Can Science Improvise?

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My friend Raquell Holmes is doing some really interesting work at using improv to unlock creativity. There’s some really interesting ties between the use of games and the use of improv to get people to approach problems in a new light, and I’m bummed that I won’t be able to make this event:

Monday Dec 17th – 7:15 to 9:15pm
835 Market Street, Rm. 619, Downtown San Francisco State University Campus

Register at http://www.acteva.com//booking.cfm?bevaid=234451
In advance- $15 At the Door- $20

What happens when you combine the playfulness of improvisation with
the rigor of science? The Life Performance Coaching Center which
leads people from all walks of life in a performance-based approach to
human development is pleased to host Dr. Raquell M. Holmes founder of
improvscience. Holmes has been bringing the discoveries in human
development and performance to researchers and educators in many areas
of science including biology and computing sciences.

In this exploration for scientists and those interested in creativity
and development, participants are introduced to what the
improvisational arts bring to science. Learning to build with the
contributions of others and see opportunities for improvisational
conversation helps us to take risks and discover new ways of seeing
each other and our work.

Come and play as we break down the social barriers that can inhibit
creativity, exploration and discovery.

Helen Abel, LCSW, has worked with people to develop their lives for
over 30 years as a social worker, therapist and coach. She is on the
staff of the Life Performance Coaching Center where she leads the
popular Playground series {link if available} where people learn how
to use their capacity to create, perform and play. As a life coach she
helps people access these same skills to develop creative and new
kinds of conversations with their friends, family and colleagues.

Dr. Raquell Holmes is Director of Outreach, Recruitment and Retention
at the Center for Cell Analysis and Modeling at University of
Connecticut Health Center. She helps biologists to incorporate
computing and computational resources into their teaching and
research. Community building and improvisational theater are explicit
components of the majority of her National Science Foundation funded
projects. She founded improvscience to provide scientists with
opportunities to develop skills in leadership, collaboration and
innovation. Since its inception improvscience has worked with over a
thousand professionals in Science, Technology, Engineering and
Mathematics education and research.

Should I advertise on Twitter?

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Apparently Twitter sent me some credits to use in their advertising program. Now, I really don’t like Twitter’s promoted tweets — I’d prefer to be the customer rather than the product. (That is, I’d like to be able to give Twitter money for an ad-free experience.)

At the same time, I’m curious to see how the advertising system works. I’d like to understand it and blog about it, but Twitter would like to maintain confidentiality around the program. They’re engaged in white-hot competition with Facebook and Google to be the new advertising platform of the future. At the same time, it’s less transparency than the exceptionally high bar that Twitter has generally aspired to.

That said with the launch of Control-Alt-Hack, my collaborators have stuff to sell and give away. (Not to mention maybe a sales bump for The New School of Information Security?) Or maybe I could promote other books that I think people should read, like “Thinking, Fast and Slow“). Does the nature of what I’m advertising change the calculus? Would advertising the giveaway make it different?

Then again, I do lots of “advertising” on Twitter already–I advertise the book, the game, blog posts, ideas I like. Does paying to bring them to more people dramatically change the equation?

Interestingly (and I think this is something that can be discussed, because it’s visible), I’m offered the chance to promote both tweets and myself.

I’d be really interested in hearing from readers about how I should take advantage of this, and if I should take advantage of it at all.

The Gavle Goat is Getting Ready to Burn!

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The Telegraph reports that the Gavle Goat for 2012 is up, and surrounded by guards, cameras, flame retardants, and arsonists.

Emergent Chaos has reporters on the ground internet, ready to report on this holiday story of a town, a goat, and an international conspiracy of drunken arsonists. Stay tuned!

This years goat is shown in its pre-fire state. Note the pre-positioned fire extinguishers surrounding it, along with what one might describe as an altogether insufficient fence.
Gavle Goat 2012

[Update: It turns out that the goat is blogging this year. Mixed English and Swedish.]

Now Available: Control Alt Hack!

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Amazon now has copies of Control Alt Hack, the card game that I helped Tammy Denning and Yoshi Kohno create. Complimentary copies for academics and those who won copies at Blackhat are en route.

Control-alt-hack.jpg

From the website:

Control-Alt-Hack™ is a tabletop card game about white hat hacking, based on game mechanics by gaming powerhouse Steve Jackson Games (Munchkin and GURPS).

Age: 14+ years
Players: 3-6
Game Time: Approximately 1 hour

You and your fellow players work for Hackers, Inc.: a small, elite computer security company of ethical (a.k.a., white hat) hackers who perform security audits and provide consultation services. Their motto? “You Pay Us to Hack You.”

Your job is centered around Missions – tasks that require you to apply your hacker skills (and a bit of luck) in order to succeed. Use your Social Engineering and Network Ninja skills to break the Pacific Northwest’s power grid, or apply a bit of Hardware Hacking and Software Wizardry to convert your robotic vacuum cleaner into an interactive pet toy…no two jobs are the same. So pick up the dice, and get hacking!

Bleg: Canon & Apple RAW processing

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I’m having a camera issue that’s become more and more noticeable with recent software changes. The raw previews coming out of the camera appear substantially more exposed than when Aperture is finished processing them. The difference is hard to measure (there’s no easy undo for raw processing), but appears to be about a full stop of light, sometimes more. I often use a quick shoot-adjust-shoot loop that gives me the exposure I want, and Aperture is messing with the result.

The intuitively obvious search terms (aperture, raw processing, exposure) are not getting me very far in understanding what Aperture does to process the raw images, how I might alter the defaults (well, there’s adjustments pane>RAW fine tuning, but that offers up only boost, huge boost, sharpening & edge adjustments, Moire, Radius and De-noise. Those don’t seem to be incredibly relevant to the brightness of the image.)

Does anyone have advice for how to get the RAW images to process differently?

Test post

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Over the summer, Adam and I were talking and I said that I’d like a place to do some personal blogging as opposed to things I normally do, which are targeted at one place or another.

I’d like to be able to blither about security, but also about whatever. Photography, cooking, you know, things that most people who blog blog about.

We set this up and I have finally gotten around to making a test post.

So thank you, Adam and the rest of the jazz combo. I’m Jon Callas, and I’m on bari sax and english horn.

TSA Approach to Threat Modeling, Part 3

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It’s often said that the TSA’s approach to threat modeling is to just prevent yesterday’s threats. Well, on Friday it came out that:

So, here you see my flight information for my United flight from PHX to EWR. It is my understanding that this is similar to digital boarding passes issued by all U.S. Airlines; so the same information is on a Delta, US Airways, American and all other boarding passes. I am just using United as an example. I have X’d out any information that you could use to change my reservation. But it’s all there, PNR, seat assignment, flight number, name, ect. But what is interesting is the bolded three on the end. This is the TSA Pre-Check information. The number means the number of beeps. 1 beep no Pre-Check, 3 beeps yes Pre-Check. On this trip as you can see I am eligible for Pre-Check. Also this information is not encrypted in any way.

“Security Flaws in the TSA Pre-Check System and the Boarding Pass Check System.“

So, apparently, they’re not even preventing yesterday’s threats, ones they knew about before the recent silliness or the older silliness. (See my 2005 post, “What Did TSA Know, and When Did They Know It?.)”

What are they doing? Comments welcome.

Proof of Age in UK Pilot

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There’s a really interesting article by Toby Stevens at Computer Weekly, “Proof of age comes of age:”

It’s therefore been fascinating to be part of a new initiative that seeks to address proof of age using a Privacy by Design approach to biometric technologies. Touch2id is an anonymous proof of age system that uses fingerprint biometrics and NFC to allow young people to prove that they are 18 years or over at licensed premises (e.g. bars, clubs).

The principle is simple: a young person brings their proof of age document (Home Office rules stipulate this must be a passport or driving licence) to a participating Post Office branch. The Post Office staff member checks document using a scanner, and confirms that the young person is the bearer. They then capture a fingerprint from the customer, which is converted into a hash and used to encrypt the customer’s date of birth on a small NFC sticker, which can be affixed to the back of a phone or wallet. No personal record of the customer’s details, document or fingerprint is retained either on the touch2id enrolment system or in the NFC sticker – the service is completely anonymous.

So first, I’m excited to see this. I think single-purpose credentials are important.

Second, I have a couple of technical questions.

  • Why a fingerprint versus a photo? People are good at recognizing photos, and a photo is a less intrusive mechanism than a fingerprint. Is the security gain sufficient to justify that? What’s the quantified improvement in accuracy?
  • Is NFC actually anonymous? It seems to me that NFC likely has a chip ID or something similar, meaning that the system is pseudonymous

I don’t mean to try to allow the best to be the enemy of the good. Not requiring ID for drinking is an excellent way to secure the ID system. See for example, my BlackHat 2003 talk. But I think that support can be both rah-rah and a careful critique of what we’re building.

Choice Point Screening

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Stamford Police said Jevene Wright, 29, created a fictitious company called “Choice Point Screening” and submitted false invoices for background checks that were submitted to Noble Americas Corporation, an energy retailer firm located in Stamford. (Patrick Barnard, “The Stamford (CT) Patch“)

I don’t want to minimize the issue here. Assuming the allegations are correct, the company’s assurance in their trust of their employees is diminished, they may face compliance or contractual issues, and they’re out at least 1.4 million dollars, most of which has likely been spent. A good number of folks are having bad days, and I don’t want to add to that.

At the same time, I do have a number of comments.

First, Those background check services sure are expensive! I wonder how many people that was.

Hmmm, according to their website, “In the past six years Noble has grown from 1,500 employees to over 14,000.” I do wonder how many of the “background checks” came back with false allegations of past misconduct. If there were 14,000 people with no red flags, isn’t that something of a red flag in and of itself? I also wonder (in a law school hypothetical sort of way, and assuming with no evidence that Wright or an accomplice fabricated false reports on some people so that his fraud went undetected) what sorts of claims might be available to those denied employment based on those untrue statements?

Second, there’s something of a natural experiment here that lets us assess the value of background checking. Assuming Noble Americas Corporation runs a second set of background checks, I’m very curious to know how well spent that $2m* will have been: how many employees do they fire, having learned of something so heinous that the employee can’t be kept, and how many do they fire, having been handed a reason to get rid of a poor performer? (Naturally, those 2 numbers will be rolled into one.)

Lastly, there’s an interesting social engineering angle here. There’s a real company “ChoicePoint” now part of LexisNexis. (ChoicePoint was made famous for their awesome handling of a 2003 data breach, which this blog diligently covered.) So when naming a false background check company, Choice Point Screening seems like it might be a new brand for the company. An auditor, seeing all those background checks, is unlikely to focus in on the extra space. It’s a nice touch.