Security Notes Of The Week, Part 2

• Via SANS (from about 10 days ago), a GAO report is being used to justify federal cybersecurity waste.  This is one of the main problems in government regulation:  if you are not extremely explicit and cover all scenarios, people will find ways of weaseling out of what you intended the legislation or regulation to be.  This is the all-important law of unintended consequences, and it applies to security as well as every other regulatory scenario.
• Also via SANS.  As far as governments go, I think the Swiss have it pretty well right on file sharing and downloading:  file-sharing is here to stay, some amount of it isn’t going to ruin the system, and content providers need to adapt their financial models to deal with it rather than trying to sic governments on the issue.  Too bad most governments are seeing this as a way to gain power and pad their corporatist friends’ pockets.
• A story of international terrorism.  There’s no reason why terrorists would not use computer insecurity to further or finance their schemes, although fortunately, it doesn’t seem like this happens nearly as often as you might think.
• Facebook is a hotbed of insecurity.  So are smartphones.  When the most secure option is to root your phone, the carriers have failed.

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