What I was reading today?

On December 26th, from 09:04 to 14:44, I’ve red…

Branden Williams’ Security Convergence Blog: Deming Points Applied to Security – The “Deming Cycle” is much like the Systems Development Life cycle and other methods that ratchet change allowing continuous improvement. Less well known is Deming’s insistence that effective quality improvement can not be done without statistically stable quality measurements (Bell Laboratories Deming Quality class about 1996). As a statistician he recognized that attempting to improve an unstable or poorly understood system is non-scientific tampering.The fourteen points are rooted in the idea that management must advocate quality in non-production line systems where success and failure cannot be counted or otherwise easily measured.Security is a type of quality and cannot be measured by counting successes and failures. Restating Deming’s fourteen points as security directives is a useful way to direct security management.
Preparing your laptop for a security conference | Security4all – Taking your laptop with you to a hacker/security conference is not without risks. As a security geek, you should be paranoid either way. So how do you go about securing your system?Well, the best way to guarantee the integrity of your laptop is to make a backup of your laptop and restore it after the conference. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to patch your system, make sure it has AV scanning + firewall and some system hardening. Just to make sure you don’t end up with a compromised or non-booting laptop during the security conference. Have a look at the digital self-defense article from Didier Stevens for some more details.
FOXNews.com – World Bank Admits Top Tech Vendor Debarred for 8 Years – For months, the World Bank has been stonewalling and denying a series of FOX News reports on a variety of in-house scandals, ranging from the hacking of its most sensitive financial data to its own sanctions against suppliers found guilty of wrongdoing.But last week the world’s most important anti-poverty organization suddenly came clean — sort of — in its tough sanctions against a vitally important computer software service supplier that has been linked not only to financial wrongdoing but also to the ultrasensitive data heists.A top bank official, FOX News has learned, has admitted that a leading India-based information technology vendor named Satyam Computer Services was barred last February from all business at the bank for a period of eight years — and that the ban started in September.The admission confirms what FOX News reported from its own bank sources on October 10 — a report the World Bank officially disparaged at the time.
Your first day with a new Mac: the get-started guide for Windows users | News | TechRadar UK – Just got a new Mac for Christmas and feeling a little bewildered?Fear not – Switch to Mac, brought to you by our colleagues over on MacFormat magazine, shows new Mac users how to move comfortably from the familiarity of Windows.Below are 20 common tasks that PC owners perform without thinking about, and their equivalents on a Mac – just as easy!
50 Things We Know Now (We Didn’t Know This Time Last Year): 2008 Edition – Well, well, well. Wasn’t 2008 a newsy little year?Believe it or not, stuff happened that had nothing to do with the presidential election, gas prices or Michael Phelps. Not that you’d have an easy time sifting through all the media debris to find the information that actually meant something.With so many distractions, you probably didn’t hear that using Facebook makes you a better employee, or that drinking wine can help you avoid lung cancer, or that doing tai chi makes life easier for asthmatics. (Unless you do it in a public park wearing something approximating pajamas, of course. Then you just look silly.)For those and other warm, delicious info muffins, we humbly present our list of stuff you know this year that you didn’t know this time last year. Feel free to unleash these at your New Year’s Eve party
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Slashdot | How Do You Monitor Documents? – “I have been presented with a problem recently, which I know others have probably faced. During the last month, one of our customers accused us of providing another customer with their specification. So the question arose: how do we, or can we trace documents and find if they are being opened or used somewhere where they weren’t intended. We don’t want to be restrictive, because at times, we have people all over the place, but if one of our documents were opened in a foreign country, that would arouse suspicions. Most of our documents are made with MS office suite, and I have been thinking of working on a macro to ping a server, but that would require the user to enable the macros, and it would also require the insertion into about 1000 documents. But it’s been difficult for me to find a solution that doesn’t prevent someone in Omaha from opening a document for legitimate use and is not a solution that can easily be disabled or hacked around.”
grinding.be » Blog Archive » more notes on Presence – how to stay in contact when you’re everywhere – Attention Conservation Notice: This is a long and heavily detailed step-by-step guide to creating your own digital personal-assistant that will let you keep tabs on your distributed presence across the internet without having to log in to each site on a daily basis.