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Posted by xeonmc 2 days ago

This World of Ours (2014) [pdf](www.usenix.org)
243 points | 189 commentspage 2
Havoc 2 days ago|
I see this on reddit a lot in self hosting context.

The range of things people do on security is wild. Everything from publicly expose everything and pray the apps login function some random threw together is solid to elaborate intrusion detection systems.

bitbasher 1 day ago||
My favorite talk by Mickens (https://vimeo.com/95066828), also talks about Mossad.
drdrek 1 day ago||
The point about the lay person not needing massive parallelism was very true, until it was not :D
megous 2 days ago||
Not sure what audience he is talking to. Experts deal with a lot more issues that sit between choosing a good password + not falling for phishing and "giving up because mossad". The terminology that he sprinkles about suggests the audience is experts.
rini17 2 days ago|
The article actually addresses this -- that all these extra issues are not manageable for mere mortals anyway and/or perfectly spherical cows are involved.
megous 2 days ago||
It does not. It just invents a bunch of straw men, and then mocks them.
rini17 1 day ago|||
Such as?
IAmBroom 1 day ago|||
Literally what you are doing with the article right now.
megous 1 day ago||
Pretty sure I'm not literally inventing actual straw men here. :-)
some_random 1 day ago||
Where does this deification of Mossad come from anyways? They've done a lot more than western intel agencies post cold war but that's absolutely come with failures just like every other intel agency in existence.
singular_atomic 1 day ago||
When we need him the most (a world overrun in llms and AI slop) it seems like he's vanished...
dnlserrano 2 days ago||
Mickens essays are always a good read
zkmon 2 days ago||
Security is a problem caused by ownership of some usefulness. Sometimes solution can be around addressing these two causes.
tarjei_huse 2 days ago|
Do you have a concrete example?
zkmon 1 day ago||
Do not have concentrated usefulness and do not have concentrated ownership.
contrarian1234 2 days ago||
I think the central premise is a "wrong". The "point" of science isn't really to do useful things. Framing things from that angle is in subtle ways dangerous bc that shouldnt be part of the incentive structure.

you dont understand the mating behaviors of naked mole rats bc of some sense of "usefulness". Its just an investigation of nature and how things work. The usefulness comes out unexpectedly. Like you find out naked mole are actually maybe biologically immortal

You should just find interesting phenomena and invetigate. Capitalism figures out the usefulness side of things

wmwragg 2 days ago|
Yeah, Science shouldn't be concerned with usefulness, just like Art. It's the application of those fields which should concern itself with usefulness i.e. applied science, engineering, design etc. I'm not saying that scientific research shouldn't be carried out by companies with specific goals in mind, just that it shouldn't be the expected default.
impossiblefork 2 days ago|
The Mossad part is a very silly element of the text. Many organizations have to defend against US intelligence, Israeli intelligence etc., and I'm sure, that they, with the exception of some very terrible countries with a lot of incompetence or full of disloyal people likely to become infiltrators, are quite successful.

Actual security is possible even against the most powerful and determined adversaries, and it's possible even for you.

IAmBroom 1 day ago|
Well, data security. Right up until the wetware is included.
impossiblefork 1 day ago||
I think, a lot of people imagine these people as very capable, and they think of things like those pagers etc., but when I think of them I think of the Lillehammer affair and a bunch of other similarly silly business, so I'm much less impressed with them, feeling that they're basically silly people.

There's so many cock-ups etc. that you can read about Wikipedia that I don't understand why people hold these people highly and imagine them to be so able. They simply aren't.

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