- MCP server with stdio transport for local use - Search episodes, transcripts, hosts, and series - 4,511 episodes with metadata and transcripts - Data loader with in-memory JSON storage 🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
630 lines
32 KiB
Plaintext
630 lines
32 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 3636
|
|
Title: HPR3636: The Importance of Data Reduction
|
|
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3636/hpr3636.mp3
|
|
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 02:36:19
|
|
|
|
---
|
|
|
|
This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,636 from Monday 11 July 2022.
|
|
Today's show is entitled, The Importance of Data Reduction.
|
|
It is part of the series' privacy and security.
|
|
It is hosted by Lurking Pryon, and is about 39 minutes long.
|
|
It carries an explicit flag.
|
|
The summary is I have a discussion about data reduction with special guests, and author
|
|
are Brady Frost.
|
|
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night, wherever happens to be, wherever
|
|
you are in the world.
|
|
You're listening to the stuff Evil Steve doesn't want you to know, and I'm your host,
|
|
Lurking Pryon.
|
|
So, read capping, what we've talked about, we talked about changing passwords, that was
|
|
my first episode.
|
|
Talk about good idea fairy hunting, where we go when we look for the guys who are gals
|
|
who are coming up with good ideas, and ingratiating ourselves with them.
|
|
I've had a really good luck with that in the past, as far as implementing security within
|
|
an organization.
|
|
We talked about who the fuck is Evil Steve.
|
|
We actually had two episodes on that.
|
|
Talk about implementing two factor authentication and getting a password manager.
|
|
And this week, we are joined by our Brady Frost, and author, bright sci-fi, and other
|
|
cool stuff, and welcome to the show Brady.
|
|
Hey, thank you.
|
|
I'm glad to have you here.
|
|
It's always good to be joined by other people so that you could not feel like you're just
|
|
talking to yourself.
|
|
I talk to myself all the time.
|
|
I do too.
|
|
I answer myself too.
|
|
Shit.
|
|
So I understand you have some questions for me.
|
|
Yeah.
|
|
Yeah.
|
|
So where did this idea for Evil Steve come from?
|
|
All right.
|
|
That's actually kind of a funny story.
|
|
I was teaching security plus and A plus for the Air Force.
|
|
I stood up the 8570 course for the Air Force, and we were teaching these students security
|
|
plus.
|
|
We want them to just come in and get a certification.
|
|
That was never the idea for 8570.
|
|
Matter of fact, I even got to sit down with the guy who came up with 8570.
|
|
And he was horribly distraught with what had happened to it where it just became a certification
|
|
game.
|
|
That wasn't his goal at all.
|
|
He actually wanted people to get the value of what was being taught from a security aspect
|
|
rather than just having a certification.
|
|
But all the branches implemented it differently, and it became a horrible mess.
|
|
But when I was teaching my students, I wanted them to realize that it's not things that
|
|
are attacking us.
|
|
Everybody talks about worms and viruses and ransomware, but what they don't realize
|
|
is they're actually a person on the other end of a keyboard somewhere that purposely
|
|
attacked you.
|
|
And I wanted them to start thinking and keep thinking about security in the context of
|
|
a person is attacking you, not a thing.
|
|
And Steve was one of the guys that I was teaching with, and he was known to have kind
|
|
of a bristly personality.
|
|
I made evil Steve.
|
|
And it worked.
|
|
Everyone was like, okay, cool, you know, evil Steve.
|
|
I thought he was using evil rob when he taught, but as it turns out, no, he wasn't, and
|
|
he didn't even know where evil Steve came from until this year I was talking to him.
|
|
And he's like, oh my God, I had no idea.
|
|
But yeah, evil Steve actually is like the main bad guy for Air Force Cyber Command.
|
|
So whenever they're talking about the bad guy, it's evil Steve, it's kind of caught on
|
|
and became part of the culture.
|
|
And yeah, that's evil Steve.
|
|
So pretty awesome.
|
|
That's a good story.
|
|
I like that.
|
|
Yeah.
|
|
I've actually got a domain for evil Steve.
|
|
Yeah.
|
|
So I'm looking to get that set up and rolling.
|
|
It's kind of difficult right now because of the international political situations that
|
|
are going on, so understandable.
|
|
Yeah, it's hard to have domains in Russia right now.
|
|
Well, let me rephrase, it's hard to manage domains in Russia right now.
|
|
I bet.
|
|
Yeah.
|
|
Okay.
|
|
Yeah.
|
|
I was just going to say, I think for the listeners who have followed these episodes,
|
|
and myself in general, I feel like most of us are generally pretty security conscious.
|
|
We try to be.
|
|
We're busy.
|
|
There's a lot going on, passwords, password managers, two factor authentication.
|
|
We're seeing that more and more.
|
|
Our phones want to be involved in two factor authentication.
|
|
Our email accounts suggest it.
|
|
We don't have it enabled.
|
|
We're getting an alert for it.
|
|
Some of us have gotten better at looking for phishing emails.
|
|
Our grandparents are great at sending those out or our parents.
|
|
Absolutely.
|
|
So some of us are catching on.
|
|
Is there any areas that maybe we're overlooking?
|
|
Do you have any data in the cloud?
|
|
Of course.
|
|
Yeah.
|
|
I'm an author.
|
|
Okay.
|
|
So you've got stuff.
|
|
So how many Gmail accounts, Microsoft accounts, Apple accounts, Yahoo accounts, how many
|
|
of those do you have?
|
|
Too many.
|
|
How long have you had them for a while?
|
|
Okay.
|
|
So my original Gmail account, I got in on the beta.
|
|
And you know what, you're going to laugh because here, I'm going to pull it up.
|
|
I have 16,053 unopened emails.
|
|
And I'm not joking.
|
|
I just read that off my screen.
|
|
That is crazy.
|
|
That is insane.
|
|
I need them.
|
|
I need them because you never know, you know, representative Blake Moore has a newsletter
|
|
and he's telling me that Better Cybercrime Metrics Act and all about that, but the Better
|
|
Cybercrime Metrics Act.
|
|
And the supporting the American Circuit Boards Act and constituent meetings and stuff like
|
|
that.
|
|
That's important.
|
|
He's telling me all about the cybercrime.
|
|
I haven't opened it and I have no intent to open it.
|
|
But it's in my email box and if I ever need it, I know where I can find it.
|
|
That might be helpful or it might not.
|
|
Have you ever like emailed yourself something from work?
|
|
Yes.
|
|
Yes, I have.
|
|
Now, I know you've had this email and these email accounts for a while.
|
|
Is there anything that you may have emailed yourself in the past, like maybe mortgage
|
|
documents, bank statements, maybe passwords to somebody like your wife because she needed
|
|
a password to something, maybe social security number, anything like that?
|
|
Probably.
|
|
I'm not going to lie to you.
|
|
I have probably done that, especially anytime you go to refinance your house, you know,
|
|
they want, you know, they want your all your stuff and how do they get it?
|
|
Like, you know, you either you can upload it through DocuSign sometimes, sometimes they
|
|
just want you to send it over to the mortgage broker in an email.
|
|
So yeah, now that you mentioned that, I probably have quite a few of those, those emails sitting
|
|
in my set.
|
|
I didn't close.
|
|
And you know, a lot of people have dated that there's a lot of people who have dated and
|
|
you know, when I was single and I was dating, I used to get pictures all the time, all
|
|
the time.
|
|
And I know I'm not the only one and I know people have sent pictures.
|
|
But you know, the thing is those things are still sitting in your mailbox, all of those
|
|
old conversations that you've had with people and it's one of those things that we just
|
|
get email and it sits in our box and we just think, okay, great, it's there.
|
|
I can get it whenever I need it.
|
|
The flip side is, if he able Steve gets access to your account, there is a treasure trove
|
|
of data sitting there at his disposal and he can do anything that he wants with it.
|
|
And just the mortgage papers for refinancing your house gives them absolutely everything
|
|
he needs to become our Brady Frost.
|
|
That's true.
|
|
And you know, I have emailed myself, drafts of chapters as an author, you know, I've
|
|
got two published books out there and I'm constantly working and I'm constantly on
|
|
the go.
|
|
So someone out there, you know, might want that and then they go looking for that and they
|
|
find all this other stuff out, you know, you make a really good point here.
|
|
My entire life is sitting in these accounts.
|
|
Yeah, it's all there and that's the problem.
|
|
See this is the biggest problem with the society that we have in InfoSec is the business
|
|
community and people in general.
|
|
We are all about data.
|
|
We want to have massive amounts of data on hand at all times.
|
|
The problem is whenever Steve gets access to your organization, he has access to massive
|
|
amounts of data because it's there and available at all times because you might need that thing
|
|
from 10 years ago.
|
|
I am constantly using that search feature and I know that there are folks out there
|
|
they've got the Google Foo.
|
|
You know, we constantly have to keep so much in our brains because I'm not just an author,
|
|
I also work full time.
|
|
You know, I've got two graduate degrees, I've gone the school route, I've worked full
|
|
time the entire time.
|
|
So my brain is just full of data and the way I survive is I search my inbox.
|
|
So what I need to know from you, Rob, I guess is what can I do about this because like
|
|
you said, I am addicted to this information, I need it.
|
|
So how do I go forward still holding onto this information but getting it in a more
|
|
safe environment?
|
|
Okay.
|
|
So there's some information that you need.
|
|
There's important stuff that you look for all the time and you can just pull up your
|
|
history of your searches and that will really quickly tell you what kind of information
|
|
is important.
|
|
So what I would recommend doing is setting up folders for those emails and then set up
|
|
rules to automatically move important emails to those specific folders.
|
|
Okay.
|
|
All right.
|
|
So everything else is sitting in your mailbox.
|
|
The next thing I would do is I would download literally all of my emails.
|
|
Did you know you could even do that?
|
|
You know, when I saw it was a feature because I have, let's see, I have a total of 25,000
|
|
plus emails, I guess.
|
|
So I have opened 9,000 of them and I'm running out of storage space and I don't want to
|
|
pay Google extra money, you know, just to store my emails.
|
|
And so yeah, like every now and then I go and delete some and I did see that there is
|
|
a feature to download that stuff, but yeah, I guess without knowing how to manage that
|
|
information once I download it, I didn't really take it any further.
|
|
Well, when you download it, it comes down as a zip file.
|
|
Okay.
|
|
Everything is there.
|
|
All of your emails are there.
|
|
All of the attachments that are in those emails are there.
|
|
So you download it to a zip file.
|
|
Now you have all of your emails in a zip file.
|
|
We put that on a disk that's not connected to the internet, like on a hard drive or a
|
|
thumb drive, even better would be to encrypt it using a GPG key or something else.
|
|
And then you could just put that encrypted file on your Google drive.
|
|
That way you've got access to it no matter where you're at.
|
|
And then what I would do is I would delete out all of the emails from my inbox.
|
|
You've already moved the ones that are important to those folders.
|
|
You set up a search rule.
|
|
You move all those to those folders.
|
|
So all of those emails are sitting there.
|
|
They're still ready for you.
|
|
The other 15,000, delete them.
|
|
They're not gone.
|
|
They're sitting in that zip file.
|
|
So if you find out, oh my gosh, I need that.
|
|
Well, that's no problem.
|
|
You can go open the zip file search for it and there you go.
|
|
Is it a little more of a hassle?
|
|
Sure.
|
|
Now what you've done is you have shrunk the amount of data that you're sending or leaving
|
|
in your inbox.
|
|
And then what I would do is I would set up a rule to delete all emails when they reach
|
|
four weeks of age.
|
|
Because if you think about it in the world today, if you have an email that's four weeks
|
|
old, is it really even relevant anymore?
|
|
You know, every now and then I'll find one.
|
|
But if I'm archiving them, then I guess it's not really that much much different, is
|
|
it?
|
|
No, well, I mean, the ones that are going to be important, you're going to move to your
|
|
important folders.
|
|
And if you don't want to delete the emails, you could again just download them and keep
|
|
them in a zip file.
|
|
I know a lot of people don't want to delete.
|
|
That's fine.
|
|
You don't have to.
|
|
I personally believe in deleting.
|
|
If I don't need it, delete it.
|
|
But if you want to save it, you could just keep downloading zip files.
|
|
And that way, your inbox is very minimal and you've only got the emails in there that
|
|
you actually need.
|
|
That way, if your account does get compromised, because, I mean, Steve's pretty creative.
|
|
And eventually, we're going to fall for it.
|
|
He's going to come up with a good enough scenario, a good enough ploy, or we're just going
|
|
to have a bad day where we didn't have enough coffee.
|
|
And boom, let's minimize the amount of damage that Steve can do when he does get access
|
|
to our accounts.
|
|
That's a very good point.
|
|
Now, is it just email?
|
|
I mean, should I be looking to do this sort of a thing on any other types of media or
|
|
communications?
|
|
Yeah.
|
|
The other thing I've got to keep in mind is with all of your email accounts, there's also
|
|
an associated drive, like Google Drive, Microsoft One Drive.
|
|
You've got Dropbox.
|
|
If you have any Dropbox accounts or Box accounts, you've got all of these clouds.
|
|
Storage accounts that have information in it that's just sitting there.
|
|
Again, is this information being protected?
|
|
Because if somebody gets access to your Gmail account, they also have access to your
|
|
Google Drive.
|
|
So you might want to go through the information that's on all of those.
|
|
And again, if you need it, put it into a zip folder and encrypt it.
|
|
It's there if you need it, but it's not sitting there in plain text.
|
|
Now, can Steve break the encryption and get in?
|
|
Sure.
|
|
Sure.
|
|
Is he going to have to work harder for it?
|
|
Yes.
|
|
Is there probably an easier target to mess with?
|
|
Yes.
|
|
Yeah.
|
|
And I remember that from your first episode on passwords and the length of passwords and
|
|
how that can drastically increase the amount of time that it would take even with a brute
|
|
force or rainbow tables to go through and try to crack your password.
|
|
So if I incorporate that when I'm encrypting these files, if I'm incorporating that kind
|
|
of a mindset, then I can make this a lot easier on myself.
|
|
Absolutely.
|
|
The next thing I would do is I would also look at the information that you have on your
|
|
computers and your phones.
|
|
And again, how much of that information do you actually need readily at hand?
|
|
So like maybe old text messages or just what you're saving in your old text messages
|
|
are a treasure trove.
|
|
Oh, my gosh.
|
|
If you were to scroll through all of your texts, you might be surprised at the amount of
|
|
information that's sitting in there.
|
|
Do you really need them?
|
|
I would argue that you don't.
|
|
A lot of apps allow you to download those texts.
|
|
So you could download the text and save them in a zip file and then delete the ones that
|
|
are on there.
|
|
That is, you know, I'm finding that it's a relative, what you're telling me right here,
|
|
it's a relatively straightforward concept.
|
|
But in a way, it's so revolutionary because like you said, we're addicted to data.
|
|
I mean, I'm sure everything in our society these days is addicted to data.
|
|
The companies want our data.
|
|
They, you know, all the data that we, I'm constantly getting offered, hey, you know,
|
|
come, come back and try our cloud service.
|
|
We want to, we want to house your data.
|
|
Of course you do.
|
|
And I love having cloud storage.
|
|
So, you know, that, that's an idea that it appeals to me.
|
|
And I'm sure I'm not alone.
|
|
But what you're saying is is that we have to be a little bit more conscious about the
|
|
way that we're storing our data and how we're just leaving it there.
|
|
Yes.
|
|
Absolutely.
|
|
You've got to think of, you've got to think of your digital storage as your desk.
|
|
All right.
|
|
So you have important files in your house.
|
|
And right now they're all just sitting on top of your desk out there in the open.
|
|
So somebody's no web.
|
|
Hold on.
|
|
Is my web cam on?
|
|
Where, where are you in my office?
|
|
Because my desk is cluttered with important documents.
|
|
We don't talk about that.
|
|
Yes.
|
|
That's another subject we can talk about later.
|
|
But no, your desk, it's just piled with all these papers, including mortgage documents
|
|
and things like that.
|
|
And we're smart enough to realize, hey, some of these documents are really important.
|
|
And we don't want anything to happen to them like if we had a fire or a flood or if
|
|
somebody broke in and burgled our house.
|
|
So we set up a, maybe a safety or a safety deposit box at a bank if we're really paranoid.
|
|
Most of us have some kind of a little home safe or something like that that we can put
|
|
the important papers in.
|
|
Well, should you have a safe for your important information that's online?
|
|
Well, when you put it that way, it makes sense.
|
|
Yeah.
|
|
I mean, at home, we're taking those physical paper documents that are really important,
|
|
like our birth certificates and our marriage licenses and our mortgage deeds and we're
|
|
putting them into a safe.
|
|
Yet online, all those copies are sitting there and playing text for anyone who has access
|
|
to your account.
|
|
This is the sound of my mind being blown.
|
|
So it really is just that easy, right?
|
|
You're telling me all I have to do is just download these archive files that I have just
|
|
sitting here and then just zip them up and encrypt them and put them on the cloud storage
|
|
or better yet, even keep a copy off of the cloud storage in a secure location.
|
|
Maybe in that safe that you've got in your house.
|
|
Huh.
|
|
It's good, really hard for a hacker to get information that isn't even on the internet.
|
|
I'm just going to throw it out there.
|
|
I have to say, I think I'm sold.
|
|
This is something I mean, it doesn't sound that hard to do.
|
|
I mean, it's going to be a process deleting these emails after I put them in a secure archive.
|
|
But you know, even my 14 year old daughter is constantly telling me that it's disgusting.
|
|
I've got all these emails in my inbox and I would swear she must have listened to this
|
|
in the past.
|
|
It's like, went in the future and listened to this episode because she keeps a bare minimum
|
|
inbox.
|
|
So she's on top of things, I guess.
|
|
Maybe that's a, you know, we give the younger generation so much grief, but seems like
|
|
she's like ears ahead of me on this one.
|
|
Absolutely.
|
|
But they're very good at reading stuff and they don't want the clutter sitting there because
|
|
they're bombarded with data.
|
|
It's everywhere.
|
|
They get it at school.
|
|
They get it from their friends.
|
|
They get it from their social media.
|
|
Everything they do is on their phone or on their tablet.
|
|
So I mean, there's just data everywhere.
|
|
So it's a matter of practicality for them.
|
|
Let's keep what we've got to a bare minimum so we can focus on what's actually worthy of
|
|
our time.
|
|
So in a way, they're practicing good security concepts without even realizing that it's
|
|
good security.
|
|
Hmm.
|
|
That makes a lot of sense.
|
|
I'm going to have, after we get done recording this episode, I'm going to have to go tell
|
|
her what a good job she's doing.
|
|
And maybe admit defeat and then I'm going to come around and see things her way.
|
|
Oh, a slice of humble pie.
|
|
Yeah.
|
|
It's good to eat one every now and then.
|
|
It is.
|
|
It is.
|
|
It keeps us from getting our head too big.
|
|
But yeah.
|
|
The other thing that you might want to think about, I know that you travel and I know
|
|
that you have to check your email from different places and stuff like that.
|
|
I would recommend going into all of your accounts and setting up one time passwords.
|
|
You can do it real easy in Google.
|
|
You can do it in LinkedIn.
|
|
You can do it in Microsoft, go to the security section and you can generate like a list
|
|
of 10 one time codes that you can use instead of your password.
|
|
Hmm.
|
|
Now, let's think about this at work.
|
|
You go to work, you log into Facebook, you log into Gmail, you log into.
|
|
So if your work is inspecting your data, all of that information is in plain text.
|
|
You just gave your employer your login credentials.
|
|
Now, we trust that they're going to do the right thing and not keep it, right?
|
|
Well, you would hope so.
|
|
You would hope so.
|
|
And I know that we're all working for ethical companies, right?
|
|
We would hope so.
|
|
I mean, even still from public Wi-Fi, an airport, a hotel, here's the thing.
|
|
Somebody at some point in time is going to be able to see that information as it's being
|
|
transmitted from you to whatever server it's going to use the one time password so that
|
|
all they get is a password that cannot be reused.
|
|
You just brought up a really good point because I was traveling with the family last year.
|
|
And it's something that I have a bit of a security background.
|
|
I'm not a complete neo-fi.
|
|
But my wife has this uncanny ability to get herself into tricky situations with computers.
|
|
We were sitting in the hotel and it's something for me that I am aware of, but she wasn't
|
|
being attentive and she had connected her phone to the Wi-Fi and it was close enough
|
|
to look like the hotel's Wi-Fi.
|
|
But it actually was not the hotel's Wi-Fi.
|
|
So in that case, you're totally on the nose with that one.
|
|
She logged into Facebook.
|
|
She logged into her email to make sure that the kids were doing all right, which Wi-Fi
|
|
are you connected to?
|
|
And as soon as I saw that, I had to tell her that she had to change all of her passwords
|
|
that she had logged into all those accounts.
|
|
Absolutely.
|
|
But yeah, using those one time passwords, any time that you're not connected to a network
|
|
you're trust, and I generally say if you're not at home on your own network, use a one-time
|
|
password.
|
|
Don't even take the chance.
|
|
And you can generate those new codes all the time and use that in addition to your two-factor
|
|
authentication.
|
|
So just something to be a little bit more secure and not giving away a password should you
|
|
happen to connect to the wrong Wi-Fi.
|
|
That makes a lot of sense.
|
|
It's just simple stuff.
|
|
And like I said, when we do make that mistake, let's just try to make sure there's not a
|
|
treasure trove of data for them to steal.
|
|
Let's go.
|
|
We're over 25,000 emails that they can sit through, and that's only on the receiving end.
|
|
Yeah.
|
|
About the mention was in your sent box.
|
|
Right.
|
|
That might cause panic alone.
|
|
Well, I think I'm generally safe.
|
|
But like you said, it's when you have to send those important documents.
|
|
You know, those are the ones that I've been sending out.
|
|
So like that's a lot of financial documents.
|
|
That's a lot of drafts that I'm not ready to get out there.
|
|
That's a lot of, you know, home details, stuff that my kids are involved in, you know,
|
|
like sports and other interests.
|
|
There's a lot of information just on my side that's gone out to trusted parties.
|
|
Yes.
|
|
Now, keep mine.
|
|
Once you've sent something out to the ether, it's out of your hands.
|
|
Right.
|
|
What you hand control is what is in your box and if they get in and I've got it sitting
|
|
there, they don't need to go hack anybody else, right?
|
|
Nope.
|
|
Nope.
|
|
Not at all.
|
|
Everything they need to make your life miserable for the rest of your life.
|
|
No.
|
|
Fun.
|
|
Uh-huh.
|
|
Is it a joyful?
|
|
Well, you know, I'll be honest with you Rob.
|
|
It kind of sucks because like I just said, I'm not, I don't consider myself a complete
|
|
security neophyte.
|
|
But you've pointed out something that I really hadn't put much thought into, you know.
|
|
I don't write my passwords down.
|
|
I don't leave them under my keyboard.
|
|
But here I am collecting this treasure trove of data on myself and I never really even thought
|
|
about it.
|
|
And that's like, we can even go into the ethics of, look, Google also has access to all of
|
|
those emails that are just sitting in your inbox.
|
|
That's true.
|
|
Yep.
|
|
Do they look at them?
|
|
Well, so from what I've read is a person might not, but the algorithm does.
|
|
And I get ads based on emails I've sent.
|
|
And that's not even me saying stuff in front of my phone.
|
|
So unfortunately, yes, I think in one form or another, whether it's a robot, a piece
|
|
of code or human eyes, Google is definitely looking at my emails and they're probably looking
|
|
at the ones that I decide to keep versus the ones that I delete.
|
|
They probably have an entire profile just based on my interactions with my inbox.
|
|
Absolutely.
|
|
And they're not the only ones.
|
|
Here's the thing.
|
|
If you're going to run a free service like Google, you've got to make money somewhere,
|
|
right?
|
|
That means I'm the product.
|
|
You are the product.
|
|
Anything that you use for free, your data is the product.
|
|
They are monetizing you.
|
|
And the question is, is how much do you really want to make for them?
|
|
I'm a generous guy, but I don't think I'm that generous.
|
|
Well, because I mean, Google, they're kind of a big company, right?
|
|
Yeah.
|
|
One of the biggest, yeah.
|
|
They generally have a lot of profits, right?
|
|
Yeah, lots of profits.
|
|
And it's not from you paying them for services?
|
|
No.
|
|
Well, I do have my domains through Google domain services, but you are correct.
|
|
I don't think there are enough domain sales every year to add up to their level of corporate
|
|
compensation.
|
|
Nope.
|
|
But the data that they have on you and the ability to market you to advertisers, that's where
|
|
the money comes from.
|
|
I guess that that leaves us all with a question.
|
|
Does using our data equate to being evil?
|
|
And if that's OK, if that's the case, then is Google breaking one of their original
|
|
tenements of don't be evil?
|
|
I think that's, it's probably, you know, once a company gets so big, it's kind of hard.
|
|
Well, they did change that evil to someone.
|
|
They did change that tenant.
|
|
What?
|
|
Are you saying that they're no longer not going to be evil?
|
|
What I'm saying is that's no longer the tenant that they put out.
|
|
Yeah, oh boy.
|
|
So I guess we all should have seen that coming.
|
|
Of course, of course we should have.
|
|
I mean, I see what you're saying.
|
|
I did just hear about a new email service out there.
|
|
I'm very excited about it.
|
|
It's called SkyNet.
|
|
And I think I might be moving my emails over to those servers instead.
|
|
You know, companies are starting to realize that people do like their privacy.
|
|
Hopefully, we'll see some things.
|
|
But in the meantime, I mean, I'm not going to say bad things about Google or Microsoft
|
|
or anything like that.
|
|
But let's minimize the amount of data that we have sitting out there.
|
|
We're all focused on availability.
|
|
Yes.
|
|
It's not everything needs to be that available.
|
|
I mean, just like you're willing to take some time to open up a safe to get out your
|
|
burst certificate, you probably should take a little bit of time to get out the important
|
|
information that would really hurt you if someone got access to your account.
|
|
I see your point.
|
|
And I'm not actually taking my emails over to SkyNet because we all know how that
|
|
turns out and we get the terminators and all that stuff.
|
|
I'll just try, I'll try to protect my data a little bit better.
|
|
That's all we can do.
|
|
That's all we can do.
|
|
Like I say, it's it's not about being secure.
|
|
It's just about being more secure than the next potential victim, whoever else is on
|
|
Steve's plate.
|
|
It's like running from the bear.
|
|
You don't have to be fast.
|
|
You just have to be faster than the other guy, right?
|
|
Absolutely.
|
|
Oh, I ran the other person.
|
|
I'm seeing the light.
|
|
I'm seeing the light.
|
|
I guess I'll spend this week cleaning up my inbox.
|
|
It's fun times, man.
|
|
Clear up the inbox and while you're in there, go ahead and generate some one-time passwords
|
|
and start using those.
|
|
Uh, it's a good point.
|
|
It's a good point.
|
|
It's a good point.
|
|
Let's start using them.
|
|
And, uh, you know, make sure your daughter's actually deleting those emails.
|
|
She may just be keeping them in other folders.
|
|
I want to check on them.
|
|
Oh, she, she's a deleter.
|
|
She's definitely a deleter, yep.
|
|
Oh, but that is a good point because there is an archive.
|
|
function and I'm not sure exactly how that works because you still have in Gmail
|
|
so you can archive an email. You can. Absolutely. Yeah, but it's just another
|
|
fuller. Yep. But it makes you feel better, doesn't it? Well, not anymore. Exactly.
|
|
Yeah, man. So yeah, there you go. Some good stuff for you. It's been a good
|
|
talk to you. Do you have like any pick of the week? A pick of the week. You know
|
|
something interesting that you would like to share maybe a movie, a book, a podcast,
|
|
a news article, anything cool. Well, actually, you know, I was thinking about
|
|
this recently and this is a security information security related podcast. Okay. And so one
|
|
thing that I would like to share when I was a kid, one of the things that got me interested
|
|
in the idea of securing data and exploiting data was a movie called Hackers. Love that
|
|
movie. Yeah, Angelina Jolie, a bunch of other folks that were really popular in the day.
|
|
But a really great movie. And then in that for people who have been around a little while,
|
|
I didn't realize this until later, one of the major systems to hack was called a Gibson.
|
|
And hacking a Gibson was your credentials as a elite hacker, right? Those days are so
|
|
long gone. Yes, but there was no such thing as a Gibson. What I found out is that the term
|
|
cyberspace actually originated in a book called Neuromancer written by William Gibson. So
|
|
if you would ever like to do a little reading, it's a very cyberpunk, but it was written
|
|
in the 80s. So it's a little dated in the way that they view what cyberspace would be
|
|
like, but a very enjoyable book. Check out Neuromancer by William Gibson. Well, that's very
|
|
cool. I'm going to check that out. That sounds really cool. Right. I will check that out.
|
|
Now for me, with my limited time, I like to just veg out and have a good laugh. So I've
|
|
been watching a show called our flag means death. It's a not that one of that. What was
|
|
that about? Pirates. But well, are we talking about pirates on the ocean or pirates of Silicon
|
|
Valley? What kind of pirates are we talking about? We're talking pirates on the ocean. The
|
|
premise is there's this rich guy who decides that he's tired of doing the lay in life
|
|
and being with his wife that he was forced to marry and these kids that he has. So he just
|
|
leaves and goes and buys a ship and recruits a crew and decides he's going to become a pirate.
|
|
And he's going to be a gentleman pirate. And yeah, imagine the fun things that can happen to a
|
|
person who's trying to be a pirate that doesn't know how to be a pirate. So yeah, it's a very humorous
|
|
show. Definitely enjoy it. It makes me laugh and takes my brain off the craziness happening in the
|
|
world. So yeah, our flag means death. Check it out. Good stuff. Well, hey, since you're here,
|
|
I'm going to go ahead and let you plug yourself, man. Go ahead. Throw it out there.
|
|
Oh, thank you, Rob. So yes, my name is Arbredy Frost. And I am the author of a Battle Mage Reborn.
|
|
It's a series in the lit RPG space, which is basically taking a world that has game mechanics,
|
|
very much like a role-playing game, and then creating a story around it. So the first book is
|
|
called Second Chance. And just this past fall, the second book, The Broken Blade was released.
|
|
I am currently working on book three. But those are available on Amazon as an ebook. It's
|
|
in Kindle Unlimited. You can also go on Audible. I've got audiobooks for both books out there.
|
|
So yeah, if you're looking for some fantasy based role-playing game mechanics with a enjoyable,
|
|
slightly dark story, go ahead and check it out. I've read them both. I enjoy them. They're
|
|
really good. Can I give a little bit of spoiler here for other people that are listening?
|
|
A little spoiler, maybe. Well, I mean, it's not going to be a big spoiler. The idea is this guy
|
|
has died and they are offering the service where they basically take brain scans and grab your
|
|
personality. And then what they do is they upload you into this game when you die. So the main
|
|
people in the game have all passed from Earth and are living on in this game as characters.
|
|
That is correct. Yes. Talk about having all of your data in one place. Yes.
|
|
Oh, be careful what you delete there.
|
|
Yeah, good books. I definitely enjoy them. Highly recommend them if you're interested in
|
|
those kinds of things. And even if you're not, maybe check it out. You might like it.
|
|
Thanks for the recommendation. Thank you for enjoying my books. I've always encouraged folks to
|
|
read my books and email addresses in there. I will archive your email, I guess. If you reach out
|
|
to me, please drop me a line and let me know how you like the books. We'll do. Hey,
|
|
man, it's been great having you on the show and hopefully we can do this again. Yeah, absolutely.
|
|
All right. Well, thank you very much and thank you all for listening and we will talk to you
|
|
in about two more weeks. You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does
|
|
work. Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself. If you ever thought of recording
|
|
broadcast, click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is. Posting for HBR has been
|
|
kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the internet archive, and our syncs.net. On this
|
|
otherwise status, today's show is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
|