7 ms·

Mr. Fart’s Favorite Colors

362 points by philfreo 11y ago

gboudrias 11y ago
Good article, very click-baity title. The article is about software security and how it compares (or doesn't compare) to real-world security, and what this means for the Apple case. What drew me in is mostly that the beginning is written in a very light-hearted style, so it's a pretty easy read at first.
- blakeross 11y ago
  Thanks. And, I agree: https://twitter.com/blakeross/status/706191059185872896 https://twitter.com/blakeross/status/706191059185872896 Usually I go in the other direction and redefine bland, e.g. https://medium.com/@blakeross/don-t-outsource-your-thinking-ad825a9b4653 https://medium.com/@blakeross/don-t-outsource-your-thinking-.... Had a little Friday fun with this one.
  - neotek 11y ago
    For what it's worth, you're a fantastic writer and this is one of the most enjoyable articles I think I've ever read. You've captured the essence of the subject perfectly, and your writing style is thoroughly enjoyable.
    - soylentcola 11y ago
      Seconding this. Maybe it's my love of anecdotes and analogies to illustrate points that may be hard for people to understand. Possibly it's my appreciation for well placed juvenile humor. Either way, I identified with some of the points being made and easily picked up on the things I'd not considered from this angle thanks to the funny examples.
      - karmelapple 11y ago
        Everything above echoed, with the important addition that I feel I can share this article with all of my non-techy friends and family and feel they will step away with a much better understanding of the Apple discussions. I still see unease with some of my friends and family about the topic, and although perhaps some of them have realized the ultimate question of should the cockpit or the cabin control things, I don't think they have a good understanding of why that is, or how this phone security compares to other things that are called "security," whether a door lock or the airport security line. Very vivid writing that explains this for everyone. And I dig this type of humor.
- skybrian 11y ago
  I liked it. However, I'm not going to forward it since it will confuse people who don't have the background to disambiguate. For example, who is "you" in the following two bullet points: It is not 'secure' as the Coke recipe is secure. Coca Cola has the key to its vault, but you don’t have the key to yours. It is not “secure” as the Pentagon is secure. Those blueprints are closely guarded, but your plans — even much of your security code — are known to all.
rzimmerman 11y ago
It is really surprising the amount of paranoia and thought that goes into software security compared to pretty much everything else. A driver's license is mostly a laminated piece of paper with some holograms. Social security numbers are 9 digit passwords you share over and over again that can't really be changed. I was recently asked to sign a receipt at a store when I'd used Apple Pay. My phone uses a fingerprint reader to authorize a one-time-use token for payment that's transmitted in a cryptographically secure way. But that signature - that's the real unfakeable proof.
- legulere 11y ago
  You can relatively easily add credit cards to Apple Pay that don't belong to you.
- nhf 11y ago
  Signatures on credit cards are an interesting artifact. Planet Money did a nice podcast on signatures a year or two ago: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/08/29/344034815/episode-564-the-signature http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/08/29/344034815/episo... Apparently signatures are still used as a method of determining liability for fraudulent charges, who knew?
  - CamatHN 11y ago
    In the UK at least, receipts often are contracts and often have one or two terms on them. The singing is to prove you acknowledge the contract.
    - stevetrewick 11y ago
      I'm in the UK, have worked frontline and back office retail and never seen this. Could you give an example?
      - CamatHN 11y ago
        i.e. you go into a car park and upon buying the ticket they make you sign it because on the ticket they have written 'We are not responsible if your car or anything within it gets stolen or damaged.' This term is onerous and as such needs to be agreed to which the signature does.
jacobolus 11y ago
In “thinking like a technologist”, this post is missing the context/subtext in the airline security game. The metal detector makes the airplane neither more nor less safe than the security theater porno scanner machine, and the precheck also doesn’t accomplish anything. The only reason most of the people need to be diverted through the porno scanner machine is that the federal government spent a few billion on them in a handout to some senator’s friends, and to scrap them now would make the tremendous waste of money obvious to everyone. But at the same time, business travelers don’t want to go through the new machines, so we let them pay a nominal fee (easily amortized down to trivial if you fly a few dozen times per year) to go through the old metal detectors instead. Bonus: they now get to take a shortcut in the security line that they didn’t used to get. If someone without a real precheck manages to sneak through the metal detector line by counterfeiting some paper token, it isn’t a real security risk.
- blakeross 11y ago
  Well, I did say at the end: "For as much money and time as we’ve wasted on printer-powered air security, only one innovation has prevented another 9/11: Locked, reinforced cockpit doors." I agree that it's generally theater all the way down.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    While locking the door is important, the real innovation is in the attitude of the passengers. It just isn't possible to hijack a plane anymore because the passengers will not allow it.
DrScump 11y ago
<This is the moment you realize that some people just want to watch the world burn.> Or, maybe the user is "kicking the tires" to see how robustly it was coded, concerned that poor data verification practices reflect weaknesses elsewhere in the code as well. EDIT: s/inadequacies/weaknesses for clarity
wangii 11y ago
I was astonished by how un-safe the road/traffic system really is 8 years ago when I started to learn driving. Just think about it, driving on road is extremely vulnerable: any other driver on the road could make a small mistake to get you both killed, accidentally or intentionally. Yet the road system is far more secure than its cyberspace counter part. Why? * Potential damage is roughly symmetric. A bad/evil driver might kill others but very likely also kill himself. * Threat is local. There is no way a bad/evil driver to kill all the drivers. * The road system as a whole does not have the single point of failure. I think the claim in the article is dangerously wrong. We should never be given a binary choice in such big issue.
- jacobolus 11y ago
  The road system has killed tens if not hundreds of millions of people. How many have been killed in cyberspace?
- jessaustin 11y ago
  We should never be given a binary choice in such big issue. The question, "should the security of any model of personal computing device be subject to the whims of every court in every nation" seems binary to me.
Negitivefrags 11y ago
I've run into the programmer vs normal person difference in thinking quite often with regard to customer support calls. Occasionally I will be called by someone from some company or government department because they want to notify of something. Lets say for example, I forgot to pay my insurance bill. At some point in the call they will ask me "I just need to verify your identity with some security questions." and ask me for something like my date of birth or my home address. The only correct answer to this is "I can't give you that information. You called me. I have no idea who you are." I'm always met with complete incredulity at this concept. About 50% of callers don't understand at all what I'm trying to get at. Most of the rest just don't have any idea how to continue. What I tell them at this point is that the correct way to handle this is that they need to give me an extension number for them personally and I will find the external number of their company/dept myself on their website and then call them back. Unfortunately a lot of these callers either can't (due to not having a personal extension number) or wont (it's off protocol I guess?). The problem is, I feel like an asshole for taking a stand on things like this ("Why is this guy trying to make my job difficult"), but more people need to understand that it's all too easy to be socially engineered!
- deleted 11y ago
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  - trollingineer 11y ago
    You are incredibly petty. Grow up.
- deleted 11y ago
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- deleted 11y ago
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- deleted 11y ago
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  - girvo 11y ago
dclowd9901 11y ago
I have nothing to say other than, author, if you're reading this, this opinion was... There's no other word for it: utterly fantastic.
- blakeross 11y ago
  I appreciate that. I've been working in tech since I was a kid and have been transitioning over to writing recently. It's been an interesting shift because it doesn't offer the same kind of motivating fuel (up-and-to-the-right graphs, etc). So comments like this are more encouraging than you know. Thank you.
  - archagon 11y ago
    After finishing this, but before reading the byline, I thought to myself, "Yeah, this dude definitely has some writing chops... hmm... maybe that Firefox guy who wrote the screenplay?" Turns out it was indeed you! Definitely looking forward to reading more of your articles/whatever.
  - dclowd9901 11y ago
    Well, as someone who went the direct opposite way, you fully have my endorsement. I'll be keeping an eye out for future posts.
- andreis_ 11y ago
  He's a very good writer. I realised when looking him up on Twitter that he's also the one behind the Silicon Valley scripts. https://twitter.com/blakeross https://twitter.com/blakeross
ivraatiems 11y ago
I think this is a fantastic article - and I thought it was genuinely funny, but my sense of humor is about 80% butt jokes so I think that's just an unusual alignment of my taste with the author's ;). Now, allow me to take this article about irreduceable complexity and reduce its complexity: the question is not even about which shade of security gray to go with. It's an ongoing psychological battle between security and security theater, which is an unrelated set of activities that is almost, but not entirely, exactly unlike actual security. Security theater operates on the level of what feels right, instead of what is logically right. That makes it powerful. It offers an appearance and feeling of safety, and there's value in that. Of course, if you ask someone "do you want a phone that feels safe or is actually safe," they'll pick the latter, but actually, they want and need both. That's the problem with this issue. The general public doesn't feel the difference between these two domains clearly enough to know how dangerous the governments plan for the iPhone is - they don't understand that it shifts the balance wholly from security to security theater, when what you actually want is a blend of both. You need The Great Tagliatelle and the locked cockpit door. You need laminated paper and you need to have pilots with secret codes. Without security, an iPhone will still FEEL safe - it just won't be. The problem is, feeling safe is good enough for most. That's why we mostly have metal locks and not giant flaming Doberman-lauching turrets on our lawns. Until the public gets the need for a balance, this debate will go nowhere fast, and the government - who is very used to getting its way - will skillfully play on our desire to feel safe in order to get what it needs.
dstroot 11y ago
Best read in months. Thanks for posting this.
hueving 11y ago
The anecdote about the airline industry in the US is half-correct. It's true that cockpit protocol didn't change after the German crash, but that's because the airlines in the US already have a better version than the German one. When a pilot leaves the cockpit to drop a grenade, a flight attendant must enter the cockpit to sit with the remaining pilot until the bomber returns. While this doesn't protect against a completely insane pilot (he/she could kill the flight attendant), it does eliminate scenarios where the cockpit only has one person present.
- blakeross 11y ago
  Yeah, I'm aware of this. But I don't think this prevents the germanwings outcome (which was, indeed, orchestrated by the "completely insane pilot" you mention). The person plotting to commandeer the cockpit always has the upper hand, because they'll be the first to act. It's hard to defend against a sucker punch or a knife from first-class. You could even argue that the two-in-the-cockpit rule is less secure, because it introduces one additional person who could pull off a germanwings scenario into the impenetrable control room. This is the same concern raised by the pilot quoted in this article (http://www.smh.com.au/business/aviation/germanwings-australian-pilots-wary-of-the-new-rule-of-two-for-cockpit-20150330-1mbjy0 http://www.smh.com.au/business/aviation/germanwings-australi...): "It exposes the cockpit to more security risks than the isolated case of a homicidal pilot," he said. "I think flight crew are a better judge of fellow pilots' mental state. Now I have to judge the cabin crew member's mental state too before leaving them in the cockpit with access to things like the crash axe." Originally I had a long aside in the article to deal with this point, but I axed it because I don't think it changes the core argument. Unfortunately Medium seems to have removed footnoting capabilities. But it's still a valid note. Thanks.
  - hueving 11y ago
    I'm not sure this guy was insane so much as severely depressed. He did kill a plane full of people but it was a much more passive act than having to swing an ax at someone else in close quarters. Why do you think he waited for the other pilot to go to the crapper? Also, the argument about now having to judge other cabin crew members mental state falls a little flat since the pilot that left the cockpit clearly wasn't even able to judge the guy he was with. It's sort of like arguing that now you have to read two minds instead of one.
kyberias 11y ago
I really liked the style of writing in this piece. The author certainly should consider writing a book. Reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell.
jessaustin 11y ago
"Mr. Fart" is the best nickname for them yet, much better than that "Female Body Inspectors" one sees on t-shirts.
purpled_haze 11y ago
The best security: be honest and place complete trust in those you employ. Hire people you trust. If there is nothing that is blocking you, then morale is higher, and people get more focused on what is important. If there is nothing to break into, there is less temptation. Your employees won't be perfect, but if they are trusted, if you let things be, there's a good chance everything will be fine- at least as fine as it would have otherwise.
- purpled_haze 11y ago
  I'd like the people that -1'd me to explain why I'm wrong. No matter how much defense you put up, if you are accessible, you are at risk for unauthorized use of data. Employing only people you trust and showing them you trust them is a great alternative to security restrictions.
cponeill 11y ago
Best article I have read in a while. Thanks for writing it.

362 points by philfreo 11y ago

Good article, very click-baity title. The article is about software security and how it compares (or doesn't compare) to real-world security, and what this means for the Apple case. What drew me in is mostly that the beginning is written in a very light-hearted style, so it's a pretty easy read at first.

blakeross 11y ago
Thanks. And, I agree: https://twitter.com/blakeross/status/706191059185872896 https://twitter.com/blakeross/status/706191059185872896 Usually I go in the other direction and redefine bland, e.g. https://medium.com/@blakeross/don-t-outsource-your-thinking-ad825a9b4653 https://medium.com/@blakeross/don-t-outsource-your-thinking-.... Had a little Friday fun with this one.
- neotek 11y ago
  For what it's worth, you're a fantastic writer and this is one of the most enjoyable articles I think I've ever read. You've captured the essence of the subject perfectly, and your writing style is thoroughly enjoyable.
  - soylentcola 11y ago
    Seconding this. Maybe it's my love of anecdotes and analogies to illustrate points that may be hard for people to understand. Possibly it's my appreciation for well placed juvenile humor. Either way, I identified with some of the points being made and easily picked up on the things I'd not considered from this angle thanks to the funny examples.
    - karmelapple 11y ago
      Everything above echoed, with the important addition that I feel I can share this article with all of my non-techy friends and family and feel they will step away with a much better understanding of the Apple discussions. I still see unease with some of my friends and family about the topic, and although perhaps some of them have realized the ultimate question of should the cockpit or the cabin control things, I don't think they have a good understanding of why that is, or how this phone security compares to other things that are called "security," whether a door lock or the airport security line. Very vivid writing that explains this for everyone. And I dig this type of humor.
skybrian 11y ago
I liked it. However, I'm not going to forward it since it will confuse people who don't have the background to disambiguate. For example, who is "you" in the following two bullet points: It is not 'secure' as the Coke recipe is secure. Coca Cola has the key to its vault, but you don’t have the key to yours. It is not “secure” as the Pentagon is secure. Those blueprints are closely guarded, but your plans — even much of your security code — are known to all.

rzimmerman 11y ago

It is really surprising the amount of paranoia and thought that goes into software security compared to pretty much everything else. A driver's license is mostly a laminated piece of paper with some holograms. Social security numbers are 9 digit passwords you share over and over again that can't really be changed. I was recently asked to sign a receipt at a store when I'd used Apple Pay. My phone uses a fingerprint reader to authorize a one-time-use token for payment that's transmitted in a cryptographically secure way. But that signature - that's the real unfakeable proof.

legulere 11y ago
You can relatively easily add credit cards to Apple Pay that don't belong to you.
nhf 11y ago
Signatures on credit cards are an interesting artifact. Planet Money did a nice podcast on signatures a year or two ago: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/08/29/344034815/episode-564-the-signature http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/08/29/344034815/episo... Apparently signatures are still used as a method of determining liability for fraudulent charges, who knew?
- CamatHN 11y ago
  In the UK at least, receipts often are contracts and often have one or two terms on them. The singing is to prove you acknowledge the contract.
  - stevetrewick 11y ago
    I'm in the UK, have worked frontline and back office retail and never seen this. Could you give an example?
    - CamatHN 11y ago
      i.e. you go into a car park and upon buying the ticket they make you sign it because on the ticket they have written 'We are not responsible if your car or anything within it gets stolen or damaged.' This term is onerous and as such needs to be agreed to which the signature does.

jacobolus 11y ago

In “thinking like a technologist”, this post is missing the context/subtext in the airline security game. The metal detector makes the airplane neither more nor less safe than the security theater porno scanner machine, and the precheck also doesn’t accomplish anything. The only reason most of the people need to be diverted through the porno scanner machine is that the federal government spent a few billion on them in a handout to some senator’s friends, and to scrap them now would make the tremendous waste of money obvious to everyone. But at the same time, business travelers don’t want to go through the new machines, so we let them pay a nominal fee (easily amortized down to trivial if you fly a few dozen times per year) to go through the old metal detectors instead. Bonus: they now get to take a shortcut in the security line that they didn’t used to get. If someone without a real precheck manages to sneak through the metal detector line by counterfeiting some paper token, it isn’t a real security risk.

blakeross 11y ago
Well, I did say at the end: "For as much money and time as we’ve wasted on printer-powered air security, only one innovation has prevented another 9/11: Locked, reinforced cockpit doors." I agree that it's generally theater all the way down.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  While locking the door is important, the real innovation is in the attitude of the passengers. It just isn't possible to hijack a plane anymore because the passengers will not allow it.

DrScump 11y ago

<This is the moment you realize that some people just want to watch the world burn.> Or, maybe the user is "kicking the tires" to see how robustly it was coded, concerned that poor data verification practices reflect weaknesses elsewhere in the code as well. EDIT: s/inadequacies/weaknesses for clarity

wangii 11y ago

I was astonished by how un-safe the road/traffic system really is 8 years ago when I started to learn driving. Just think about it, driving on road is extremely vulnerable: any other driver on the road could make a small mistake to get you both killed, accidentally or intentionally. Yet the road system is far more secure than its cyberspace counter part. Why? * Potential damage is roughly symmetric. A bad/evil driver might kill others but very likely also kill himself. * Threat is local. There is no way a bad/evil driver to kill all the drivers. * The road system as a whole does not have the single point of failure. I think the claim in the article is dangerously wrong. We should never be given a binary choice in such big issue.

jacobolus 11y ago
The road system has killed tens if not hundreds of millions of people. How many have been killed in cyberspace?
jessaustin 11y ago
We should never be given a binary choice in such big issue. The question, "should the security of any model of personal computing device be subject to the whims of every court in every nation" seems binary to me.

Negitivefrags 11y ago

I've run into the programmer vs normal person difference in thinking quite often with regard to customer support calls. Occasionally I will be called by someone from some company or government department because they want to notify of something. Lets say for example, I forgot to pay my insurance bill. At some point in the call they will ask me "I just need to verify your identity with some security questions." and ask me for something like my date of birth or my home address. The only correct answer to this is "I can't give you that information. You called me. I have no idea who you are." I'm always met with complete incredulity at this concept. About 50% of callers don't understand at all what I'm trying to get at. Most of the rest just don't have any idea how to continue. What I tell them at this point is that the correct way to handle this is that they need to give me an extension number for them personally and I will find the external number of their company/dept myself on their website and then call them back. Unfortunately a lot of these callers either can't (due to not having a personal extension number) or wont (it's off protocol I guess?). The problem is, I feel like an asshole for taking a stand on things like this ("Why is this guy trying to make my job difficult"), but more people need to understand that it's all too easy to be socially engineered!

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- trollingineer 11y ago
  You are incredibly petty. Grow up.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
deleted 11y ago
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deleted 11y ago
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- girvo 11y ago

dclowd9901 11y ago

I have nothing to say other than, author, if you're reading this, this opinion was... There's no other word for it: utterly fantastic.

blakeross 11y ago
I appreciate that. I've been working in tech since I was a kid and have been transitioning over to writing recently. It's been an interesting shift because it doesn't offer the same kind of motivating fuel (up-and-to-the-right graphs, etc). So comments like this are more encouraging than you know. Thank you.
- archagon 11y ago
  After finishing this, but before reading the byline, I thought to myself, "Yeah, this dude definitely has some writing chops... hmm... maybe that Firefox guy who wrote the screenplay?" Turns out it was indeed you! Definitely looking forward to reading more of your articles/whatever.
- dclowd9901 11y ago
  Well, as someone who went the direct opposite way, you fully have my endorsement. I'll be keeping an eye out for future posts.
andreis_ 11y ago
He's a very good writer. I realised when looking him up on Twitter that he's also the one behind the Silicon Valley scripts. https://twitter.com/blakeross https://twitter.com/blakeross

ivraatiems 11y ago

I think this is a fantastic article - and I thought it was genuinely funny, but my sense of humor is about 80% butt jokes so I think that's just an unusual alignment of my taste with the author's ;). Now, allow me to take this article about irreduceable complexity and reduce its complexity: the question is not even about which shade of security gray to go with. It's an ongoing psychological battle between security and security theater, which is an unrelated set of activities that is almost, but not entirely, exactly unlike actual security. Security theater operates on the level of what feels right, instead of what is logically right. That makes it powerful. It offers an appearance and feeling of safety, and there's value in that. Of course, if you ask someone "do you want a phone that feels safe or is actually safe," they'll pick the latter, but actually, they want and need both. That's the problem with this issue. The general public doesn't feel the difference between these two domains clearly enough to know how dangerous the governments plan for the iPhone is - they don't understand that it shifts the balance wholly from security to security theater, when what you actually want is a blend of both. You need The Great Tagliatelle and the locked cockpit door. You need laminated paper and you need to have pilots with secret codes. Without security, an iPhone will still FEEL safe - it just won't be. The problem is, feeling safe is good enough for most. That's why we mostly have metal locks and not giant flaming Doberman-lauching turrets on our lawns. Until the public gets the need for a balance, this debate will go nowhere fast, and the government - who is very used to getting its way - will skillfully play on our desire to feel safe in order to get what it needs.

dstroot 11y ago

Best read in months. Thanks for posting this.

hueving 11y ago

The anecdote about the airline industry in the US is half-correct. It's true that cockpit protocol didn't change after the German crash, but that's because the airlines in the US already have a better version than the German one. When a pilot leaves the cockpit to drop a grenade, a flight attendant must enter the cockpit to sit with the remaining pilot until the bomber returns. While this doesn't protect against a completely insane pilot (he/she could kill the flight attendant), it does eliminate scenarios where the cockpit only has one person present.

blakeross 11y ago
Yeah, I'm aware of this. But I don't think this prevents the germanwings outcome (which was, indeed, orchestrated by the "completely insane pilot" you mention). The person plotting to commandeer the cockpit always has the upper hand, because they'll be the first to act. It's hard to defend against a sucker punch or a knife from first-class. You could even argue that the two-in-the-cockpit rule is less secure, because it introduces one additional person who could pull off a germanwings scenario into the impenetrable control room. This is the same concern raised by the pilot quoted in this article (http://www.smh.com.au/business/aviation/germanwings-australian-pilots-wary-of-the-new-rule-of-two-for-cockpit-20150330-1mbjy0 http://www.smh.com.au/business/aviation/germanwings-australi...): "It exposes the cockpit to more security risks than the isolated case of a homicidal pilot," he said. "I think flight crew are a better judge of fellow pilots' mental state. Now I have to judge the cabin crew member's mental state too before leaving them in the cockpit with access to things like the crash axe." Originally I had a long aside in the article to deal with this point, but I axed it because I don't think it changes the core argument. Unfortunately Medium seems to have removed footnoting capabilities. But it's still a valid note. Thanks.
- hueving 11y ago
  I'm not sure this guy was insane so much as severely depressed. He did kill a plane full of people but it was a much more passive act than having to swing an ax at someone else in close quarters. Why do you think he waited for the other pilot to go to the crapper? Also, the argument about now having to judge other cabin crew members mental state falls a little flat since the pilot that left the cockpit clearly wasn't even able to judge the guy he was with. It's sort of like arguing that now you have to read two minds instead of one.

kyberias 11y ago

I really liked the style of writing in this piece. The author certainly should consider writing a book. Reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell.

jessaustin 11y ago

"Mr. Fart" is the best nickname for them yet, much better than that "Female Body Inspectors" one sees on t-shirts.

purpled_haze 11y ago

The best security: be honest and place complete trust in those you employ. Hire people you trust. If there is nothing that is blocking you, then morale is higher, and people get more focused on what is important. If there is nothing to break into, there is less temptation. Your employees won't be perfect, but if they are trusted, if you let things be, there's a good chance everything will be fine- at least as fine as it would have otherwise.

purpled_haze 11y ago
I'd like the people that -1'd me to explain why I'm wrong. No matter how much defense you put up, if you are accessible, you are at risk for unauthorized use of data. Employing only people you trust and showing them you trust them is a great alternative to security restrictions.

cponeill 11y ago

Best article I have read in a while. Thanks for writing it.