The Business of Hacking: What Your Data’s Worth

Back in the old days, hackers took the old Indian approach of “counting coup:” they penetrated a network just to say they did it, left you a little file that said “HI” and then departed. Even malicious hackers contented themselves with erasing your disk drive — a huge nuisance but recoverable; anyway if you [...]

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Education, and the Beginning of Our End

So you think we have enemies abroad trying to do us in? It would be hard for them to do the damage that we’re doing to ourselves, if we don’t get a handle on the education of our children — and obviously also remedial education of our adults. The 2005 data from the [...]

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Why We’re Losing, and How to Fix, the War on Terror

Much of the criticism against the Bush Administration concerns the almost hopeless incompetence of their execution of this war — underplanning, underfunding, under-trooping, and allowing the most colossal level of war-profiteering in history. But there is something more profound, one of failing to understand the jihadist movement at its most basic and motivational level, [...]

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Continued Cyber-incompetence at DHS

Just recently the GAO released a status report on the state of federal programs and operations that are high risk due to their greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement. This is a wide-ranging, recurring examination that seeks to identify stuff the needs to be fixed, and now.
Among their other findings, they pointedly [...]

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