Silicon Shecky

This week there was protesting going on about SOPA and PIPA. The real question is, what happens now?

Congressmen are removing their support. the people who introduced the bills are removing the DNS blocking provisions. What more needs to happen is the question that they will ask.

First, lets start with this, a politicians promise is like a prostitute’s kiss. It is slimy and is not something you can believe. The fact that non of the congressmen who have backpedaled have given any clue as to what they now find objectionable outside of their constituents not liking the bill, is a worrisome sign. One that shows that they don’t really want to back off, and they are putting on a face until the fervor dies down. This is why we need to press the advantage right now to get these bills changed.

Karl W. Palachuk rightly claims in a Facebook post that 99% of the people who signed the petitions don’t know much about the bill. He though, like a lot of the people for the bills, try to make it about infringing versus not infringing. That is not the real problem. People like him who say that not supporting SOPA/PIPA is akin to being a pirate yourself are short sighted and wrong. The real issues are Cybersecurity, letting the foxes (RIAA/MPAA) guard the hen house, and no oversight. The Censorship angel is being used as a way to disguise these other issues that have been brought up.

For instance, there is a provision in SOPA that “bars the distribution of tools and services designed to get around such blacklists.” This is dangerous because sites such as Tor, which is used by people in places such as China and Iran to get around their firewalls, could create problems for VPNs, which could be used by people who work for multinational companies to get around the blacklists, and encryption which would prevent people from seeing what you are requesting on the net. Heck, to bypass some of the blocking/filtering, you could just modify your hosts file. Does that make every operating system illegal under SOPA?

Also think about this. The punishments in SOPA do not fit the crimes. Overbearing on the fines front, making these crimes a felony and setting jail times longer than those who beat up their wives or kids is just not right.

Now to further the argument, there is the Megaupload takedown which happened yesterday. this 2 year investigation with international cooperation sets a standard for taking down sites that are helping pirate stuff knowingly. Yes they have servers on American soil, but they are a multinational company, and Kim Dotcom was arrested in New Zealand. That right there shows that the DCMA combined with current law can take down pirates.

Yes Piracy is a problem. Then again its always been a problem. Should we shut down libraries because people might not (and do not) return books thereby getting them for free. Heck they read them for free through the library. You can get movies, music all of it for free from a library. Why not shut them down? The point being that no matter what, there will be it. I have yet to see confirmable numbers on what it actually is doing to the entertainment industry, but with the amounts of money the execs get pain in bonuses, it really can’t be hurting them too much.

You can go to sites like ArsTechnica.com and find a wealth of information about SOPA and PIPA, what they could do with the laws, extreme examples such as I have posted, and more. There is a wealth of good information out there, and people do need to actually take time to make educated decisions about these sorts of laws.

Finally, think about this. How often do the worst case scenarios come true? Look to the past, see what controversial laws have been enacted without oversight, and how they have been abused over the years. See what groups like the RIAA and MPAA have done in playing the role of Chicken Little (Cassette Tapes, VCRs etc..) over the years, and how they have been proven wrong. We have to decide at some point our own future and not let it get silently dictated to us by a bunch of corporate goons.

Extra charges for single online pay, 4G outages, the FTC starting to look at their business practices. Verizon, what have you done?

I was going to give a review of the Motorola Droid Razor today, but decided to push that off. See the Razor is available only through Verizon, and I noticed yet the start of another outage of 4G services this morning. Verizon has said these outages are growing pains, and were the 4G network brand new, I would accept that, but it is not. Verizon has had their 4G network up for just over a year, and should know how to handle growth. They were the ones who didn’t have the issues AT&T had with the explosion of smartphones. Of course that was CDMA vs. GSM. Now its LTE vs. LTE, and AT&T might have the advantage.

See both are using the LTE network, which requires the use of a SIM card. AT&T, whose network is still known for poor quality, and lots of drops, at least has a head start in dealing with the issues of a network that requires the SIM cards. I wish I had proof, but it seems that the SIM cards, or at least networks that require them, are not as stable here in the States as a network like CDMA which has no SIM card. (At the time of writing this, the 4G network just came back up after being inaccessible for an hour). It would be interesting to hear from someone on the differences between the two networks and why the ones that need SIM cards seem to be more unreliable.

Now this is on the heels of the FTC announcing it was probing Verizon over the $2 convenience fee it was going to charge and then pulled back on. Verizon’s statement is that even paying online has its costs. And they are right, there is equipment and software costs, maintenance on the systems, and hardening the equipment against hackers and other forms of data breaches. Still the costs are the same, whether for an automated system or if people pay individually. That is, unless they have to use 2 separate systems, or the company that is processing the payments is charging them an extra fee. Either way, there are other options to reduce the cost. If you think about it from a security standpoint though, the single payment, which I use, is a safer bet, not just from people knowing they have the money in their account, but from a security breach standpoint.

Just think about it. If you sign up for Automated payments, Verizon and the third party who processes the payments, both have your bank account or credit card information saved on servers. These servers are supposed to be PCI compliant. Even if they are, PCI compliance is a joke. Think of the banks (all of which have to follow at least PCI compliance) or stores (Which have to be PCI compliant) or anything that does online transactions, and how many breaches we hear of. Now think about how many breaches we don’t hear of, at least not immediately. Now look at single payment options, where you can choose not to save the payment info on their servers. Yes there are still problems that can arise from man in the middle attacks, spoofed SSL certificates, etc.. but once you make that payment, the info is not supposed to be stored anywhere. That means if Verizon, or their third party payment processor, has a security breach, your payment information should not be compromised. In reality it might just me being paranoid, but from a logic standpoint it does seem safer.

Now, Verizon did withdraw the $2 fee idea pretty quick, but expect to see it show back up again and again. The bigger thing Verizon has to worry about right now is the amount of bad press they are receiving. They need to remember that pissing one customer off means that customer is going to tell their friends and family, and eventually it can and will take a toll on business.

We all talk about it. We all know that it is important. We also get frustrated about the lack of it. Security, one of the most important things needed with technology, really is a never ending battle.

The world is a much different place now than in the past. We are all interconnected. Computers, iPhones, Social Media, and much more have taken the world to a place where we live in two worlds simultaneously. We integrate our lives, our status, and our personal information into the digital world. Meanwhile, there are those that look to get a hold of it. Others to shut down the flow, to slow down the information available, or to just plain steal what they can. So what do we do? How do we stay secure?

Any technology company that produces anything, be it software or hardware, does not want their product to be a backdoor for those with malicious intent. Yet, the more simple a device or a piece of software is to use, the more likely there are security holes in it. We all know that, and we all cringe for those who do not patch, or are unwilling to spend the funds to help secure the technology. So if this is all so important, why does it seem that the infosec professionals can’t get through to people about it? The answer is simple, and that is a disconnect.

We as people working the technological side of things are one of the biggest problems. We talk about DDoS, Phishing, Social Engineering, Hacking and still we have to fight the battle on two fronts. One agains the malicious people out there, one against the people we are protecting. You look through the lives of people like Kevin Mitnick and Kevin Poulsen and the books they have written, and wonder how can we stop people from stealing lives, stealing credit cards, using the technology in our hands to do harm to others.

There is the whole patch and write better software approach. You can get the best firewalls, log trackers, and policies if you are lucky to help mitigate it. Make the footprint smaller. So why is it such a struggle for so many businesses and individuals who are not in our line of work to understand that? Its the disconnect.

The disconnect can be likened to a layman reading a law brief or even a EULA. the wording is not in terms or ideas that people normally comprehend. The world of IT is a fantastic world, and communicating with each other on a technical level is fantastic, but that is because we speak the same language. Its just like lawyers can understand all the legalese that they write. Its meant for them, and yet they have to break it down for their clients to an understandable state, at least the ones who care about their clients do.

In the corporate world, larger size businesses seem to have a better understanding. They worry about their products, their secrets and know those have to be protected. The small and medium businesses, not so much. I will recommend hardware, software and policies to help them, and they come back with the same old line, “We are small, no one would want to break into our systems. Most people don’t even know abut us.” That is a disconnect. A disconnect from reality, and a disconnect from what we are trying to tell them. Overall there are a lot more small and medium sized business (and way more individuals) with this thought process than there should be.

Now I’m not a genius, but I can understand that trying to tell one of these clients that it doesn’t matter what size, doesn’t quite fly with them. They need proof. Once one of them is hacked that one all of a sudden will take security more seriously. Not always to the extent that we would like, but it is a start. So how can we get the others to understand. How can we get them to realize security is not an end, but a process?

That is the real job we have to do. Not try to ram technospeak down their throats but find a way to communicate with them in layman’s terms, in a way that they understand. We all know that no matter what nothing technology wise is going to be completely secure. We need them to understand that no matter what nothing is 100% secure, but we can lessen the chances. So here are some terms we use, and think about how you would explain it to a non-tech person. I’d love to hear your responses.

Smaller Attack Vector

Social Engineering

Zombie Machines

Packet Filtering

Just taking some small terms like that, I am sure you can think of other terms that need to have some sort of layman term assigned to them. The more we think like an average person when talking about what is needed to make their technology more secure, the better chance we have of getting it more secure, and the more time we can spend on actually proactively fighting those that wish to be malicious.