Category Archives: Security
Deutsche Telekom breach
Stories like this one in Deutsche Welle suggest I’ll need to start revising my graphs again:
Deutsche Telekom has confirmed that personal information from 17 million of its mobile phone customers was stolen in 2006, including secret telephone numbers of high-profile politicians and celebrities.
Deutsche Telekom said the stolen data includes customer mobile phone numbers, addresses, dates of birth and, in some cases, email addresses. Bank information or credit card numbers were not accessed, said the Bonn-based firm.
RFID skim law
ComputerWorld reports that California has made it a crime to read RFID without authorization:
California became the second state to pass a law making it illegal to steal data from RFID (radio frequency identification) cards.
The law sets a penalty that includes a maximum fine of US$1,500 and up to a year in prison for someone convicted of surreptitiously reading information from an RFID card.
Cohen on Palin
Roger Cohen wrote an editorial on Palin, risk and national security:
I know one thing: this is no time for further gambling. John McCain rolled the dice on Sarah Palin. I’m grateful to Bob Rice of Tangent Capital for pointing out that the actuarial risk, based on mortality tables, of Palin becoming president if the Republican ticket wins the election is about 1 in 6 or 7.
That’s the same odds as your birthday falling on a Wednesday, or being delayed on two consecutive flights into Newark airport. Is America ready for that?
The lesson of the last eight years is this: when power is a passport to gamble, people can end up seriously broke or seriously dead.
There is one capable, sober guy in the Bush administration: Defense Secretary Robert Gates. He recently said that U.S. forces in Iraq had to learn counterinsurgency on the job. “But that came at a frightful human, financial and political cost,” he noted.
Gates warned that “warfare is inevitably tragic, inefficient.” He urged skepticism of any notion that “adversaries can be cowed, shocked or awed into submission, instead of being tracked down, hilltop by hilltop, house by house, block by bloody block.”
In short, he lambasted the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Bush war effort for its gambler’s irresponsibility. The financial equivalent of reckless “Shock and Awe” has been “Sub and Prime.”