Author: Steve OHearn

The legendary hacker Kevin Mitnick wasn’t necessarily the technical wizard that a lot of people think he is.  But most of Mitnick’s hacks were simple classic con games, nothing more.  Many assume he managed to “guess” passwords or had some other super secret technical ability to navigate around firewalls and login systems.  Not the case.  In one instance, he literally just walked into a supposedly secure facility, walked right into the computer room and physically grabbed a huge notebook of system user names and passwords, and then – simply walked right out, unchallenged.  I heard he was just wearing a T-shirt and jeans in a coat-and-tie office, and nobody confronted him.

A typical approach he used was to phone a system administrator, pretending to be an authority figure of some sort, and demand access to a particular system to support a presentation he was supposedly giving at the time, and “it won’t be my hide when General so-and-so finds out this thing didn’t happen because somebody changed a stupid login password, do YOU want to explain why we couldn’t give this demonstration?  Do YOU want to be fired?”

It often worked.

And apparently it still does.  The buzz going around network security circles now is about the recent Def-Con contest where the winner phoned a system admininstrator at Wal Mart.  (Canadian hacker dupes Walmart to Win Def Con prize, theStar.com, August 8, 2012). Using classic con-man techniques, the contest winner finagled 75 pre-determined data points out of the guy within 20 minutes.  He did it all over the phone, through simple conversation, while sitting in a glass cage, as part of the observed competition.

The process of extracting secure data from human beings through direct interpersonal interaction (that’s “talking to people” for the layman) is apparently now called “social engineering”, which has a nice ring to it.  I used to call it “that stuff Paul Newman and Robert Redford did in the movie The Sting“.  “Social Engineering” sounds so much more impressive.

But here’s my question:  did anyone at Def Con check to confirm that the Wal Mart guy provided actual secure information?  After all, a typical response to a suspected incoming hack attack – technical or conventional – is to distribute bogus information to see how and where it turns up.  Disinformation, in other words.

Did the Def Con folks confirm that the hack was truly successful?

Or was the hacker merely walking into a trap?

I’ve always thought it was silly that we tally Olympic gold medals by country, with no adjustment to account for each nation’s population.  Is it fair to compare the more than 300 million people who live in the United States of America with, for example, tiny little Grenada, with a population barely over 100,000?  It stands to reason that larger countries, on average, will produce more gold medal contenders than smaller countries, it’s just the simple law of probability.

So I was about to do the research and compile a “medals per capita by country” chart, when I found that someone else beat me to it.  Here’s the URL: http://simon.forsyth.net/olympics.html

That’s the website of Simon Forsyth.  Simon’s nice enough to include links on his webpage to the websites of other people also named Simon Forsyth, which is cool in and of itself.  But I digress.

Simon has compiled a list of medal results, current as of August 7 (it says August 8 at 4:30 AM, and at the time I’m writing this, it’s 2:30 PM of August 7 on the U.S. east coast, so I have no idea how he did this in the future.)

Here’s a highlight of Simon’s chart listing at the time of this writing, listing nations according to their medal-count PER CAPITA:

1. Grenada
2. New Zealand
3. Jamaica
4. Slovenia
5. Croatia
…
8. Great Britain
…
24. United States of America
…
34. People’s Republic of China

That’s a very different story than the typical chart we’re currently seeing in the news, a chart that shows China and the U.S. battling it out for first place.  Both China and the U.S. have enormous populations, one should expect that these nations would top the medal counts.  But in reality, for its population – China is doing terribly, the U.S. is faring a bit better.  And smaller nations like Croatia and Slovenia have a lot to be proud of.  And Grenada should be absolutely giddy – and reportedly is.

See the rest at Simon Forsyth’s website.

It’s about time somebody said it: “I really worry about everything going to the cloud.”  Steve Wozniak, creator of the earliest widely used personal computer – the Apple II – spoke to a group recently in Washington, DC, and warned that cloud computing will be “horrendous”.

Personally, as a lifelong data professional and uber geek, I would say – it could be horrendous.  The potential is certainly there.  The shift to cloud computing puts the onus on the cloud providers to ensure safety and availability of the information contained in the cloud.  Does that guarantee a horrendous outcome?  I don’t think so.  But it’s certainly possible.  There’s unquestionably an element of risk involved.  That’s why I only put certain digital assets in the cloud, and not others.

Wozniak, I believe, is speaking to the notion that most people and organizations are moving to shift larger amounts of information to the cloud, and therefore he’s convinced that it will ultimately be “horrendous”.

The key concept in cloud computing is the element of “control”.  Who controls your digital assets?  By “digital assets”, I mean – the software you’ve purchased, the eBooks you bought, your own personal data that you’ve developed,  collected, and stored?  Your documents you’ve written, your emails you wrote, sent, and received?  Your family photos?  Your scanned bills and bank statements?

Even your votes you’ve cast on official ballots in your local polling station – those are subject to the cloud as well.  Everything that has been digitized is now subject to the major paradigm shift of moving the storage of such digital assets to the cloud.

The term “cloud” is intended to emphasize the nebulous nature of the storage of this information.  You’re not supposed to be concerned with it’s location, it’s just “out there”.  Somewhere.  On some computer, connected to someplace on the Internet.

It could be the down the street.  Or Siberia.  Theoretically, it could be physically located in a satellite in outer space, literally.

You’re not supposed to be worried about it.

Wozniak apparently is worried about it.

Are you?

One thing about working in the database industry:  you don’t work in a vaccum.  By that, I mean you generally don’t work solely on data issues, since data does not exist for its own sake, but rather for the sake of supporting a business, government agency, or some other organization.  Data engineers who work with business systems and large scale enterprise applications must eventually learn about the businesses they work with, and in great detail. Lucky for me, too, since personally I just happen to be fascinated by just about everything.

Case in point:  the recent advances in something called 3D printing.  If you’ve never seen it in work before, the second video below won’t make any sense, so do yourself a favor and watch the first video, and see how computer-aided design systems can directly “print” fully functional three-dimensional objects, including tools, with moving parts, all at once:

Next, if you want to see how 3D printing can go beyond a simple crescent wrench, take a look at this stunning application:

That second video is what prompted me to blog about this subject today.

It’s remarkable enough to imagine that a space travel team could theoretically “manufacture” any tool they need in space with a minimum of a 3D printing machine and a supply of resin, plus the right software and knowledge of how to create whatever tool is required.

But in the second video, we see how a prosthetic manufacturer is challenged to deliver a significantly smaller set of complex prosthetics than what he has previously created. In short order, he is able to scale down the design, and switch to a lighter material that won’t burden the patient, and he completes and delivers the devices almost instantaneously – and is able to continue delivering scaled prosthetics as the patient – a growing child – requires larger devices over time. And he does it all in a virtual instant, via mail order.

Remarkable.