End of Month Roundup, Jan 2010

Well I have to say that I still have not got back into the swing of blogging after Christmas. January has already come and gone with a only a single post to show, and I am grateful for the 1,500 visitors this month. There is a great deal going on in security, and I am collecting materials for posts that I imagine will come next month.

This is the first post written on my new netbook, and I finally succumbed to the purchase after many months of indecision. The post-Christmas sales finally got me. I also purchased a copy Ultra Recall for capturing and editing web content, and added some plug-ins to Windows Live Writer for improved editing and content linking. You may also have noticed the site enhancements provided by Apture that provide compact previews of linked content without having to navigate away from the current the page.

One of the built-in previewers is for Scribd content and I have added quite a few documents of late, clearing out pdfs that have been languishing on my hard drive, in need of review. My latest uploads include

• State of Enterprise IT Security and Emerging, Jonathon Penn, Forrester
• How to Organize Email
• How to Secure Windows and Your Privacy -- with Free Software
• Rainbow Tables Explained
• A Probabilistic Model for Cyber Attacks and Protection
• A Status Report on the P versus NP Question
• On the Entropy of Arcfour (RC4) keys

The last document is a copy of a 1998 IBM technical report on RC4 (then only referred to as Arcfour), examining the randomness of initial state and the cost of recovering the key through backtracking.

This time last year I had started another blog which I had hoped would be more informal and easier to write (less time per post), and also give me some exposure to Wordpress blogging tools. Quite quickly it became too hard to maintain both blogs and I ended up more or less abandoning the new blog and transferring some content over to No Tricks

• Moore's Lore and Attention Crash
• The Restaurant at the end of the Web
• Twitter as your Personal Content Proxy
• Social Media Data in Flight and at Rest
• Scoble's Law of Twitter

It seems that I was just as interested in Scribd a year ago as I am today with

• Data Centric Security Model hot on Scribd
• Entropy and Anonymity article featured on Scribd
• Some books on Scribd
• Publishing on Scribd

but there was still time for a few other posts as well

• Google's Storm in a Teacup
• Downadup's Password Cracking List
• Algebraic Group Visualization

Let’s hope I am back to full strength blogging next month.

Slides from my ZISC talk on Black Swans in IT Security

In December I gave a talk at the Zurich Information Security Colloquium, based on a post I made in October 2008. The slides can now be found on Scribd.