Tag Archives: interviews

A Hacker’s Mind News

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/02/a-hackers-mind-news.html

A Hacker’s Mind will be published on Tuesday.

I have done a written interview and a podcast interview about the book. It’s been chosen as a “February 2023 Must-Read Book” by the Next Big Idea Club. And an “Editor’s Pick”—whatever that means—on Amazon.

There have been three reviews so far. I am hoping for more. And maybe even a published excerpt or two.

Amazon and others will start shipping the book on Tuesday. If you ordered a signed copy from me, it is already in the mail.

If you can leave a review somewhere, I would appreciate it.

Museum Security

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/10/museum-security.html

Interesting interview:

Banks don’t take millions of dollars and put them in plastic bags and hang them on the wall so everybody can walk right up to them. But we do basically the same thing in museums and hang the assets right out on the wall. So it’s our job, then, to either use technology or develop technology that protects the art, to hire honest guards that are trainable and able to meet the challenge and alert and so forth. And we have to keep them alert because it’s the world’s most boring job. It might be great for you to go to a museum and see it for a day, but they stand in that same gallery year after year, and so they get mental fatigue. And so we have to rotate them around and give them responsibilities that keep them stimulated and keep them fresh.

It’s a challenge. But we try to predict the items that might be most vulnerable. Which are not necessarily most valuable; some things have symbolic significance to them. And then we try to predict what the next targets might be and advise our clients that they maybe need to put special security on those items.

Interview with the Head of the NSA’s Research Directorate

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/02/interview-with-the-head-of-the-nsas-research-directorate.html

MIT Technology Review published an interview with Gil Herrera, the new head of the NSA’s Research Directorate. There’s a lot of talk about quantum computing, monitoring 5G networks, and the problems of big data:

The math department, often in conjunction with the computer science department, helps tackle one of NSA’s most interesting problems: big data. Despite public reckoning over mass surveillance, NSA famously faces the challenge of collecting such extreme quantities of data that, on top of legal and ethical problems, it can be nearly impossible to sift through all of it to find everything of value. NSA views the kind of “vast access and collection” that it talks about internally as both an achievement and its own set of problems. The field of data science aims to solve them.

“Everyone thinks their data is the messiest in the world, and mine maybe is because it’s taken from people who don’t want us to have it, frankly,” said Herrera’s immediate predecessor at the NSA, the computer scientist Deborah Frincke, during a 2017 talk at Stanford. “The adversary does not speak clearly in English with nice statements into a mic and, if we can’t understand it, send us a clearer statement.”

Making sense of vast stores of unclear, often stolen data in hundreds of languages and even more technical formats remains one of the directorate’s enduring tasks.