Special Interest Group on CRAP

Thoughts by Kevin McCurley
Not affiliated with ACM. They have their own crap.

Special Interest Group on CRAP header image 1

Entries Tagged as 'security'

Ah the irony

December 1st, 2009 ·

[Read more →]

Tags: The internet · security

allofmp3.com rears their ugly head

August 13th, 2009 ·

Today I got a piece of spam sent to the email address that was only used for communication with allofmp3.com. In case you have forgotten, that was a shady music seller who sold MP3 music files by the megabyte, but was eventually shut down through pressure by the US trade representative. The spam [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: The internet · security

You may have already won

July 2nd, 2009 ·

Everyone probably gets these emails telling you that you have a long lost uncle who was an official in Africa who left you $21 million, and if you’d just send $1,000 to them then they will wire you the money. They are called 419 scams. About once a year I also get an [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Economics · Rants · The internet · security

It’s about trust

October 8th, 2008 ·

As I look around at what is happening in the world today, I keep seeing evidence that it all comes down to trust. As someone who spent a great deal of time working on information security, the subject of trust is one that I tried to design for, but I always regarded trust as [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Politics · Research · security

Thoughts from the Crypto conference

August 28th, 2008 ·

I was having a hard time summarizing my thoughts from the Crypto conference. As always it was nice to see old friends and engage in discussions about the state of the art in crypto, but in retrospect I think the field of mathematical cryptography has dug itself into a hole and has a hard [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Research · security

The Annual Pilgrimage

August 15th, 2008 ·

I started working on cryptography as a way to do something more practical than pure mathematics. Waaaaaaay back in 1985 I discovered the Crypto conference in Santa Barbara at UCSB, and I was enthralled because I could interact with computer scientists, electrical engineers, business people, and other mathematicians on a subject that seemed to [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Research · security

The birthday of spam

May 2nd, 2008 ·

Sadly, today is the 30th birthday of spam. I seem to remember that you should never trust anyone over 30.
Email providers are largely distinguished today by their ability to accurately filter out spam. There is a huge of amount of absolute crap that is sent, but most of this is easy to handle. [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: The internet · security

When hackers have offspring

March 27th, 2008 · 1 Comment

Disclaimer: this is unrelated to my own child (I think)
I recently came across the following cartoon, which is a joke that is so obscure that few people will get it (you need to know what sql injection attacks are). Still, if Frank Zappa could name his daughter “Moon Unit” (sister of Dweezil), and David [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Amusements · security

PageRank as economic utility function

February 28th, 2008 ·

I’ve written in the past about the interpretation of the PageRank probability distribution as an economic utility function. Recall that one interpretation is PageRank(url) = probability that a random surfer arrives at the url. This can be used to estimating monetary value for advertising on the page, because it is correlated to the [...]

[Read more →]

Tags: Research · The internet · security