History, Poetry, Security

The massacre of the Cathars

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The Wikipedia has a fair amount of information on the Cathars that seems fairly well written. I noted in particular a description of habits and beliefs that upset the Catholic organization:

The slaying of life was abhorrent to the Cathars, just as was the senseless copulation that produced enslavement in matter. Consequently, abstention from all animal food except fish was enjoined of the Perfecti. (The Perfecti apparently avoided eating anything considered to be a by-product of sexual reproduction, including cheese, eggs, milk and butter.) War and capital punishment were also absolutely condemned, an abnormality in the medieval age.

Such teachings, both theological and practical, brought upon the Cathars firm condemnation from the religious authorities whose social order they threatened.

It is amazing to take a careful look at life under Count of Toulouse Raymond VI as he was the ruler in an area with a fairly civilized and yet secular and prospering community. Other sites paint a compelling portrait:

Chivalry and poetry, art and literature, and business and commerce thrived, the land was at peace, the people prospered; Jew, Cathar, Waldensian, and Catholic lived and worked side by side in an area free of religious persecution and dominated by religious tolerance. People were judged on their own merits, not by the religious beliefs to which they subscribed. Secular offices were distributed on the basis of merit, not religion, and powerful offices in the state were open to Jew, Cathar, Waldensian, and Catholic alike.

This was the time and place of the Troubadour poets, influenced by the Sufi poets to the south as well as the Kabbalists. They sang and spoke of the idealized female and unattainable love, and recognized women as spiritually equal; perhaps even as divine. In fact, women even could become a Perfecti!

Things went south (pun not intended) from increasing pressure from the Pope who became outraged at the Cathars prosperity. He demanded they submit to the Catholic establishment’s authority and he sent representatives to negotiate their surrender. Sadly, one of the representatives was murdered while visiting Raymond. This led to excommunication of Raymond and eventually a Papal decree that the land and wealth of the region was fair game to Catholics who wanted to take it by force for themselves. From the Wikipedia again:

The crusader army came under the command, both spiritual and military, of the papal legate Arnaud-Amaury, Abbot of Cîteaux. In the first significant engagement of the war, the town of Béziers was taken on 22 July 1209. Arnaud, the Cistercian abbot-commander is said to have been asked how to tell Cathar from Catholic. His reply, recorded by a fellow Cistercian, was “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eis.” — “Kill them all, the Lord will recognise His ownâ€?. The doors of the church of St Mary Magdalene were broken down and the occupants slaughtered. 7,000 people died there including women and children. Elsewhere in the town many more thousands were mutilated and killed. Prisoners were blinded, dragged behind horses, and used for target practice. The town was razed. Arnaud, the abbot-commander, wrote to his master, the Pope: “Today your Holiness, twenty thousand citizens were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex.â€? The population of Béziers was then probably no more than 15,000 but with local refugees seeking shelter within the city walls, the number claimed, 20,000, is possible.

Raymond had anticipated the invasion to a degree and apparently tried to negotiate, but his efforts failed to stop the crusaders from taking Béziers. The town apparently had only a few hundred Cathars, but the decision to stand together meant the whole population was massacred. This crusade continued for more than twenty years. Raymond tried also to comply with the demands of the Pope and crusaders over time to achieve their forgiveness, such as turning-over his seven best strongholds and his mercenaries or removing all Jews from positions of power, but the Catholic authority simply tortured him with his own desire and acquiesence. Eventually, against some resistance, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were sent by the Pope to “convert” or kill the people of Languedoc, and the poetic and peaceful Cathars were completely destroyed.

History, Security

Rear view mirrors are small for a reason

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I had to give my “rear-view” lecture the other day and so I thought I should just jot down a note here as an easy reminder. In nutshell, when looking forward you should be careful not to fixate on the little mirror on your windshield. Avoiding past mistakes, and learning is vital, but data about where you have been is not necessarily the best thing going forward. A turn in the road, for example…

The general manager of the Australia Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT), Graham Ingram, gives an excellent example in a recent article about virus writers are researching the top anti-virus systems in order to bypass them:

“The most popular brands of antivirus on the market… have an 80 percent miss rate… So if you are running these pieces of software, eight out of 10 pieces of malicious code are going to get in,” said Ingram.

Although Ingram didn’t mention any of the leading losers by name, Gartner’s figures for 2005 show that Symantec is the clear leader with 53.6 percent of the market. McAfee and Trend own 18.8 percent and 13.8 percent of the market respectively.

One vendor Ingram did mention was Russian outfit Kaspersky, which in the same tests managed to block around 90 percent of new malware.

According to Gartner, Kaspersky’s market share is a lowly 0.7 percent.

I actually think there is more to the difference between a pure-play anti-virus company like Kaspersky and f-prot and a “we’ll sell you anything you’ll buy” Symantec and McAfee. But even if we accept Ingram’s premise that the big vendors are losing relevance because they are a bigger target, it should make people think twice before assuming that just because Symantec helped them get around the last bend, they no longer need to pay attention to the road ahead.

Another example, also in recent news, is of the Israeli army adapting to Hizbullah tactics. The Hizbullah have not only acquired sophisticated arms (supplied by China via Iran — more on that another day), but Hizbullah has a series of complex tactics, tunnels and civilian targets that provides them the element of surprise. The traditional Israeli armor-based strategy has backfired as enemy anti-tank missles turn the Merkava and APC into death-traps. Instead, the Israelis have turned things upside-down and have adopted traditional troops on the ground to diffuse the effectiveness of anti-tank missles (no clear target), coupled with sniper nests to pick out the Hizbullah embedded among the women and children. You might say that the Israelis keep an eye on where they have been, but they also adapt quickly to where they are trying to go.

Security

16 to 24 yr olds online only 3hr/wk?

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I just read some fun data on the BBC regarding the UK Office of Communications (Ofcom) 2006 report.

It does not surprise me that young adults are usually far more prone to adopt new trends and be responsive to changes in technology that give them advantages (call it the “more free time to explore less disposable cash phenomenon” if you will). But one thing did surprise me, from the BBC article:

Sixteen to 24 year olds, it reports, spend nearly three hours on the net each week.

Nearly three hours a week? That can’t be right, or the numbers must conceal something like a group that doesn’t have access. I believe that the amount of time online for this age group will soon surpass three hours a day, especially if you count mobile phones and handheld devices that are “connected”.

The actual report gives some food for thought:

16-24 year olds spend on average 21 minutes more time online per week, send 42 more SMS text messages, but spend over seven hours less time watching television.

[…]

3G mobile services are now available to over 90% of the population and the proportion of unbundled exchanges is up ten percentage points on 2004.

So I think the more challenging question soon will be, in terms of the convergence of emerging technology, what these numbers will look like when you can watch television on your 3G mobile devices and send SMS text messages from your television.

Security

Disks still not being properly cleaned

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I feel like I read a story like this one every year. Someone buys or finds an old hard drive and tries to recover the data. They then manage to expose the fact that people still do not properly erase information on disks before discarding them to the wild:

The research – which was based on 317 computer hard drives obtained from the UK, North America, Germany and Australia – showed just how many people believe in the data fairy: though 41% of the disks were unreadable, 20% contained sufficient information to identify individuals, 5% of the disks held commercial information on organisations ranging in the UK from Man Trucks to Easington Council, and included records of a Children’s Day Care centre.

There was also illegal information with 5% of the disks holding “illicit data” and 1% of the disks bearing paedophile information. As a result, a criminal investigation has been launched in South Wales and another one in Australia.

[…]

Just how compromising and thorough the information stored on computers can be was demonstrated by data obtained from disks belonging to Port Weller Dry Dock, a Canadian ship building company.

On the drives was information that showed the company had details on a bid for the US Navy’s top secret DD21 destroyer programme, part of a US defence programme intended to equip the US navy for the 21st century.

This problem can either get better or worse with the new era of online archive and storage solutions. In other words, people can transfer the issue of handling stored data to a service-based system but can they trust that such a service will do any better job than the companies in this study?

Jon Godfrey, from Life Cycle Services, has a nice quote in the story:

“People get worried about losing data on computers but they don’t realise that erasure is as important as retention. The survey shows that the commercial sector is still chronically ignorant of the destruction and retention of data, and our experience is that the problem is actually worse than the study suggests.”

Actually, studies also show that people do not get worried about losing data. So it is perhaps more accurate to say that people simply do not always understand the risks and/or are unequipped and untrained to handle them.

the poetry of information security