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From Wired The revolt that started a year ago today in Egypt was spread by Twitter and YouTube, or so the popular conception goes. But a group of Navy-backed researchers has a more controversial thesis:Egyptians were infected by the idea of overthrowing their dictator. Using epidemiological modeling to chart the discussions and their trajectory online is an interesting idea, I don’t …

What do Anat Kamm, Ehud Barak and Meir Dagan have in common? Ehud Barak is current Israeli Minister of Defense, former IDF Chief of Staff and former Prime Minister  that led the disastrous withdrawal from Lebanon that fomented Intifada II and then Lebanese War II.  Barak is famous for quotes like “If I was a Palestinian, I …

I first heard the idea about hedging risk against actual future disasters (man-made or natural) around the time of Hurricane Katrina. The essay below by professor Avinash Persaud considers the creation of a terrorism futures market. The ideas are particularly timely in the context of the unrest in Libya and the uptick in oil prices. Right …

An exceptional post by Lilac Sigan “To bad it doesn’t pay to be a nice guy” suggests that Israel may be better off in the long term with its relations with Turkey by demanding a quid-pro-quo (The Turks are demanding reparations and an official apology from Israel for boarding the now infamous Gaza flotilla boat …

Bruce Schneier writes that The Threat of Cyberwar Has Been Grossly Exaggerated Not unpredictably – the essay yielded a lively discussion,  I agree with Bruce – especially because of all the hype around Stuxnet. On one hand – the locals in Israel more or less know, or guess who worked on the project and on the …

From the recent September/October 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs – William Lyn U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense writes about defending a new domain. The  long, eloquently phrased article, demonstrates that the US has fundamental flaws in it’s strategic thinking about fighting terror: Predicting cyberattacks is also proving difficult, especially since both state and nonstate actors …

I want to challenge the effectiveness of top-down, monolithic security frameworks (ISO 27001/PCI DSS) – I submit that rapidly changing threats – social networking, cyberstalking, social engineering, cyber-stalking and custom spyware are threats that exploit people and system vulnerabilities but are not readily mitigated by a top down set of security countermeasures. The recent case …

In music, dissonance is  sound quality which seems “unstable”, and has an aural “need” to “resolve” to a “stable” consonance. Leading up to the Al Quaeda attack on the US in 9/11, the FBI investigated, the CIA analyzed but no one bothered to discuss the impact of Saudis learning to fly but not land airplanes. …

Martin Hellman (of Diffie Hellman) fame maintains the Nuclear Risk web site and has written a very insightful piece on risk analysis of nuclear war entitled Soaring, cryptography and nuclear weapons Hellman proposes that we need a  third state scenario (instead current state – > nuclear war) where the risk of nuclear holocaust has been …

If you thought that working in high-tech  is  rough – just consider how tough it is to be a musician in Afghanistan. JALALABAD, Afghanistan (Reuters) – Taliban fighters beat musicians, shaved their heads and left them tied to trees overnight because they performed at an Afghan wedding, a village tribal chief said Monday, a sign …