Over here in the UK, we have become quite used to chip & pin transactions. In fact, visiting a Chinese restaurant in Leeds last night I saw a sign saying "To combat fraud, we will only accept chip & pin" - must have been there years. I can't remember the last time I saw a card with only a magstripe.
Wait, yes I can - it was a few months ago, in Boston. In the US, chip and pin is virtually unknown. I'd say I've seen more chip & pin in Kenya than in the states, and they too aren't far on with adoption. It seems, yet again, that a move to introduce chip & pin in the US has failed - a partial move, but not really.
Does it actually matter though? Is carrying a bit of plastic around in our wallets about to become a thing of the past? Last week I saw Barclay's advertise "bPay" in a free paper at the train station. Contactless fob... wristband... sticker. Is that even too physical? I plan to pay for my ironing to be done with Paym - just using an app. My wife pays for her car detailing with Paypal. With uber we pay for taxis with a card that nobody needs to see.
Here in the UK, we seem to be going magstripe >> chip&pin >> contactless >> no-card. Is the US just going to skip a generation, in the same way landline phones never made it into Kenya? Those guys skipped straight to mobile because the cost of putting in a load of wires was higher than the cost of the latest generation of technology. These days, not every revolution has to follow all the stages!
I quite like my wallet - but it probably has too many things in it. I suspect it won't be long before there's neither plastic cards, nor pictures of her majesty.
Saturday, 3 October 2015
Friday, 18 September 2015
Unhackable? I Guess it's Possible...
Stories have been doing the rounds this week of an "unhackable" computer. Of course, these are not strictly true. More credible media reports an "unhackable" kernel - here in New Scientist. The kernel is the complicated bit of software that lets other stuff (so called "userspace") not have to worry about directly fiddling with the hardware, and makes sure all of userspace plays nice together. Here's the page with the FAQ from the folk who built it.
Of course, making an unhackable kernel is an incredible feat - though calling it "unhackable" is a bit more fluff in my view (totally forgivable, given the achievement, mind!). I remember looking at formal proofs in my student days. This stuff is hard. To prove a whole kernel does what it says on the tin. Wow. To do it without needing to trust your compiler? Even better.
Don't think though that this is going put AV vendors out of business any time soon. The overwhelming majority of security break-ins have been due to userspace software - think heartbleed for example - or due to errors at "layer 8" (those foolish bags of meat that drive computers). As such, just having a secure kernel is only going to get you so far - which is why this is useful in things like military drones: you can start to write formally proven drone software, and no-one is going to install adobe flash on a predator drone (please, FFS tell me they aren't!).
What this should do, though is inspire confidence in "the Internet of Things" - well, at least a bit. If my door locks are going to be on the Interwebs, I damn sure want them running a kernel like this that's formally proven and open source. Sadly, we will probably end up with a load of never-updated proprietary hoo-ha that's got more holes than a hedgehog's pillow.
Of course, making an unhackable kernel is an incredible feat - though calling it "unhackable" is a bit more fluff in my view (totally forgivable, given the achievement, mind!). I remember looking at formal proofs in my student days. This stuff is hard. To prove a whole kernel does what it says on the tin. Wow. To do it without needing to trust your compiler? Even better.
Don't think though that this is going put AV vendors out of business any time soon. The overwhelming majority of security break-ins have been due to userspace software - think heartbleed for example - or due to errors at "layer 8" (those foolish bags of meat that drive computers). As such, just having a secure kernel is only going to get you so far - which is why this is useful in things like military drones: you can start to write formally proven drone software, and no-one is going to install adobe flash on a predator drone (please, FFS tell me they aren't!).
What this should do, though is inspire confidence in "the Internet of Things" - well, at least a bit. If my door locks are going to be on the Interwebs, I damn sure want them running a kernel like this that's formally proven and open source. Sadly, we will probably end up with a load of never-updated proprietary hoo-ha that's got more holes than a hedgehog's pillow.
I used to Write a Blog you Know...
So, this week, I changed jobs. The last 12 years, I spent with Smoothwall, which was a lot of fun. All good things, as they say, must come to an end, so here I am.
Anyway, I used to write news articles for the website, back before this newfangled "blog" idea was born ;) and in latter years, I wrote more than a handful of articles for the blog. Now, it was always a bit of a chore coming up with articles, but then I was rather constrained in my topics, so hopefully, this blog will prove easier to write. Not sure. My brother, Will, has a blog, he says its a real pain in the backside coming up with content. He's usually right. This is probably a dreadful idea. And his template is more stylish than mine.
Ah well.. I should give it a shot, shouldn't I?
Anyway, I used to write news articles for the website, back before this newfangled "blog" idea was born ;) and in latter years, I wrote more than a handful of articles for the blog. Now, it was always a bit of a chore coming up with articles, but then I was rather constrained in my topics, so hopefully, this blog will prove easier to write. Not sure. My brother, Will, has a blog, he says its a real pain in the backside coming up with content. He's usually right. This is probably a dreadful idea. And his template is more stylish than mine.
Ah well.. I should give it a shot, shouldn't I?
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