... (Score 0, Troll) 928

Men really need to start to stand up for equal rights.

While I agree with your main point, equal rights is not the problem. Equal treatment is. We have the same rights, feminism has won long ago. But in many areas men and women are still treated very differently. Sometimes the women are treated badly, and there are many feminists making a big scandal of it, and sometimes the men are treated badly, and almost never anyone says a word.

Comment Re:What?!? (Score 1) 928

Blame Twitter. If you had more than 140 characters available, you could properly voice your opinion in a way they cannot find fault with, for example by lauding them so excessively that anyone with three working brain cells understands what you really want to say.

Twitter is a free SMS broadcast service and public link sharer, nothing more. People use it for stuff that they really should take a minute of calm and a slightly longer text format for. Brevity is a virtue, but only really good writers can properly convey a complete thought in a short sentence.

Comment Re:Customer service? (Score 1) 928

I completely understand why airlines do NOT let families on early, because they now charge people extra for those privileges. But if they were trying to maximize efficiency instead of profits, it would definitely make sense to move the families on when fewer people are obstacles on the plane.

If efficiency were your policy, you'd stop applying special rules based on arbitrary distinctions. While deeply engrained in our culture, there's no reason to treat families differently from other people travelling together, who may (or may not) have equally compelling reasons to want to sit in one row.

Airlines have destroyed their own customer friendliness by collectively fighting a price war until the point where they need to make you pay for napkins so they can operate profitably. I personally find it insulting that some arbitrary rules give some people priviledges that other people have to pay for. Do it 100% or don't do it at all.

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