The motto on the very first official United States coin was “Mind Your Business.” Designed by Benjamin Franklin in 1787, the front of the coin also bore a picture of the sundial with with word Fugio (Latin, “I fly”). Franklin was fond of aphorisms, and the design has been taken to mean, “Time Flies, Mind [...]
Archive for January, 2009
Sign on the old historical archive in Santa Fe, New Mexico. One chilly day last September, United Airlines’ stock temporarily crashed more than $1 billion due to an accidental re-release of an old news report about its 2002 bankruptcy. The New York Times reported that “shares of United traded at one cent… down 99.92 percent, [...]
Interview with an Adware Author
Posted in Economics, Privacy, Security, Technology on Jan 12th, 2009
Matt Knox, a talented Ruby instructor and coder, talks about his early days designing and writing adware for Direct Revenue. (Direct Revenue was sued by Eliot Spitzer in 2006 for allegedly surreptitiously installing adware on millions of computers.) S: You wrote adware. You bastard. M: [sheepishly] Yes, I did. I got to write half of [...]
30-Second Security Assessment
Posted in Security on Jan 5th, 2009
You can tell a lot about a company’s information security posture in 30 seconds. As a security consultant, I’m often amazed at how much I can infer from a simple walk between the front door and the conference room. If you see many computers of the same make and model with the same type of [...]