Breaking The Iceberg

 

What the US election tells us about the lack of awareness we live in – and how it all relates to information security.

 

By Eh’den Biber

 

To understand the core of the problem of awareness, we need to understand that we are like an iceberg – a vast majority of what makes us feel, walk, talk, drive, write code, see, breath – is under the surface. Most of us don’t notice the fact we are constantly breathing – and yes, you only noticed it right now, and you will admit it if you were honest. What you consider as “you” don’t actually do anything conscious when you walk-and-snapchat-hopefully-not-your-penis. Yes, I think I once send a photo of my penis, but for my defence it was a long time ago, and I did it using the best resolution I had at that time on my ZX81: ASCII art. Let’s move on🙂

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The alien guesthouse

By Eh’den Biber

#AUSITM
#AWARENESS

Part one – Drop the Grenade, or Inner Spirit of Time

When I was young and innocence I loved playing games; I loved pretending. I can still remember how I loved to pretend I’m an astronaut, a scientist, a hero. I remember how I saved the world again and again in a movie constructed by my own imagination. It felt good, felt wonderful.

That was then.

Let’s fast forward to my last weekend: I’m in a restaurant in what will be called by Americans as “the middle of nowhere”, or as Europeans like to call it – Brussels. I’m the hero of a WTF story: one which I, as a dad, is trying to prevent his youngest son from stabbing himself with a knife. Seriously, where is my freaking spaceship!?!

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EU: The Post Mortem Edition

ANALYSIS: How lack of awareness led us to BREXIT, and what can we do next?

(Warning – colourful language is ahead ).

 

Part 1 – The Deadly and the Trump, or how the heck did we get here?

For months EU citizens were looking at the race of the US republican and democrat candidates, feeling they are watching a weird reality show. The democratic party stood behind a politician who is so tied to corporate America that it’s impossible to think of any interest group that she or her husband didn’t receive donations from. The Republicans vote went to a big mouth, fear mongering, racist, who was best described by Seth MacFarlane: “This guy has an ego. When Trump bangs a supermodel he closes his eyes and imagine he’s jerking off”

The fact US citizens are most likely faced with the option of choosing between a scam master sociopath and a the most lethal woman in US politics is not easy. Some European felt compassion to the Americans who have to choose between the two, but the majority of the people simply felt shocked by the Trumpism movement and the fact he was left the only nominee of the Republican party.

Meanwhile, in my fairyland, also known as the UK, our prime minister lured voters to re-elect him in the last general election based on a promise for a referendum to whether or not the UK should stay in the EU. Since he won, and since there are so many people in the UK who wanted that referendum Cameron was forced into honouring his promise. And then blah blah blah… and now we’re out. Hip Hip Hooray to 52% of the population.

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Mr Big (Data)

Why big data and analytics are sexy, and why only awareness can secure them.

 

What doesn’t kill you will make you…suffer longer (Paraphrasing Friedrich Nietzsche)

 

S-E-X-Y

Information is sexy, and sexy sells. These days, nothing seems to be sexier to than the “Big Data” and “Analytics”, which are the latest buzz words in the cloud we all seems to live upon. You know terms become buzz words when board members start to use expressions previously only known to academeeks (academic geeks). When people who have little clue to the nature of a specific technology starts to believe in it as a business enabler, you can be certain it is a hype (cyber, anyone?). Or, as consultancy firms prefer to call the latest buzz: “Ka-Ching”.

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The Cyber Minority Report: Gender Affairs

Investigating the evolutionary relationship between women, information, and security, via the prism of the red queen hypothesis.

In 1973, an evolutionary scientist called Leigh Van Valen published an academic paper called “a new evolutionary law”. In it he defined a law called “law of constant extinction”, which state that the probability of extinction does not rely on how long a specie exists. To explain it, he proposed a hypothesis he called “the red queen hypothesis”. It is calls so because in Lewis Carroll’s sequel to “Alice in Wonderland” called “Through the Looking Glass” there is a scene in which the red queen tells Alice:“It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.“

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