Category Archives: Geek Horror

Cozy Bear vs Fancy Bear

20 Sunday Dec 2020

Posted by in Geek Horror, cyber war, Novel

≈ 3 Comments

I would be remiss to let this SolarWinds story go without commenting and self-promoting my cyberwar series.  These opportunities don’t come around every day.  Well, actually there is a story just about every day, but few on par with the colorful intrigue of SolarWinds, FireEye, and Cozy Bear.

My favorite aspect to this story is how it more resembles cyberwar than cybercrime.  Experts are downplaying the cyberwar facets, but espionage is on the war spectrum.  I focused my novels on cyberwar to respond to what I perceived as a dearth of stories because most books published on the topic are on cybercrime.  The difference is that cyberwar is acted out by nation states and, North Korea’s Lazarus notwithstanding, for non-financial reasons.

Remember when you used to read stories of thieves stealing money from banks?  Two decades deep into the 4th generation of the industrial revolution (4IR), data is the new currency.  Steam power dramatically increased productivity three hundred years ago in 1IR as the industrial revolution launched a still-accelerating advance in technology.  Steam locomotives shrunk distance in terms of time travel.

Electricity further accelerated productivity, making the work day longer, in 2IR.  The 3rd industrial revolution commenced in the fifties, around the time white collar workers exceeded blue collar workers in the US work force.  Compute tech put the world on an exponential growth rate in the Information Age.  

Data networking, namely the Internet, and everything since from AI to blockchain has established a digital economy that drives 4IR.  We have complete industries now that exist only online.  But our success is our weakness.  The leading, most advanced economies of the world have more to lose in a cyberwar than the digital have-nots.  And that’s why so many people believe the next world war will be digital.  It’s where we are vulnerable, our Achilles heel.

Here’s the promo part.  If you are curious enough to read up on all this tech, but find it all just a bit too dry for your taste – read my books.  Read fiction.  I wrote my cyberwar series partly as a cybersecurity primer, so you’ll learn something.  But I chose a fictional format to make the content entertaining.  You don’t need a text book when you’ve got Cyber War I and Full Spectrum Cyberwar on your shelf.

You’ll discover that my stories are fairly prescient.  The first made Iran the bad guys but had attacks like this supply chain malware that compromise a large segment of the economy.  The second story focuses on Russia and might spook you just how closely it mirrors current events.

The Russian threat actors in Full Spectrum work for the GRU – Russia’s Military Intelligence.  I considered writing about the SVR, Russia’s Foreign Intelligence agency behind the SolarWinds hack.  I find one of their code names more literary – Cozy Bear.  The GRU is nicknamed Fancy Bear, which is still cool; Bear of course stands for Russia.

I felt forced to use Fancy Bear because it’s more plausible they would launch the type of attacks in my story.  Cozy Bear is more about intel gathering.  This is why some experts are suggesting this isn’t a cyberwar attack.  Cozy Bear doesn’t destroy systems.  They just listen to our secrets.  That doesn’t make for as fun a story as the mayhem in Full Spectrum.  Sometimes I choose plausibility when deciding my storyline.  Other times I take extreme liberties for a good story.

the day TCP died

05 Saturday Dec 2020

Posted by in Geek Horror

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

,

Like the road to a car, TCP was the transport to my digital footprint; traffic lights and all. Maybe I couldn’t get rid of my digital DNA, perhaps all I needed to do was delete the digital path known as the transport layer. If voyeurs can’t stream what I did last night, did last night ever happen?

Everything turned out fine the next day. If my friends and co-workers viewed the previous night’s events, they didn’t say anything about it. But that’s what got me thinking about killing off TCP. Born in the 80s, TCP had been the dominant digital communications transport my entire career. Novell had its day in the sun, as did Microsoft, but mostly only on local area networks. Cisco collapsed the backbone into IP packets routed over TCP and it’s been all the TCP/IP stack ever since. For decades.

The problem with TCP is latency. TCP Rate = Maximum Segment Size / Round Trip Time. Round Trip Time (RTT) is latency. Measured in nano or micro seconds on a computer but over the WAN, measured in milliseconds (ms). Latency is mostly distance. The medium matters; air is faster than glass, glass is faster than copper, but theoretically, bits travel at the speed of light, so a satellite hop (round trip) is about a quarter second, or 250ms. Note in the algorithm above that this distance metric is in the denominator of measuring TCP throughput, so the farther the distance, the lower the throughput – by design.

The last significant improvement to the TCP spec was in 1984, where version 4 was developed to mitigate the effects of congestive collapse on the network. Given that rate of innovation, TCP needs to just die. And I think TCP did die this week. It’s being replaced by the Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) protocol. The RoCEv2 (pronounced Rocky v2 for RDMA over Converged Ethernet version two) protocol can transport RDMA frames over an IP header and UDP, but Vcinity has a proprietary implementation where they encapsulate the RDMA frames in an IP header for WAN routing and add their own algorithms for flow control and packet loss recovery. The result is an order of magnitude improvement over TCP in throughput.

Think about that. In tech, an order of magnitude improvement generally equates to disruptive technology. A product killer. TCP’s days are numbered.

Go Bag

23 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by in covid-noir, Geek Horror

≈ 4 Comments

A Go Bag is an emergency-preparedness bag that you pack in advance, but hope you never need.  That description, definition, is plagiarized directly from wikihow.com, where you can learn how to make your own go-bag.  Their advice on what food to pack is ridiculous.  I’ve done enough backpacking to know.  You don’t buy a can of tuna.  You buy these Bumble Bee tuna lunch packs. Depending on your vices, Starbucks Via Instant Coffee is also brilliant.

I watched Sean Penn advise America on TV the other day that we should all have a go-bag ready as part of our pandemic preparedness. He said smart Californians already know this, for when the big-one hits. With all the backpacking, hiking the 500-mile Colorado Trail with A Lo Hawk, aka La Plata, the international travel as an IT hit man, and the Covid-regulated, guest-living I’ve been doing this year, with all that, it’s fair to say I invented living out of a go-bag.

I could tell you how much experience I’ve gained over the years, but honestly, I think most of my efficiency gains are the result of improved tech. I recall the strap to my computer bag breaking as I climbed the stairs to the second deck of a ferry, crossing Sydney Harbour to Manly Beach. It was a quality bag, but no match for the stresses of my network cables and scores of 3.5 inch floppy disks needed for emergency reinstalls of the prevalent operating systems of the day. It’s crushing weight nearly broke my foot. I now carry a billion times more data, at a fraction of the weight, in the form factor of a USB drive.

Nowadays, I carry two MacBook Airs, one work, one personal, an iPad, some adapters and USB drives, and a copy of my latest novel to gift to whomever I chat up on the flight. My current laptop bag has survived under this improved load the last fifteen years. My back is doing better as well.

I’ve been shuffling back and forth between Colorado and Texas all year and virtually living out of a go-bag. While I’ve expanded my real estate on the remote end of that passage, stocking clothes and toiletries, I can sometimes travel with just the laptop bag. I can leave behind most tangible materials, even most of my data is in the cloud, but I find that I still need to carry compute resources – the requisites to stay connected.

But I must say, I feel stealthy when I travel. I have a bit of an imagination and sometimes pretend I’m a spy as I travel through airports. I fancied myself Harrison Ford in Blade Runner during this recent jaunt through ATX. Maybe that makes me weird, but what goes through your head when you travel? Got a go-bag ready for when you have to self-isolate?

We are the Media

11 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by in Geek Horror, Politics

≈ 3 Comments

social media

“The Vietnam War was lost on television” is a phrase attributed to Marshall McLuhan.  We still trusted our news media back then.  More importantly, we were all watching the same channel.  When Walter Cronkite reported on the war casualties, we all had the same numbers.  McLuhan’s point is expressed by another of his phrases, “the medium is the message.”

Today’s medium is social media.  Streaming is interesting, but social media is the game-changer.  I could brush broader strokes and say the Internet, but social media is the medium that allows us to self-publish, and that’s powerful – just ask the President.

I find it ironic, if not pathetic, there is such pervasive sentiment bashing the Media.  Fox News plays to the lowest denominator while MSNBC promotes Antifa.  Zuckerberg should take more responsibility.  We love to blame others.

On the receiving side, we curate our messages by accepting certain friends and blocking others.  On the publishing side, we share posts that appeal to us.  That’s self-publishing.  That makes us the Media.  And we’re bad at it.  It’s fair to say the etiquette is still forming, but until then, stop blaming section 230.  We’re all publishers.  We’re all content distributors.  Own it.

The Morning After

14 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by in Geek Horror

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, ,

IMG_4203

Not enough is being written about this story.  I just paid less for a gallon of gasoline than I did my senior year of high school.  Maybe not adjusted for inflation, but this is a running blog.  Go to economist.com if you have higher math expectations.

I also ventured out to the grocer – HEB on FM620.  I was hesitant after all the stories I heard yesterday about zombie hoards butchering one another over diet coke and almond milk. I’m paraphrasing my brother-in-law from his recent experience at the HEB in Northwest Hills.

The shelves were half empty but the masses were absent.  They likely ran out of real estate to store more goods.  I felt almost guilty with some of my purchases.  I tried to make good decisions.  In the end, I hoarded Malbec and after-shower conditioner.  I love how Texas grocers sell wine.  I’ll weather this storm.

Digital Tracking

24 Friday Jan 2020

Posted by in Geek Horror, Novel

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

 

JV2

Just when you thought you were safe, talking to people…

It’s possible to pair public information about yourself with private information about yourself – to de-anonymize the data with a strong level of confidence.  And if you can do this yourself, so can others, to your personal data.  If anyone can find some studies that prove me right, post links in the comments.  Otherwise, it makes for a better story if you simply assume I’m right, as you read the rest of this blog post.

As evidence, I offer you this graphic of my pages-read stat from Amazon.  It shows two pages read on Tuesday and three read on Thursday.  First thing about those numbers is that they are atypical.

Typically, my pages-read stats are zero for longer stretches of time.  Then, when they are not at zero, they hover around 25 or around 100.  Apparently, Kindle Unlimited readers average 25 pages read in a day, on the days they read.  Maybe some also average 100 pages read, or maybe there’s yet another reason for that lesser cluster.  I don’t know.

I do know who that reader is, because I talked to him on both those days.  He told me what he read.  Good ‘ole HUMINT.  The benefit of my super low stats, is that I can easily correlate what he told me with what I see in my stats.  I know that every move on this trend line is my collaborator reading my book.  Imagine the fun I could have.

I could post his progress online, in this blog, for the digital world to see.  I’m correlating two sources of his digital footprint, one gathered from a public conversation, the other obtained from somewhere else his tracks are being published, seemingly anonymously – Amazon Books.

I was able to de-anonymize my Amazon author stats out of the law of small numbers, in my case, typically zero, then only two and three, and because the reader told me he was reading pages.  Because I know these stats are his, I can assume pages read in subsequent days where I don’t talk to him, will be his.  Net, net, I will know his reading pace.  I’ll know if he finishes the book, with further correlation with what I know to be the book length.

I don’t think he’s overly concerned.  I showed him what I was doing.  His response?  “Privacy is a thing of the past.”

 

Cybersecurity is Complex

19 Monday Aug 2019

Posted by in Geek Horror

≈ Leave a comment

Cyber War

Is that true?  Is security really any more complex than other IT disciplines?  More so than virtualization?  Or AI?  No, it’s not.  It is different.

I ask this question of myself, as much as whatever audience reads my blog, because I’ve encountered this for so long at different companies where security is a subset of a larger portfolio of products.  The argument is that security is too complex for sellers.  Subsequently, additional skills are needed to assist the seller to close the deal.  That part might be true, but sellers should have the confidence to begin a security discussion on their own.

I found this argument especially ironic when I returned to work for a telco.  In my mind, telcos invented security.  I was a firewall admin in 1994 when some AT&T gentlemen, Cheswick and Bellovin, published Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker.  As a firewall admin, that was my bible.  I can speak first hand just how deep the security skills are at telcos.  Still, the sellers there, as much as anywhere else, tell me they find security complex.

There are two reasons sellers perceive this.  One is the specifics around deploying a security policy.  The other is culture.

A telco seller slinging circuits encounters many complexities in the turn-up of his or her set of products.  Very often they are coordinating the activation of an MPLS circuit – which they might call IP VPN.  A product name that drives some security people nuts and could be a topic for another blog.  Back to point, the seller might attach a managed firewall deal with the circuit, and have it provisioned to include an intrusion prevention system.

The complexities associated with tuning firewalls and intrusion prevention systems could be true for the security policies with other security tech, but FWs and IPS are examples I’m most familiar with.  Ideally, the implementation process will take three weeks.  Could just as easily take three months though, after the turn-up of the circuit, before the seller can commence billing on the deal.  Why is that?  Security must be more complex.

The issue is that customers don’t always understand their environment.  They don’t know all the valid applications communicating to and from their premises and the Internet.  Implementing a security policy that blocks all traffic not explicitly allowed is a discovery process.  For the seller managing the customer relationship, having to explain why the IPS pattern-matched their nightly data backup routine as a DoS attack, security is complex.

I’m theorizing more on the culture aspect, but I believe it’s equally responsible for the perception of security complexity.  There are two types of security experts.  Chris, who served in the military in Signals Intelligence, advanced to special forces, then transitioned to the commercial sector with a stint at the NSA before joining a major MSSP, represents a formidable talent.  The Colonel Flag type, he could tell you, but then he’d have to kill you.

The other type is Jen.  Her office bookshelf is stacked with technical journals and her Goodreads bookshelf is also ninety percent nonfiction.  She dresses in khakis and a white button-down.  The Cult-of-the-Dead Cow Type can recite the baud rate of every modem she ever used for her CompuServe subscription before the Internet was a thing.

Chris and Jen might not attend RSA, but they never miss BlackHat or DefCon.  They learned their tech the same as everyone else, on the job.  But they spend extra cycles reading SANs security newsletters, and listening to podcasts like Security Now and Colorado=Security.

Chris and Jen belong to a community.  You see this in some other industries, but it’s rare for other IT disciplines.  Even the programmers’ groups on Reddit are half made of these security experts.  Disaster Recovery experts don’t meet up on weekends to shoot guns at the range.

This community isn’t impossible to join.  Chris and Jen drink beer and are as socially inclusive as database architects.  But security is more than just a job to them.  A career might be the correct word, I feel there might be a better one.  There’s a reason Chris and Jen are experts.

Since I’m taking liberties with stereotypes, let me say that Sellers listen to podcasts more than any other humans.  Consider listening to one of the two I linked above.  You’ll find the content engaging.  And be comfortable starting a security conversation with your clients.  Let them know you have Chris and Jen on your team to take the discussion further.  It’s not hard.

 

512

07 Friday Jun 2019

Posted by in Geek Horror

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, ,

ignite (1)

I’m sitting in an ATX bar drinking 512 IPA near gate 23, listening to live music.  If that makes you jealous, I won’t get home before midnight.  But what a week.

I was a booth babe for my company at the Palo Alto Networks Ignite 2019 User Conference.  It was a cool setup because it was less booth and more coffee shop slash drinks after five.  If that wasn’t enough to draw people in, and it was, I was signing promotional copies of Full Spectrum Cyberwar.

If it confuses you that I would be both working for my firm and at the same time self-promoting my book, I can explain the joint-marketing/co-branding concept to you in one word – LinkedIn.  If you need more words, my original content drew people into the booth.  My authenticity with a signed book increases customers and potential customers’ commitment to my firm.  It also lubed the conversational skids.  That helps my firm and for me, hopefully, a percentage of them will buy my first or future-3rd book.

tomo

The vendor took care of me and my crew with an over-abundance of high-quality meals near the Austin Convention Center.  And when it was all done, I met my friend and neighbor, Steve Wolfe, also working in Austin at the time, and my brother-in-law Steve Collier, at Tomos for the best sushi on Parmer Lane.

I’m exhausted and won’t get home before midnight, but I’m drinking 512 IPA, listening to live music, and I’m good.

Left Handed

13 Monday Aug 2018

Posted by in Geek Horror

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Left-Handers-Day

This is getting creepy.  Am I the only one Facebook notified that today is International Left-hander’s Day?  On the other hand, this exceptional profile accuracy renews my faith in the omnipotence of their algorithms.  If their AI knows I’m left-handed, then they should be able to resolve this Russia thing.

As much as I appreciate the recognition, I can’t pretend to understand the value having this day brings to me.  No doubt, extensive lobbying went into making this day available to us lefties worldwide.  Not sure I’d give my right hand to keep it, but I wouldn’t give it back.

I will say this.  In fact, I’ll let my future son-in-law say it for me – visually – captured here as I was spying down on the city of Telluride.  Whether you’re AI, or a bot, or some photo-opportunist, I know that you know that I know you’re watching me.

St Sophia

hashtag deletefacebook

24 Saturday Mar 2018

Posted by in Geek Horror, Politics

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Delete-FaceBook-Account

Sure, go ahead.  Delete Facebook.  Or better yet, just add the hashtag and don’t do it.  I chuckle over the irony when people post their intentions to take a pause from their social networking addiction.  Seems to me like they rarely make it past three weeks.

I don’t care if Facebook lost billions in market cap in this latest brouhaha over consumer privacy.  Like anyone else, cry me a river.  I also have little doubt their market cap will return before year end.  Just like every major corporate hack, Target, Sony, Heartland, their stock takes a dip and recovers in less than a year.  And while I don’t care about Facebook, if forced to pick sides, I’ll stand by Zuckerberg.  As culpable as they are for their own inactions, just like with prostitutes and drug users, the politico positioning is to punish the victims.  And it’s pretty clear why.

The reason is clear when I read the op-eds in the Saturday morning papers.  Editors can finally take a departure from their vigilant stance as Trump apologists by directing their angst against Facebook.  There is no collusion and Zuckerberg is responsible for the Russian election meddling.  No better misdirection than an unloved corporate scapegoat.

I don’t think anything will come of this but the one thing I could get behind is if this leads Zuckerberg to stop pushing the lies about Facebook not being a media company.  Talk about some brazen bullshit.  They direct 20% of this country’s advertising dollars.  That’s the real story for me because I know Americans won’t change their privacy concerns and habits from this.

Even if you delete or pause your facebook account, you won’t stop looking for a free digital lunch elsewhere.  Facebook has two billion users, they aren’t going away from this.  Social Networking might lose this battle but technology will win the war.  Remember John Henry in his epic battle against the jack hammer?  Spoiler alert.  Tech wins.

Virtual Currency

18 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by in Geek Horror, Novel

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, ,

bitcoin image

Pretty sure I blogged late last year on my plans to buy Bitcoin.  I finally got around to doing that a couple of weeks ago.  I don’t care to start conducting transactions with virtual currencies.  This story is the best of many I’ve read that details exactly why virtual currencies aren’t really a thing yet, and won’t be for some time.  Perhaps not until quantum computing becomes pervasive.  I’m doing this for the experience.  To be able to relate accurate details in my next novel.  I referenced a bitcoin transaction in my last book but I glossed over the details.  One can’t write a tech thriller on cyberwar without speaking to virtual currencies.

I won’t go into too much detail here on my experience.  I think I’ll mostly provide links to some of the best stories I’ve discovered, and you can click on them if you’re interested.  I actually repeated a number of stories from my ten years of blogs in my last novel, and I will again.  So writing this post is more about building my reference library of content for book two than anything else.  Some of this will be useful to you if you are considering purchasing a virtual currency.

Since my goal isn’t becoming rich, I only purchased $100 of Bitcoin.  I wanted to invest just $5, and that’s an option, but there are transaction charges, and it occurred to me it’s more easy to do the math on $100.  It’s quick for me to understand the $2.99 cost of buying my $100 of Bitcoin is basically 3%.  I’ll incur similar future transaction charges and they would all be much more from a percentage perspective for only $5.

My first step was to read the Internet to understand how to begin trading Bitcoin.  I discovered I needed to register at an Exchange.  I settled on Gemini because it seemed the most professional to me.  It’s run by those Winklevoss twins whom successfully sued Mark Zuckerberg for a substantial share of Facebook.  After registering nearly two months ago, the Winklevoss twins still have not completed verification of my identity.  They did contact me once to inform me that my drivers license photo was too blurry and that I should resend it.  I did.  Nothing but chirping crickets since.  Seeing this as a red flag for future customer service interactions, I signed up with Coinbase – which is probably the most popular exchange.  Took a couple of days for verification, mostly because I did it over the weekend.  Go with Coinbase.

My research indicated that one should not leave their virtual currency sitting with an online exchange, given the history of these places having their reserves constantly hacked.  North Korea’s Icarus has made attacking exchanges their specialty of late.  Icarus is the modern day Bonnie and Clyde.

So I purchased a digital wallet.  I think I blogged on this already too.  I received the Nano Ledger S as a Christmas gift.  It’s pretty cool.  Cost about $79.  Another reason why purchasing only $5 would have been stupid.  The idea is one can transfer their Bitcoin from an exchange onto the digital wallet to avoid being hacked.  It’s mostly offline and connects to your computer via USB when you use it.  Transferring Bitcoin is essentially a copy/paste process.  Very easy to understand YouTube video here on how to do that between the Nano and Coinbase.

If I’m honest, using digital currencies is fairly complex.  But for a techie, sort of fun.  I created an account for myself at Bitsane too because I want to trade my Bitcoin for Ripple – another virtual currency that banks are starting to use.  Even more complexity as one cannot directly buy it.  Rather, you have to exchange Bitcoin for Ripple.  Yet more complexity.

There is nothing simple about trading Bitcoin.  It’s not something one can easily do from their 401K account.  But I’m a writer and my genre of tech thriller encumbers me to actually know what I’m talking about.  Fiction allows me to take some liberties, but readers of tech are interested in detail like this.

My Bitcoin stash is currently worth $130, after a single week.  $10 of that came from purchasing it from a recommendation, which you can do too from this link.  It will give you a quick 10% return on $100 transaction.  You and I will both get $10.  Seems like a better business model than actually trading Bitcoin.

WIX is the Website for Authors

20 Saturday Jan 2018

Posted by in Geek Horror, Novel

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

wix-logo

My friends think I’m technical.  I suppose compared to many of them, I am.  I would argue that ten years in personnel management killed my skills at the command line, but it’s all relative.  I just built a website for my novel.  I probably sound like a techie having just done that, but hear me out.

This morning, I built a decent web site for a book I published over a year ago.  Okay, so maybe I am technical, but lazy?  No, I tried to build a website earlier, it just sucked so badly I never really launched it.  Ultimately I deleted it.  And this is the point of my post, where I share my writing experience for other aspiring self publishers.  I built that first website with GoDaddy.  GoDaddy leverages WordPress for their platform.  Software that competes with Microsoft for the highest number of known vulnerabilities.  It’s so kludgy to use, I’m at a loss for words.  I could never get it to look how I wanted.  I couldn’t even use my own fonts.  That’s a big deal to me because I like to use a stencil font to give a military air to my book.  Think MASH.  I’d show you but this blog is on WordPress so I can’t.

It was my 15 year old daughter who talked me into using WIX.  I’m a happy camper.  Took me less than an hour to have everything looking how I wanted.  Much less than that to launch it but then I  tweaked things for over half that time because I was having fun.  WIX even provides simple-to-use email subscription forms.  Everything was so easy, a writer could do it.  I’m not just being funny there.  My experience meeting other writers is the majority of them are barely technical enough to format fonts in a Word document.  They refer to the people who publish ebooks as ebook coders, like it’s actually software development to publish a book in electronic format.  I’ll admit, it did take me about twenty hours of YouTube videos to learn Adobe InDesign, but seriously, it’s not coding.

So, if you are an author.  One of those writers who is just savvy enough to download Scrivener but not clever enough to integrate file sharing with DropBox, then Wix is for you.  Trust me, stay away from GoDaddy, it’s a POS.  That’s “Piece of Shit” for you non techies who shy away from acronyms and can’t RTFM.

Color Mode

25 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by in Geek Horror, Novel

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

rgb-vs-cmyk

This is a bit geeky but I want to share some of my lessons learned as a survivor of the indie publishing process.  This mistake cost me some money because I bought a handful of books to sell on consignment at a local bookstore before discovering this problem.  The issue was some of the text in my book was a lighter shade of black than the rest of the text.  I had two shades of black.  Turns out, there are maybe 1004 shades of black.

RGB represents the three primary colors of red, green and blue.  Computers and TVs, essentially all monitors, output color in RGB because they are working with light.  Think the colors of the rainbow.  All the colors of the rainbow combined are white.  You see the white in the middle of the RGB Venn diagram above.  Conversely, when there is zero light, a monitor screen is black.  RGB is represented by 0 to 255 values for red, green and blue respectively.  Based on what I just said, 0,0,0 is black and 255,255,255 is white.  Microsoft Word outputs fonts in RGB because it assumes it is outputting to your computer screen.  Your printer converts RGB fonts to CMYK as you print.

Which brings us to CMYK or Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key.  Key means black because the last letter in black is “k” and “b” might lead you to think blue. Your printer isn’t dealing in light like a monitor, it’s working with ink.  Think a box of crayons.  You were told in elementary school that all the colors of the rainbow make white, but you could never get all your colors to come out as white no matter how big your box of crayons.  CMYK is represented by values from 0 to 100.  Hence, the Venn diagram above yields black for the 0,0,0,100 combination of C, M, Y and K.  Black and White are on opposite ends of the spectrum for RGB vs CMYK.  And they use a different amount of pixels, 256 vs 101 per color setting.  Make sense?

When I had to use Adobe InDesign for my book layout and create print and ebook formats for my publisher, I didn’t know that this graphics package was preparing my fonts for a printer and converting MS Word fonts from RGB to CMYK.  This alone would not have been an issue had it converted everything to the same color mode.  For some reason my MS Word fonts had two different values for black.  Or at least they converted to two discrete values.  One was a default setting for black that InDesign calls Black, for which the CMYK values are 0,0,0,100.  Or maybe 100,100,100,100.  I forget but think both sets of values are equal.  The second default setting was called Registration.  Its CMYK values are various numbers for each of the four settings.  The result is a lighter shade of black.

My publisher, Ingram Spark, which is really a distributor as I have my own publishing firm, Lobo Media, returns an electronic proof to me to look for issues with my print uploads.  Had I actually printed it, I might have noticed the color disparity.  I only reviewed them online though, and guess what?  The CMYK values don’t contain nearly as many pixels as RGB, think 100 vs 255 as printing is at less resolution than display monitors, so I could not discern the disparity on my screen.  It shows up in ink on paper, but not on a monitor.

I think the lesson here is to print out at least part of your proof to look for printing errors.  I’m blogging this because it was a topic of discussion at my book signing Thursday night.  I signed and gave away my leftover copies that contained the misprint.  They are totally readable, but flawed.  While Karen was walking around assuring everyone that the kinky sexual preferences of the book’s protagonist were entirely fiction, I was having conversations on color mode.

Going Dark

25 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in cyber war, Geek Horror, Running

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

scytale 2

FBI Director James Comey testified to Congress today that encryption will end law enforcement’s ability to perform their job.  He suggests that the FBI’s primary tool is court orders to search for information, and he makes the general assumption that data is never accessible once encrypted.  To paraphrase, encryption leads to information “going dark” for the purpose of public safety.  As if encryption is game over for the FBI.  This reminds me of a famous quote (famous misquote actually as I don’t believe this is true) attributed to the Commissioner of U.S. Patent and Trademark office Charles Duell when he purportedly quipped, “Everything that can be invented has been invented.”  Comey seems like a decent guy but suggesting that the FBI requires clear text access to American’s data because the court order process is predicated on this is disingenuous.  The FBI has an obligation to keep up with technology.

I stated in my previous blog on this topic that cryptography and cryptanalysis have been playing a cat and mouse game throughout world history.  So let’s review that, because I believe government is obligated to defeat encryption technologically rather than by  eroding America’s privacy laws.  To be fair, I recognize they are currently playing catch-up.  Consider that cyber crime is nearly a half trillion dollar market.  Security products and services are well under $100B market.  Meaning we are applying $100B to the good side and cyber criminals are making $500B.  So I can sympathize with Comey.  The bad guys are winning.

Understand the etymology of these terms.  We began by covering up secrets.  For example, Histaiaeus, in the 5th century BC, wrote his message for Miletus to revolt against the Persian King on his messenger’s shaven head.  He then waited for his messenger’s hair to grow back before sending him on his way.  This was before instant messaging.  A similar technique was used in the latest version of Mad Max.  “Steganos” is Greek for “covered” while “graphein” is the Greek term “to write”, hence steganography means “covered writing.”  So steganography was the art of covering up a message.  It goes without saying, one didn’t necessarily have to be a rocket scientist to be a code breaker back in the day.

The art of secrecy evolved to hiding the meaning of the message, rather than simply covering up the message itself – with the understanding the message will likely be discovered eventually.  The Greek term for “hidden” is “kryptos”; hence we use the term “cryptography” which we now practice with encryption.  The picture above is of a 5th century Spartan Scytale that transposed the position of letters to hide the meaning of the otherwise open message.

Technology advanced and today one does have to be a rocket scientist to be a code breaker.  Bill Gates was quoted by Representative Bob Goodlatte (wonder if he owns shares in Starbucks?) in today’s Congressional Hearing as suggesting Quantum Computing will soon be powerful enough to break any encryption.  I don’t know about that but point is technology does eventually catch up in this cat and mouse game.  Consider the plight of Mary, Queen of Scots.

On trial for treason, her prosecutor, Sir Francis Walsingham was also England’s Spymaster.  Sir Walsingham first captured Mary’s correspondance, which she hid inside the hollow bungs that sealed barrels of beer.  This was steganography.  But Mary was clever and further used a cypher to hide the meaning of her correspondence.  Sir Walsingham engaged Thomas Phelippes to perform the requisite cryptanalysis and ultimately succeeded in proving Mary’s guilt.  The rest is history.  Point being, Cryptanalysis was on par with the cryptography of the time.  Fast forward to WWII where the British successfully decoded the German’s Enigma with the use of early computing technology.  So Bill Gates might actually know what he’s talking about.

I’m in the cyber security industry and agree with Comey that the bad guys are winning.  For now.  Still, I’m not willing to surrender any more rights to privacy than have already been suspended post 9-11.  Technology will catch up.

 

 

Secrets

23 Tuesday Feb 2016

Posted by in cyber war, Geek Horror

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

secret

I understand everyone believes there should be a balance between security and privacy.  Seems sensible.  Bill Gates came out today in favor of the FBI over Apple, but then he’s been making business decisions counter to consumer needs for decades.  I myself am so impassionately middle of the road on most topics that I wonder sometimes if I’m not actually dead.  It’s great when everyone can win a trophy but you cannot avoid the reality that there are winners and losers.  I believe the current Apple/FBI debate is one of those binary scenarios.  It’s as difficult for me as anyone else to plant my flag when I want both privacy and security.  The following example though helps clarify my position.

The 4th Amendment provides both privacy protection, and presents the guidelines for the State to void those privacies given reasonable cause.  Assuming proper due process, the State wins.  This is a nice template for balance, but it doesn’t stop there.  The 5th Amendment protects us from self incrimination.  “I plead the 5th.”  Taken together, people must allow the State entry into their home for a warranted and reasonable search of evidence of a crime.  However, people are not obligated to point out where they hid the evidence.  “Oh, it’s under the seat cushion.”

There are two centuries of legal precedent supporting these Amendments to where most of us are fairly knowledgeable of the rules, without being actual lawyers.  Let me dumb this discussion down though even further.  Let me use the term secrets instead of privacy.  We all have secrets.  Not just our banking PIN code but family history and deep, dark fantasies.  I know that there are things I would never consider telling anyone, and I’m about as transparent as a person can possibly be.  Have you read my prostate chronicles?  I might be wavering a bit from the core Apple/FBI topic since not all secrets necessarily contain criminal content, but I believe the principle points remain intact.  I’m allowed to have secrets.

I’m not even that strong of a privacy advocate.  See above on my middle of the roadness.  For example, I don’t consider privacy an inalienable right.  We were born naked in a garden, so God wasn’t that big on personal privacy either.  Clearly, there was very little personal privacy when we were living together as tribes in caves.  But like anyone else in western civilization, I’ve grown accustomed to certain privileges and I do want privacy.  Even if I didn’t, the information age ascribes so much value to data integrity that encryption is paramount to how our society and economy function.  It’s not until I substitute the word privacy with the word secret that I begin to understand where I fall on this topic. The State can try to search but I can try to hide.  Tell me I’m wrong on this.

Cryptography and cryptanalysis have been a cat and mouse game played throughout millennia.  Technology plays the lead role.  I understand that if the State can decrypt my communications, they already have legal justification to do so.  My information is only as safe as my encryption is strong.  But if they can’t decrypt my data, I don’t have to hand them the keys.  That’s like showing them the evidence is hidden under the seat cushion.  And they can’t outlaw encryption.  That’s like saying I can’t have secrets.  Who doesn’t have secrets?