When we plead with our audiences to socially distance and stay home, we’re talking to the privileged folks who can and are thinking of doing a little spa day.
We aren’t talking to docs, or to underprivileged people forced to work in an exploitative gig economy.
When we plead with you not to throw a huge holiday party, we are talking to the people who will never be cited for throwing that 20 person interstate party that will be a super-spreader event.
We aren’t talking to the racial or ethnic minorities that will be unfairly persecuted.
When we plead with you to be responsible and empathetic citizens and help slow the spread of COVID-19, we are speaking to our audiences who have a choice, who have the resources to make a difference and who could save lives among those people who don’t have that privilege.
The sad truth is that a lot of our cities and states are running dangerously low on hospital beds and ICU space, and trends are going to push us into a space where care has to be rationed, very fast. So many of us can buy a little time.
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I’m really tired of explaining that hacking into an individual device in a complex physical process does not in most cases equate to successfully and meaningfully tampering with the process.
(Especially when it’s done on a table in a Village. Even though the research done there is incredibly important and meaningful.)
Anyway I have seen this for years when people gleefully found insecure HMIs on Shodan and now when people are drawing equivalence between voting machine vulnerabilities and successful election fraud.
I’m sorry for whomever this makes righteously indignant, but 2020 is a hell of a year to be rolling your own encryption, email, or web server as a consumer or small biz unless you have a lot of relevant knowledge and a lot of spare time to kill.
We’ve gone from a time where someone with generalist It knowledge could really lock things down better than a lot of firms, to a time where homeslice needs to be updating their software, settings, and plugins on the dot every couple weeks. It’s just not great.
I just had someone ask me how to secure their new self-hosted non-profit website built on an ASP.net version that has been unsupported for over four years... 🤷🏻♀️🍸
I was a very early Facebook user, long before they opened for public registration. Boy, at the time I never would have guessed that they might be the specific tool used to decimate Democracy, local news, and free reporting around the world.
If you work for Facebook in anything other than an influential legal or policy position where your entire *purpose* is to make change, I really don’t know what to tell you. I’m disappointed in you. We could help you find another infosec job.
The sad thing the last 10 years have taught us is how much easier social media and big data made it to become a cult leader. Lots of people are susceptible to addiction and conspiracy theories, there just wasn’t a great way to efficiently reach them in huge numbers, before.
I’m going to share a very unpopular opinion that I think needs to be said. There was a huge outcry on Tuesday about Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight’s poll analysis having some deep flaws. However, he and his team did some bang up analysis once real votes slowly trickled in.
Throughout the week I saw a lot of bad calls from other news sources (AZ was especially weird), but since Tuesday night they’ve been statistically and sociologically predicting what would happen with mail-in and provisional ballots very well.
(And as others have said, they were quite conservative in discussing projections for major polling errors, and ultimately did project that national race correctly.)