I did get one response on Twitter about my keynote reax. I’ve written about Eddie the Ops Guy before, and don’t have much to say about him. Many of the “revelations” should be things people have long suspected.
From my perspective, the question isn’t so much if or whether this sort of thing is done — it’s how much of it is admissible in court. Are people losing lives or property because of it? That’s a question the detractors seem to shy away from. To put it another way, I’ll be upset when Chris Dodd starts getting geoloc data, and the Air Force starts targeting Kim Dotcom.
Schneier’s talk also focused on more encapsulation of data to prevent the government’s prying eyes. I think it’s something you can spend a bunch of time and money on without terribly concrete results.
Would it be more effective to increase the data volume, making juicy things tougher to find? Go ahead and seed that UbuububububububnttuDebian Testing torrent. In 2GB chunks, it wouldn’t surprise me if it has the same effect as a 25M DB dump.
Obviously, he’s got a lot of credibility in the Infosec world, so I won’t judge too harshly. I am slightly disappointed at the lack of political analysis, though. I can recall 2009, when the fresh-faced kids were all abuzz about how this new president was going to be fundamentally different. How quickly people forget.
I also watched the talk on USB Mass Storage devices. Good talk, though I don’t have the time, money, or energy to do any of that stuff, myself, anymore. I never’d considered the information about the flash drives being downsized to meet the advertised capacities. Makes sense, but, just something I’d never thought of.
I wonder if the same is true of SATA solid state drives; might could do some interesting things, then, if so….
I sat in on the first part of DJB’s elliptical curves talk. Unfortunately, my body wasn’t cooperating with me, and it was reminding me of my futile attempts to help my wife with her calc homework earlier this week.
The maths — they are not my strength.