TSA = Laughable Security
When a group of senior executives and myself saw the coverage of the recent flaming-pants-terror-attack on TV, their first response was “Ugh. They’re going to take away our carry ons.” On further discussion, they predicted what the TSA would do, almost down to a T. And I was the only one in the room who has been working on terror my entire adult life. Hilarious.
Simply put. The TSA has taken the path of ultra-linearity. You can’t rely on these guys to get ahead of the problem. IE. If someone shows up with a shoe bomb, off go the shoes. If someone lights their pants on fire in the last hour and you have to keep your lap clear for that last hour. Lucky that the pants don’t go off (yet).
All that had to happen to prevent this was effective screening. Which means someone had to come up with the idea of deploying screeners to all gateway-airpots. But that didn’t happen.
That’s just laughably incompetent. Because it doesn’t take a terrorist to figure out what the reaction is going to be from the TSA. And it should.
But that involves nonlinear thinking.
ALSO: The #tsaslogans topic on Twitter is simply hilarious. Looks like crowdsourcing airport security may be a better option.
Dual Displays. Wow.
I just picked up a cheap MiniDisplayPort to HDMI cable from Monoprice and plugged it into an a 19 inch widescreen monitor that used to be connected to my Mini before it became the home theater brain. This is great.
My email/Skype/IM stay open and on the big screen. If I’m reading a longer document, that goes there too (the extra real estate really helps process papers I otherwise had to print out). Meanwhile, my laptop screen is for normal browsing, and with MultiTouch that’s really zooming along.
(I’m not switching to an external mouse /keyboard because MultiTouch is that much of a time saver for me and I can’t justify spending the $ on a bluetooth keyboard and the new multitouch mouse.)
The Google Phone Ecosystem
Michael Gartenberg of Interpret, over at Engadget doesn’t understand how Google injecting hardware into its own ecosystem will not jeopardize the health of the entire system. This post explains the logic.
Simply put, Michael would be right – if this was a healthy ecosystem. It’s not.
DECAF VS. COFEE
The hacker tool, dubbed DECAF, is designed to counteract the Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor, aka COFEE. The latter is a suite of 150 bundled, off-the-shelf forensic tools that run from a script. Microsoft combined the programs into a portable tool that can be used by law enforcement agents in the field before they bring a computer back to their forensic lab. The script runs on a USB stick that agents plug into the machine.