Thinkst Blog

Today i did a brief interview with E-TV news on "Anonymity Systems". Interestingly enough, the journalist started the interview determined to go down the " Anonymity is Evil! " route. I must confess to being slightly surprised by the thought. I didn't expect such strong support for the "Anonymity allows Child Pornography" point of view. The snippet of the interview that was aired was probably only a few minutes long (I have not seen it yet), but i thought it was probably worth it to note a few simple thoughts on Anonymity systems. Very few people, (if any), would question the necessity of allowing anonymity for people who suffer from victimization. Dissidents of a tyrannical regime, or victims of crime need a platform that will permit them to speak out without fear of further victimization. The problem is that "anonymity needs company". This simply implies that it's really difficult to be anonymous alone. Signals Intelligence operators ha...

This weekend we held our 2nd ever ZaCon , The Conference in need of a tagline! ZaCon aims specifically at growing the South African InfoSec Research scene by giving locals a place to teach, learn and grow. The talk had people flying in from Durban, CapeTown and even Grahamstown, and almost doubled last year's attendance. If nothing else, The coffee service was an unmistakable win! My talk this year was called "Fig Leaf Security", and was aimed at saying some of the things that we generally dont like saying (about the industry in general, and about ourselves in particular). You can catch the talk [ here ] and can watch the rest of the ZaCon Album [ here ] I went into the talk expecting it to generate some hate, but most of the feedback so far has been really positive [1|2|3]. Feel free to drop me an email or msg @haroonmeer on twitter to let me know why im wrong.. /mh [1] @nitesh_dhanjani : Watch this talk by @haroonmeer if you are in the infosec industry and feel like g...

iTried is a quick little utility I wrote while testing something. It sits on your menubar, and shows you the photograph of the last person who disturbed your screensaver (ie. tried to login). You can read more about it (and download it (free)) [ here ]

It's pretty common for people to hate Apple and to pick on the apple-tax , but then you spot something like this and you just have to smile (that special blend of fanboy smile!). The standard icon for textpad is clearly a text pad with a pen. I was looking into icons, and ended up maximizing the text pad icon. (click for full size) The quote was heavily used during early Apple commercials, but like many things Apple, it's just the attention to detail thats awesome!

Nils Kreimeier wrote an article for Capital Magazine on cyber-war based on interviews he did at the CCDCOE conference earlier this year. The article is in German but does feature exciting Atari style graphics superimposed on scary looking hackers. [ Grab a copy here ]

The Internet lit up last week with news of Intel's purchase of McAfee . Every analyst (and his dog) has chimed in on what it means, from "Anti Virus on a chip", to just " a national security disaster ". I think it has a subtler implication that bodes well for developing nations. - In the ongoing competition between hardware and software, hardware just flinched. Watching Intel spend almost a years worth of profit on McAfee made me think of Professor Clayton Christensen (of " The Innovators Dilemma " fame) and his "Law of Conservation of Modularity / Law of conservation of Attractive Profits"). (If you have not yet read the book, you can catch a good overview of the content from his talk titled " Capturing the Upside ".) Professor Christensen regularly cites his conversations with Intel's Andy Grove, and it is clear that Intel took cues on strategic direction from him in the past. (First, some background) The Law of Conservation ...

Hello. How 'bout that ride in? I guess that's why they call it Sin City . [1] BlackHat this year passed in a blur. In retrospect staying in Vegas for only 3 nights was probably a bad idea. ( This is especially obvious when you consider that the round trip involves about 60 hours of travelling time ) I got in and mostly hid in my room working on the talk. I did the talk, and promptly hid in my room feeling sick till it was time to fly home. (this means that i failed completely to participate in teamZA's magnific ent #hackcup football victory ) In 2009, our " Clobbering the Cloud " talk squeezed in about 138 slides into 70 minutes. This year my talk was 50 minutes long ( i wasn't convinced that the topic could hold interest for longer periods ), and my keynote deck was made up of 38 slides. But, the presentation used both the 38 keynote slides, and a prezi presentation (with about 170 transitions). This means there was never a chance of finishing the presentatio...