Security Awareness Training feedly

To those who think that training users in security is a good idea, I want to ask: "Have you ever met an actual user?" They’re not experts, and we can’t expect them to become experts. The threats change constantly, the likelihood of failure is low, and there is enough complexity that it’s hard for people to understand how to connect their behavior to eventual outcomes. So they turn to folk remedies that, while simple, don’t really address the threats.

Even if we could invent an effective computer security training program, there’s one last problem. HIV prevention training works because affecting what the average person does is valuable. Even if only half the population practices safe sex, those actions dramatically reduce the spread of HIV. But computer security is often only as strong as the weakest link. If four-fifths of company employees learn to choose better passwords, or not to click on dodgy links, one-fifth still get it wrong and the bad guys still get in. As long as we build systems that are vulnerable to the worst case, raising the average case won’t make them more secure.

Security Awareness Training
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/03/security_awaren_1.html?utm_source=feedly

Landfill Harmonic: An Upcoming Documentary About the ‘Recycled Orchestra’ in Cateura, Paraguay | Colossal

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/04/landfill-harmonic-an-upcoming-documentary-about-the-recycled-orchestra-in-cateura-paraguay/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+colossal+(Colossal)

Cateura, Paraguay is a small city that has grown atop a massive garbage dump and is regarded as one of the poorest slums in Latin America, a village where people live among a sea of garbage. Incredibly, the landfill itself is the primary form of subsistence for many residents within the slum who pick through waste for items that can be used or sold. Prospects for most of the children born in Cateura is bleak as gangs and drugs await many of them. But then one day, something amazing happened.

A garbage picker named Nicolás Gómez (known as “Cola”) found a piece of garbage that resembled a violin and brought it to musician Favio Chávez. Using other objects collected from the dump the pair constructed a functional violin in a place where a real violin is worth more a house. Using items gleaned completely from trash pair then built a cello, a flute, a drum, and suddenly a wild idea was born: could a children’s orchestra be born in one of the most depressed areas in the world? As you can guess the answer was yes

Google adds a “dead-man’s switch” — uses cases from torture-resistance to digital wills – Boing Boing

Google’s rolled out an "Inactive Account Manager" — a dead-man’s switch for your Google accounts. If you set it, Google will watch your account for protracted inactivity. After a set period, you can tell it to either squawk ("Email Amnesty International and tell them I’m in jail," or "Email my kids and tell them I’m dead and give them instructions for probating my estate") and/or delete all your accounts. This has a lot of use-cases, from preventing your secrets from being tortured out of you (before you go to a protest, you could set your dead-man’s switch to a couple hours — if you end up in jail and out of contact, all your stuff would be deleted before you were even processed by the local law) to easing the transition of your digital "estate."

No one wants to think about their own death, but not thinking about it has a zero percent chance of preventing it. The Inactive Account Manager (great euphemism) can send your data from many Google services to your digital heirs, alert your contacts, delete the accounts, or do all or none of the above. It affects Blogger, Contacts/Circles (in Google+) Drive, Gmail, Google+ profiles, Pages and Streams, Picasa albums, Google Voice, and YouTube.

It also serves as a useful self-destruct button. Don’t want anyone watching your stupid YouTube videos after you’ve long forgotten that you had an account? Don’t want your kids to find your password notebook years after you’re gone and read your dirty chat sessions with their dad? You can have your account auto-destruct after trying to reach you using other e-mail addresses and by text message. You know, in case you just get tired of Gmail and wander off somewhere else.

http://boingboing.net/2013/04/13/google-adds-a-dead-mans-sw.html