Those hypotheticals about voting machines being insecure? Hand me that tinfoil…
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Those hypotheticals about voting machines being insecure? Hand me that tinfoil…
There is a bunch of strange stuff surfacing surrounding the alleged incident in which the NSA allegedly tried to buy back stolen data from an alleged Russian hacker. I’m tracking it, but there are still many shoes that need to drop before the story begins to even make a shred of sense.
I don’t really know where to go with some of this; I’m geniunely afraid I’m going to start sounding like a conspiracy theorist. The conspiracies have already staked out their territory, though, which makes this whole topic a bit of a mine-field.
In various postings this year, I’ve been guarded about the Russian attribution of the DNC email hacks.
This is another story in the “things I am tracking but I am not sure what they mean, yet” file. Unfortunately, we won’t (probably) know for a year or two; there are still a lot of shoes to drop.
[Edit: I wrote this monday afternoon. Since then there have been new developments, which I will comment on at the bottom. The bit about hypothetical Mossad spies inside Kaspersky Labs was kidding, when I wrote it, I swear.]
If you haven’t seen the Talking Heads True Stories you should. [amazon] But that’s not what we’re going to be talking about today. I just needed a title for the blog posting, and that got me thinking.
Please remember that email is not a secure communications medium. Do not say anything in an email that you would not be comfortable seeing on a bathroom wall or on CNN.
I made a bad move when I used HJ Hornbeck’s posting on bayesian reasoning about Russian hacking as a jumping-off point for a critique of using bayesian reasoning to attempt to predict events.
This is a pretty fair view into what the high-end hacker’s existence is like. There are blurry lines everywhere, so it’s a bit hard to even say what is “hacking” versus “marketing” or “information operations” – it’s complicated.
I made an oblique reference to Bayesian arguments in a postscript to a posting, [stderr] and hadn’t realized that HJ Hornbeck has already been digging into exactly that topic, using exactly that example. [hj1] [hj2] With all respect to HJ, I’m going to use his example as an opportunity to critique some of how Bayesian arguments are used in the skeptical community.