It's all About the Vision and the Courage to Execute it

Great article on China's blogging market and the never-ending censorship saga. Meet Fang Xingdong, a banned journalist who decides to beat them by playing their own game, do the math yourself. While heading China's Bokee with 14 million bloggers and more than 10,000 new ones every day, he's appointed only 10 people to monitor the blogs :

"Of course, the authorities did not allow a completely wide-open system. Censorship is still practised, even at Mr. Fang's company. Among his 80 employees are 10 people who comb through the blogs every day, deleting anything deemed to be obscene or politically unacceptable. He hopes that the Chinese blogosphere will become self-regulating. "If it's more orderly, there will be less pressure on us," he says. "I think a blog should have a basic foundation of morality and law. I compare it to a person's home."

If I were in China, I'd register on his network.

Preventing a Massive al-Qaeda Cyber Attack

From the unpragmatic department :

"Colarik proposes "a league of cyber communities." The world's 20 largest economies would sign a treaty vowing to manage their own country's cyber activities. Member states would then deny traffic to any nation that refuses to crack down on cyber terrorists."

No, he really means it, totally forgetting on how a huge percentage of terrorist related web sites are hosted in the U.S. Here's the latest example. It gets even more shortsighted :

"Al-Qaeda also publishes a monthly magazine devoted to cyber-terrorism techniques."

If installing a VMware and PGP Whole Disk Encryption is a cyber-terrorism technique, we're all cyber terrorists without the radical mode of thinking and the Quran on the bookshelf.

Eyes in London's Sky - Surveillance Poster

Alcohol's bad, drugs are bad, surveillance is good for protecting your from the insecurities we made you become paranoid of, and so are head-mounted surveillance cams equipped police officers. Sure, but consider the social implications too. London may be one of the most important business centers in Europe -- next to Frankfurt and Rotterdam -- but I'm so not looking forward to living in what's turning into a synonym for 1984.

Still Living in the Perimeter Defense World

Whereas you'd better break out of the budget-allocation myopia and consider prioritizing your security investments, decreased spending on information security in certain regions means good old-fashioned malware and spam floods for the rest of regions doing it :

"Fewer small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Taiwan will increase their spending on information security this year compared with last year, according to a report released Thursday by the Institute for Information Industry's Market Intelligence Center (MIC). The report said that only 12.9 percent of SMEs will increase their information security spending in 2007, compared with 16.2 percent in 2006."

Perimeter defense and host security is like the ABC of security, but since viruses and network attacks are "taken care of" all seems fine -- you wish.

"While more than 90 percent of SMEs have installed anti-virus software and firewall devices, only 11 percent have installed unified threat management products, according to Wang."

And while your organization is multitasking on how to budget with the anyway scarce resources due to legal requirements to do so, or visionary leaders realizing the soft and hard cash losses if you dare to pretend your organization wouldn't get breached into, regions around the world don't have the incentives to do so. If you bring too many people to a party someone always takes a *** in the beer, or so they say. Know when to spend, how much, on what, and is the timing for your investment the right one given the environmental factors of your company. A small size business doesn't really need a honeyfarm unless of course the admin is putting a personal effort in the job.

Data Mining Credit Cards for Child Porn Purchases

22 million customers had the privacy of their credit card purchasing histories breached for the sake of coming up with 322 suspects while looking for transactions to a single child porn web site - ingenious, absolutely ingenious :

"In the case under investigation, police were aware of a child pornography Web site outside of Germany that was attracting users inside the country. And they asked the credit-card companies to conduct a database search narrowed to three criteria: a specific amount of money, a specific time period and a specific receiver account."

I don't want to ruin the effect of the effort here, but why do you still believe child porn is located on the WWW, in the http:// field you're so obsessed with? Is the WWW the only content distribution vector for multimedia files you're aware of? Try the Internet Relay Chat, the concept of Fserve to be precise. Having found the low lifes who buy child porn over the Web is like picturing a pothead as the über-dealer to meet your quotas, namely, efforts like these have absolutely no effect on the overal state of child pornography online. It's the wrong way to fight the war. Put the emphasis on fighting the very production process -- trafficking of children -- not the distribution one.

Insider Sentiments around L.A's Traffic Light System

Rember how the Hollywood Hackers were winning time while heading straight to Grand Central Station in NYC to outsmart the Plague's plan to cause a worldwide ecological disaster and cash in between? In pretty much the same fashion -- without the randomization of traffic lights -- two engineers in between their union's strike seems to have watched the movie too :

"They didn't shut the lights off, city transportation sources said. Rather, the engineers allegedly programmed them so that red lights would be extremely long on the most congested approaches to the intersections, causing gridlock for several days starting Aug. 21, they said."

Whether overal paranoia due to the sensitive nature of the workers' positions and the publicly stated intentions, insider sentiments prevail from my point of view.