As if appointment of Rod Beckström as director of National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) was not foolish enough, Bush administration couldn’t help tolerating Mr Chertoff’s ideas of privacy. In a public appearance at Canada, he attempted to explain how fingerprints are not his idea of personally identifiable information (personal data). What people, especially those who handle security, must understand that personal data can not be described by confidentiality alone.
What most people do not understand is the difference between personally identifiable information and confidential information, or as Schneier puts it ‘the difference between personal data and secret data. To put it simply, personally identifiable Information (PII) refers to any information that identifies or can be used to identify, contact, or locate the person to whom such information pertains. It has little to do with confidentiality of the information on its own. Postal codes/ zip codes and fingerprints are few such examples of less-confidential personal data.
I have been thinking about buying ASUS Eee PC to help me access my main machine while I laze around in bed. The two laptops I have are a bit clunky and store crucial data that I cant afford to loose when I roll in bed. While most of my rss, email and music streaming needs are fulfilled by my pimped iphone, they keyboard and screen size often makes it uncomfortable to access my webserver over ssh and my machine over vnc.
While I still wait for some cash inflow for buying Eee PC, Jace has written a very insightful comparison of Eee PC and HCL MiLeap Y. For those who think HCL can produce a good laptop for Linux OS, this is an eye opener.
I have read a lot of material on Johny Lang and stuff written by him, but I have never come across an article as lame as this. Someone please tell the author that penetration testing is different from data stealing!
Indian government either needs a session on risk perception. It has this tremendous capacity to recognise a threat from a cow to a smartphone.
The way things are turning out in India, we will soon see DoT ordering NIC to maintain a national mail server where all our emails will be mirrored and scanned for keywords that reflect terrorism. Atleast people can look up to NIC to snoop around in other’s email and ask for backup just incase an email is deleted from their servers!
