Slashdot Mirror
Hacker Jeff Moss Sworn Into Homeland Security Advisory Council
Wolfgang Kandek writes "Hacker Jeff Moss, founder of computer security conferences DEFCON and Black Hat, has been sworn in as one of the new members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) of the DHS. Moss, who goes by the handle 'the Dark Tangent' says he was surprised to be asked to join the council and that he was nominated to bring an 'outside perspective' to its meetings. He said, 'I know there is a new-found emphasis on cybersecurity, and they're looking to diversify the members and to have alternative viewpoints. I think they needed a skeptical outsider's view because that has been missing.'"
Either he resigns in disgust or becomes assimilated.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
This is actually a great step forward. Why not have some of the best hackers review our current practices?
Seriously. I have no doubt that Jeff has the chops and the "perspective" that has definitely been "missing". I watched the eyes of Richard Clarke and his entourage glaze over at a "town hall" meeting with the "President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board" (or whatever they called it then) in Portland about 8 or 9 years ago, as some very smart security folks told them what was coming and what needed to be done. Honestly, I don't know if they just couldn't grasp the issues or if they were more interested in political play, but the message was quite plain; "the government" was going to be no help in securing things. Political inertia being what it is, I doubt that much as changed, the current administration's well-meaning efforts notwithstanding. Jeff is in for a frustrating ride, I fear.
Well, if you stop looking at it as a insult to your team, and more as nothing more than a joke, it was pretty funny. I voted for Obama, and I still thought it was funny as shit.
But ... lets be realistic here, the jury is still out on intelligent and competent, I've seen nothing in particular so far to make me believe he is truly any different. Its practically impossible to tell this early on how its going to play out, you really don't know his agenda yet, just what you're supposed to think it is.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The password is not encrypted, it is cryptographically hashed (encrpytion is two-way, hashing is one-way). A hash function transforms an arbitrary length input into a fixed length output, so there is no inverse function in the mathematical sense: a single hash value has an infinite number of inputs corresponding to it. Finding a value that produces a given hash is extremely hard: a good hash function will not have any way of computing such a value more effective than brute force (e.g. you try all possible inputs until one of them given you the hash you're looking for).
As for reversing the algorithm: in essence, the generation of the password hash always uses a stateful generator, and this state is not preserved in the hash. When trying to reverse the hash, you must know not only the hash but also the state of the generator at the end of the algorithm, otherwise backtracking to the initial state of the generator defined in the hash function definition can take more than the age of the universe, even if you used all the computing power on earth to break this single password. Another mathematical idea that is frequently used is that if you have two very large prime numbers x and y, you can quickly compute their product z, but you can't easily find x and y if you only have z. Unless you have a quantum computer, which doesn't exist yet.
Real world analogy: it's nearly impossible to find two persons with the same fingerprints, but the fingerprints themselves don't contain any infromation about the name of the person. If you have a fingerprint and a person, you can easily identify if it the fingerprint belongs to the person, but if you only have the fingerprint, you need to check the fingerprints of all people to find a person that has the same fingerprint.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
I don't think the jury is still out on intelligent, at least. He did go to an ivy league school, and his daddy wasn't in politics, or rich. He also didn't just barely scrape by with C's, he graduated with honors. Oh, and then he's written his own books (as opposed to authorizing other people to write them, like most politicians). You could argue that the jury is still out on "different" and even "competent" but I don't think you could seriously make an argument that he isn't intelligent.
I'll take the bait. The phrase "poacher turned gamekeeper" refers to someone who now protects the interests they previously attacked. Jeff Moss never (in public knowledge) attacked the security of the United States. He has exposed weaknesses in various security systems, but that's often considered helpful. It would be more like a naturalist with a BA in Criminal Justice turned gamekeeper.