Backstory for the recent US-EU "agreement in principle" on a new data protection regime

Take 5 minutes to get caught up on recent events in EU v. US data privacy issues including why the recent "agreement in principle" is both important and a sham with important backstory on surveillance a la Snowden, past frameworks struck down a la Schrems, and why we are maybe watching the same movie again. At the end I have some useful advice about why privacy-enhancing technologies might be more fun to deal with than an intercontinental slow-motion legal soap opera.

Axie Infinity, Ronin, and (de)centralization

You might have read in the newspaper lately that $615 million in cryptocurrency was stolen, and that it was related to the popular mobile game Axie Infinity. Beyond these facts, I think it has been a little murky in the coverage just what happened and how it happened to what players. Broadly, "decentralization" is a hot buzzword and while this heist is in the news it might provide a good idea to examine what sort of decentralization existed around Axie Infinity (or not) and whether it provided any real value (or not).

Axie Infinity is a Pokemon-like game that rewards players with cryptocurrency and then the Pokemon-like creatures themselves are non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It is published by a company called Sky Mavis, and this company in turn created a blockchain network called Ronin to handle the activity generated by the game. Ronin is an example of what is called an L2 network, a blockchain network intended to handle the traffic volume of some particular constituency in some specific way. Usually the goal of these L2 networks is greater efficiency and lower cost - perhaps the end user has heard of the Ethereum blockchain and wants to hold Ether for their efforts, yet it would be prohibitively expensive to send all the transactions generated by the game (which lives in regular old-school centralized web infrastructure) directly to the Ethereum blockchain. The L2 network, in our example the Ronin Network, processes the transactions from the game and then sends the information in a condensed form to the Ethereum blockchain via a smart contract called a bridge.

In the recent heist, the cryptocurrency was actually stolen from the Ronin Network via this bridge. Some of the small failures around why this was possible are notable: while Ethereum has a battle-tested global network with multitudes of nodes, the Ronin Network had only 9 nodes with 4 of the 9 operated by Sky Mavis itself. (There is an interesting digression here about how decentralization is in practice quite easy to fake.) Worse, it appears that corners were cut in developing Ronin, as the exploit involved a "gas-free RPC node" they had been using to work on development issues. I don't have space here to unpack that phrase, but I am guessing that readers who recognize these words don't think they are good cybersecurity practice.

To zoom out and see the big picture, Sky Mavis was in a good position to drape themselves in the decentralized cache of the Ethereum blockchain and they did, but maybe this was a little disingenuous. Much of the real action was on the Ronin Network, which in turn had some of the decentralized smell on it, but then in the end it was maybe a bit too much of a Sky Mavis -first jam to really deserve that word. Sky Mavis being able to make a bad decision behind close doors and lose your money is not what decentralization in crypto is supposed to be about.

So... there was an appealing looking decentralized cargo cult but maybe not meaningful decentralization of the full stack... and it went bad in ways true decentralization is supposed to prevent...

Axie Infinity and the Ronin Network hack

There is much to be learned from the recent hack and theft of cryptocurrency from related to Axie Infinity and the Ronin Network, including some standard cyber security lessons about social engineering, distinctions about (de)centralization and what is a layer 1 v. layer 2 network, as well as an imminent experiment in anti money laundering practices around crypto.

Open banking in your day-to-day and API security trends

Open banking - the API miniseries continues! I resume our conversation on API-centric trends by looking at some familiar fintech innovations for plugging your brokerage into your bank, relate this to my simplified API definition and narrative on why these APIs are empowering to both businesses and consumers, and talk a little bit about how this situation is driving yet another trend in the cybersecurity business around API security.

API -centric trends and the FHIR standard in healthcare

Today I continue our conversation about API -centric trends with some exploration of these ideas in the context of the FHIR interoperability standard in healthcare, elaboration on my simplified 80/20-rule definition of an API with a very familiar example courtesy of Google, and how these trends and patterns are related to common practices in WebDevelopment. In all our trends, getting developers on board is really the business goal underneath.

How the Fed's policy tools work and the danger of the present moment

I've become a grumpy old man complaining about the FederalReserve... Take ~7 minutes for my basic introduction to how the Fed's policy tools really, what memes about Jerome Powell's "money printer" really refer to, the history of quantative easing (QE) and the taper tantrum as opposed the Fed's more well-traveled manipulation of short-term interest rates, and why inflation concerns leave policy makers caught in between these two tools in a way they don't have a lot of clear historical prototypes for handling.

API -centric trends in information technology

ALERT: THURSDAY MINI-SERIES EVENT! On Thursdays for the next 3 weeks I will be posting a series of videos discussing a number of API (application programmer interface) - centric trends, specifically open banking, the FHIR standard in healthcare, and the NEF (network exposure function) idea attached to the move to 5g in telecom. In addition to discussing the details for each I will talk about how the business backdrop is about access to developers and the tension between established companies and younger, app-driven would-be-disruptors in verticals that happen to also share name suffices like fintech and insurtech.

I will also talk about how you can use private computation, like Capnion's Ghost PII API, to provide a much higher level of data privacy in these settings especially in cases where you want to consume data from multiple sources.

Litecoin and privacy as market differentiator

Privacy is emerging as an important product differentiator that can provide you a nice story to tell consumers about why they want to throw in with you and not somebody else. Spend ~5 minutes to learn about how Litecoin is set to adopt the private computation protocol Mimblewimble, how you might say this is a sort of cryptocurrency world version of a legacy product adopting privacy as a means of staying fresh in the marketplace, and finally enjoy my understated sarcastic jokes about the role played by meme images of dogs.

Password managers, two-factor authentication, and credential stuffing

You should definitely take ~5 minutes to learn about personal cybersecurity best-practices involving use of a password manager and two-factor authentication, why the credential stuffing type of cyberattack makes these best-practices such, and learn about some interesting current events involving Lastpass and the New York attorney general that exemplify this how and why.

Legal liability faced by cybersecurity executives and Uber's 2016 data breach

Cybersecurity executives are seeing more and more civil and criminal legal liability from breaches that occur on their watch (if not handled correctly). I discuss this trend in the context of Uber's 2016 breach, the recent accelerating criminal proceedings against Uber's then CSO (often a similar role is styled CISO), talk some very basic best practices around what is supposed to happen, and discuss how this trend has chilled enthusiasm for ransomware payments and bug bounty programs.

The Apache Log4j 2 vulnerability and why such things are important

You should take 6 minutes to learn about the recently announced Apache Log4j 2 vulnerability (especially if these things are unfamiliar to you) including immediate action items like checking in on your public cloud assets, the role of the MITRE corporation in maintaining the official list of CVEs, the very prosaic urgency of patching for announced vulnerabilities, and the 2017 Equifax data breach as an example of why this patching can be imminently important. Correction: I snuck an extra "s" onto the end of Log4j erroneously on a couple occasions in the video.

The (Alleged) Insider Threat at Ubiquiti

I have a great spy v. spy insider threat -type story for you today. Take 7 minutes to learn about the long-unfolding drama at Ubiquiti including their January data breach, demands for a huge ransom of Bitcoin, the now discredited whistleblower revelations in March that fooled cyber security influencer Brian Krebs, and finally the just-unsealed FBI indictment stating the attacker and whistleblower are one and the same. The data privacy conscious will be interested to learn the tiny flaw in this alleged criminal's use of a VPN that led to the unraveling of their plot.

The Intersections of Market Power in Social Media

Let me convince you that market power (or not) in the social media world is one of the most interesting and intersectional topics out there. I discuss SingYourDialect as harbinger of Twitter crushing Clubhouse, Facebook under siege for its young and old users by Snapchat and Nextdoor respectively, Trump's struggles to get his megaphone back embodied in conservative networks like Parler, GETTR, and TruthSocial, and while the quiet tidal wave of Pikachu pornography makes this business harder to enter than you might think.

Crypto prices and the journey into the mainstream...

In this ~7 minute video, I take last nights steep drop in the price of cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, as a view to arguing that the journey to mainstream acceptance plays a key role in price movements both up and down. I specifically discuss the role of the new tax laws in the infrastructure bill, what the new provisions are, and why people are a little irked by them.

Robinhood's Data Breach

You should find ~4 minutes to learn about the notable data breach at Robinhood, the company previously famous for its role in the retail trader meme stock dynamics around companies like AMC and GameStop. I cover the role of social engineering, why this breach signals imminent further danger for similar companies and Robinhood users, and highlight a few odd pieces of incomplete information in Robinhood's disclosures.

Issues with facial recognition and Clearview AI

Check out this brief primer on some social and ethical challenges around facial recognition technology including the problematic frequency of web scraping as a source training data, the role of law enforcement as a major customer, and particular vivid concerns about algorithmic bias in this area of artificial intelligence. I discuss these threads and more in the context of Clearview AI and the recent decision in Australia to demand that company delete the data of Australian citizens it might hold... if they labeled it well and can find it now...