Alkahest

I recently had a small argument with a vendor selling biometric fingerprint scanners tied to your credit card number.  He said that they were the greatest and most secure thing ever; I said that there weren’t any standards and that the security of the devices was questionable.
I wish I had seen this earlier.

IT security (and for that matter, other security concerns too) are often seen as conflicting with usability. There is something to that. If you take any given technology and turn up the level of security it provides, you will almost always decrease the usability of the system.
Consider passwords. If people are allowed [...]

I missed this when it came out last week, but apparently, a gentleman named Ryan Bird was detained at the airport last week for writing “Kip Hawley is an idiot” on his plastic baggie filled with toiletries. Apparently, the security trolls highly educated and diligent TSA employees took the statement to be a threat [...]

I survived giving my presentation today - in spite of the fact that I showed up to the wrong hotel, in the wrong part of the city.  I blame my boss.  I mentioned that the talk was at the Sheraton Imperial (although I hadn’t looked to see where that was yet) and he said, oh [...]

Checking my schedule for tomorrow, I realized that I have to give a talk at a major “human studies” conference about security risks in web-based surveys.  Unfortunately, I haven’t actually prepared anything.  I’ve got my slides from the last time I did the talk, but I really wanted to do something more interesting and interactive [...]

One of the disadvantages of having so many email accounts is the number of spam you get. Recently, I’ve been noticing an increase in stock spam making it through my spam filters. I’ve been wondering how effective the spam is and whether or not one could make money shorting these stocks.
Apparently, I’m not [...]

I’ve heard and read a number of people saying “political correctness be damned, we should use racial profiling to identify terrorists.” The problem I’ve always had with this is that it makes no sense. Try the following test, identify the terrorist:

young muslim male
young muslim female
asian male or female
caucasian male or female
black male or [...]

I spent a lot of time last week looking at an application in order to assess its security. The thing that was troubling me was that this is a web application and the primary form for data entry was defined like:
form name=”foo” method=”post” action=””
This means that the nothing happens when you hit submit on the [...]

given that the vulnerability and the patches haven’t yet been released, does this constitute a “-1 day exploit?”

I wonder if these folks have read the recent article in the NY Times regarding prosopagnosia?
The company Passfaces has a password replacement technology that uses the brain’s ability to recognize faces. The idea is that the user selects a set of faces. They are then presented with a series of options where each [...]