Saturday, 26 December 2015

Kinkkumyrkytys

At this time of year I'd like to make a serious public health announcement and make people aware of a strange, incurable, debilitating disease affecting the majority of people here in Finland at this time.


* * *

Kinkkumyrkytys (eng: hampoisoning)

A debilitating disease suffered around late December and sometimes early January by persons residing in Finland. Thought initially to be a genetic disease of the native Finnish population, it now appears to be some kind of virus that is transmitted to non-natives in that region.

The sufferer experiences symptoms of feeling too full, bloated and some nausea. It also causes the sufferer to lie or sit for extended periods of time; attempts to move or walk cause the above symptoms to become worse.

In a mechanism that is still unexplained the disease affects the vocal centres of the brain rendering the sufferer to emit grunts and be incapable of saying much more than simple sentences. Sufferers have been known to complain bitterly and say phrases such as "Ei ruokaa...", "Ei enää kinkkua taas...".

Curiously regardless of the nationality and language of the sufferer, these phrases are always in Finnish leading to speculation that this is some new class of neurological disorder. Because of the above utterances, it is believed that this is how the disease obtained its name.

In extreme cases the sufferer becomes a vegetable and can only blankly stare at contentless, bright, flashing pictures known as Finnish Christmas TV without comprehension for hours on end. In some serious cases people have been known to binge watch "Vain Elämä" - the prognosis in these cases is however extremely grave bordering on absolutely no hope at all.

Interestingly while sufferers have a complete aversion to roast ham at this time, other foods also cause the sufferers additional agony. These include: mätti (fish eggs), lipeäkala, joululimppu (Christmas bread), various kinds of "laatikko-" food including lanttu (swede), porkkana (carrot) and peruna (potato).

It has been suggested by some researchers that there may be a connection with excessive amounts of Christmas good consumed in Finland. However this research has been extensively denounced as being "pasta" - a Finnish term meaning "obviously not true you ignorant fool...pass me more ham and an extra helping of that lovely lanttulaatikko too!"

A secondary debate on whether lipeäkala is food or a chemical/biological weapon is tending towards the latter.

The symptoms of this disease continue for a number of days and the sufferer returns to full health quickly afterwards. However no immunity is gained and it is likely that the symptoms will reappear at the same time next year,

Some alternative therapists have suggested a treatment called "Tipaton tammikuu" involving consuming homoeopathic amounts of alcohol for a month. This rather dangerous and unethical therapy has been denounced as being "pasta".

Tuesday, 22 December 2015

100,000 page views

100,000 page views isn't huge...but for a blog that was meant to be a way of collecting links and thoughts and not really aimed at anyone in particular - though you might see a strong leaning to things such a privacy, astronomy, mathematics, computer science - I consider this to be quite a milestone.

And here it is, reached at 22:27 on 22 December 2015:


Nadolig Llawen
Hyvää Joulua
God Jul
Merry Christmas

Engineers for Privacy Professionals

As many discussions on this blog have pointed out, there is a mismatch between engineering and legal when it comes to privacy; one can even argue there's a mismatch between these two groups and privacy advocates too, but that's another story...

It is critical for anyone involved in privacy to understand that without the complete trust and involvement of the engineers who build the systems that are supposed to be compliant with whatever privacy policy exists, that compliance will be at best, fragile.

At the IAPP's DPIntensive meeting earlier this year I gave a presentation on the subject, here's the link to the slides.


The main learning is that unless engineering is an equal part in your privacy discussions then you're really just playing at compliance.

Privacy isn't just about privacy policies or long winded legal documents but about education, learning and understanding that everyone depends upon everyone else in order for your business to successfully (and legally!) function.

I wrote about how privacy should be taught earlier with the quote:

It often surprises me that many of the people advocating privacy don't actually understand the things that they're trying to keep private, specifically information. Indeed the terms data and information are used interchangeably and there is often little understanding of the actual nature and semantics of said, data and information.

This is also seen in how we train our staff in privacy aspects - with the dreaded "privacy awareness training":

One thing that came up was the need for training and that privacy awareness training hasn't had the effect hoped for. Given that awareness training is exactly that, is it no surprise that once the, usually, one hour presentation on how we should all care about privacy is made nothing happens?
 
Actually, everyone is acutely aware of privacy in the first place and privacy awareness training rapidly becomes an exercise in CYA - as security expert Bruce Schneier might have put it - and have no effect whatsoever on the overall quality of development, customer privacy and company culture.

I guess we're still pretty naive about privacy and unless we have a cultural change this naivety will come back to haunt us for a very, very long time with some awful business repercussions.

Monday, 21 December 2015

Books on Privacy...gift suggestions

Need a good book on privacy? A Gift for Christmas, or even something for the New Year....follow this handy flowchart:


From Amazon (US, CA, UK, DE, etc etc...), Barnes and Noble and good booksellers near you...

Privacy Engineering
A dataflow and ontological approach


ISBN-13: 978-1497569713
ISBN-10: 1497569710
264 Pages, B/W on White Paper


Twitter Discussion on Privacy and Engineering

Related with the upcoming DSummit conference in Malmö in May I've been involved in a fascinating discussion on Twitter with some of the big privacy people there.

The main point being raised is the need for a proper dialog between engineers and lawyers. I think we've seen this before, but still it is not being properly addressed and until it is privacy will remain a compliance activity rooted in a tick-box mentality with dreadful repercussions.

One only needs to take a look at the potential penalties in the EU's GDPR ... a potential fine of 4% of global turnover for a privacy violation!

The crux of this is that if you want to construct systems with privacy as an aspect, it has to be a first class aspect of that system's design. That means privacy is under the collective responsibility of lawyers, engineers and management and not the sole preserve of any of these groups.

Belief in high-level privacy impact assessments and "compliance", and placing trust in a legalese privacy policy is woefully insufficient, not to mention from a business perspective one step short of insanity.

Unfortunately going beyond this is considered by some - and I've seen too many examples of this - to be difficult and unnecessary and that legal compliance - whatever that means - is enough...

As we move to a "BigData" future, the knowledge of basic data handling, quality and governance at both engineering and legal levels is critical - not just for privacy but for basic business reasons, including consumer trust and quality of product.

How to do this is not difficult, but it does require thinking and small, but extremely beneficial cultural change...
and here's a recommendation to get those principles into use:
You can start here:Privacy Engineering and A Privacy Engineer's Manifesto

Tuesday, 1 December 2015

More Data Breach Excuses

This particular case reported on the BBC has a nice excuse...
Adele tickets: Fans claim personal data has been breachedFans buying tickets for Adele's tour have told the BBC they were shown the address and credit card details of customers other than themselves.
But several fans said they saw other people's shopping baskets, including payment details, upon check out.
Ticketing company Songkick said due to the "extreme load" on the site some customers could see others' account details. It apologised for any "alarm".
"At no time was anyone able to access another person's password, nor their payment or credit card details (which are not retained by Songkick)," it said.

Friday, 20 November 2015

ABCDE....DevOps and Privacy, pt 2

Earlier I introduced the idea that DevOps, particularly in the area of privacy could take lessons from trauma medicine, particularly in taking on board ideas from ATLS.

This led to some further ideas about the relationships or analogies between disciplines - something we've already discussed before in the context of surgery, aviation and checklists.

As software engineering is being brought closer and closer to the metaphorical coal-face - we've moved away from requirements up-front to agile and now to "DevOps" where engineering and operations become the same thing we are starting to see the need to move to much more structured and disciplined teams of engineers. If this isn't happening then there are some serious cultural and management problems.

As this shift happens we have to develop techniques to deal with this - as already mentioned checklists and ATLS provide the necessary kind of structures.

By why ATLS in particular? Well, we can draw an analogy between DevOps and trauma medicine in that DevOps operates with extremely short time-scales and in an environment where fixes and patches need to be very quick and leave the system in a stable state where a longer-term patch can be made later.

DevOps is the ER of the software engineering world.

Thursday, 19 November 2015

Airmiles and Customer Service

I think we're all used to utterly rubbish customer service from airlines, especially if you have to fly in economy class. No food, no drink, Byzantine terms and conditions, cancellations and subsequent rebookings that cost money (!!!), cramped seating and paying for Wifi on board without refunds if it doesn't work. Oh and good luck if you want to speak to a human, either on the phone or at the airport

Some airlines still have a concept of customer service - SAS and Lufthansa as well as low cost challenger Norwegian at least treat passengers (sorry customers) with some degree of dignity.

I stopped flying Finnair years ago and switched my allegiance to Lufthansa and Norwegian, primary on price. When Norwegian want 600eur to fly a family to Gatwick from Helsinki while Finnair wanted over 2500eur (on a BA flight too!) with effectively the same ticketing terms and conditions. For long haul Lufthansa is my preferred airline - they serve wine and beer with the meal (all included in the price) and have the most professional and hard working cabin crew I've so far come across.

While none of the above are perfect - they could do a HUGE amount more to make the economy experience better - more on that another time.

But what really gets me is that if times are economically tough for airlines, how little they do to actually understand their customer. I mean I used to fly Finnair religiously - their customer service was excellent, food and drink on board, clean aircraft and you could change flights without being punished. Let's be honest here, Finnair were excellent, really, really excellent! I used to change whole itineraries to fly Finnair....

If you want customers then shouldn't you understand why customers aren't flying with you. Isn't this the whole point of customer loyalty programmes?

Below is my Finnair Plus statement - it's been that way for years and not once have I ever been asked why...


So privacy, security and other aspects aside, if you have a customer loyalty card of any sort and change your behaviour, eg: by stopping using that company's services and they never query why, then you were probably never getting any service anyway...

I used to have quite a tally of Finnair points, they all expired or were changed to some newer, more customer friendly scheme, for the benefits of the customer. I was never informed why or when, nor did anyone ever contact me about the change. For a customer loyalty programme you've got to admit that's pretty dire.


So, if you happen to work in the customer service dept of an airline and wish to discuss the above and how you can win me back as a customer, and a loyal one at that, let me know...





Tuesday, 3 November 2015

DevOps and the ABC(DE[FG]) of Privacy

Or maybe this should be called the ATLS of privacy perhaps?  ATLS, or Advanced Trauma Life Support is a training programme for dealing with medical trauma incidents and is typically used by first responders such as paramedics to an incident.

Now as we move to a DevOps oriented model - think of a highly integrated Agile with a "right now" delivery timescale - then the way we will have to react to compliance, privacy impact assessments, privacy engineering etc is going to be on the same kind of time-scale. Certainly if we are late or delayed with the PIA then the product is going to be shipped - with some interesting security and privacy consequences certainly!

So, I conjecture it makes sense that we bring our PIA/compliance activities not just to the engineering level but also to the speed of development and operations.

This means that the PIA is going to have to be extremely focused and very strictly run. Effectively we need the DevOps privacy version of the medical ABC.

The question then becomes what is the equivalent to the medical ABC?

As I've stated before, privacy can [must] learn a lot of things from medicine (and aviation) - such as checklists - in that they both work in very agile, unstructured and reactive environments. Privacy in a DevOps situation can not rely upon traditional compliance or work at the usual, relative glacial speed associated with such work.

References

Ian Oliver (2015). Privacy as a Safety Critical Concept. 1st International Workshop on Privacy Engineering. California. (Keynote Talk)

Ian Oliver (2014). Privacy Engineering: A Data Flow and Ontological Approach. CreateSpace. 978-1497569713 (see: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1497569710  )

Monday, 2 November 2015

Second International Workshop on Privacy Engineering (IWPE'16)

Second International Workshop on Privacy Engineering (IWPE'16)
Co-located with 37th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy

26 May 2016 - The Fairmont, San Jose, CA

************************************************************

IMPORTANT DATES

Deadline for abstract submission: 18 January 2016
Deadline for paper submission: 8 February 2016
Notification of acceptance: 22 February 2016
Accepted paper camera-ready: 3 March 2016 

************************************************************
 
We are pleased to invite you to participate in the Second International Workshop on Privacy Engineering (IWPE'16).

Privacy engineering research has never been a more timely endeavor. Ongoing news reports regarding global surveillance programs, massive personal data breaches in corporate databases, and notorious examples of personal tragedies due to privacy violations have intensified societal demands for privacy-friendly systems. In response, current legislative and standardization processes worldwide are seeking to strengthen individuals’ privacy by introducing legal and organizational frameworks that personal data collectors and processors must follow. As a result, engineers are increasingly expected to build and maintain systems that preserve privacy and comply with data protection standards in different ICT domains (such as health, energy, transportation, social computing, law enforcement, and public services) and on different infrastructures and architectures (such as cloud, grid, or mobile computing).

Although there is a consensus on the benefits of an engineering approach to privacy, few concrete proposals exist for models, methodologies, techniques and tools to support engineers and organizations in this endeavor. Work that focuses on helping organizations and software developers to identify and adopt appropriate privacy engineering methods, techniques and tools in their daily practices is also missing. Furthermore, it is difficult to systematically evaluate whether the systems developed using privacy engineering methodologies comply with legal frameworks, provide necessary technical assurances, and fulfill users’ privacy requirements.

Clearly, more research is needed in developing methods that can help translate legal and normative concepts, as well as user expectations, into systems requirements. There is also a growing need for techniques and tools to support organizations and engineers in developing and maintaining (socio-)technical systems that meet these requirements. In an effort to close the gaps in research, the topics of IWPE'16 include all aspects of privacy engineering, ranging from its theoretical foundations, engineering approaches and support infrastructures to its practical application in projects of different scales.

Specifically, we are seeking the following kinds of papers:
  1.  technical solution papers that illustrate a novel formalism, method or other research finding with preliminary evaluation;
  2.  experience and practice papers that describe a case study, challenge or lessons learned in a specific domain;
  3.  early evaluations of tools and techniques that support engineering tasks in privacy requirements, design, implementation, testing, etc.;
  4.  interdisciplinary studies or critical reviews of existing privacy engineering concepts, methods and frameworks; 
  5.  vision papers that take a clear position informed by evidence based on a thorough literature review.

IWPE’16 welcomes papers that focus on novel solutions based on recent developments in privacy engineering. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
  • Integrating law and policy compliance into the development process
  • Privacy impact assessment during software development
  • Privacy risk management models
  • Privacy breach recovery methods
  • Technical standards, heuristics and best practices for privacy engineering
  • Privacy engineering in technical standards
  • Privacy requirements elicitation and analysis methods
  • User privacy and data protection requirements
  • Management of privacy requirements with other system requirements
  • Privacy requirements implementation
  • Privacy engineering strategies and design patterns
  • Privacy-preserving architectures
  • Privacy engineering and databases
  • Privacy engineering in the context of interaction design and usability
  • Privacy testing and evaluation methods
  • Validation and verification of privacy requirements
  • Engineering of Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PETs)
  • Integration of PETs into systems
  • Models and approaches for the verification of privacy properties
  • Tools and formal languages supporting privacy engineering
  • Teaching and training privacy engineering
  • Adaptations of privacy engineering into specific software development processes
  • Pilots and real-world applications
  • Evaluation of privacy engineering methods, technologies and tools
  • Privacy engineering and accountability
  • Organizational, legal, political and economic aspects of privacy engineering

This topic list is not meant to be exhaustive, as IWPE'16 is interested in all aspects of privacy engineering. However, to screen out off-topic papers early in the review process, we request authors to submit an abstract prior to their paper submission. Abstracts of papers without a clear application to privacy engineering will be considered outside the scope of this workshop and may be rejected.

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PAPER FORMAT & SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

We solicit unpublished short position papers (up to 4 pages) and long papers reporting technical, research or industry experience (up to 8 pages) on all dimensions of the privacy engineering domain. Each paper, written in English, must follow IEEE Proceedings format. Submission of a paper should be regarded as a commitment that, should the paper be accepted, at least one of the authors will attend the workshop to present the paper.

Abstracts and papers must be submitted via EasyChair

All IWPE'16 Papers will be published in IEEE eXplore, which is indexed by EI Engineering Index, ISI Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI-S), Scopus, etc.


Friday, 23 October 2015

Historial Navigation Techniques in the US Navy

This is an interesting development: a reintroduction of an "historical" technique to ostensibly address a problem introduced by a technology to make things simple(r).

The same techniques guided ancient Polynesians in the open Pacific and led Sir Ernest Shackleton to remote Antarctica, then oriented astronauts when Apollo 12 was disabled by lightning - the techniques of celestial navigation. 
A glimmer of the old lore has returned to the Naval Academy. 
Officials reinstated brief lessons in celestial navigation this year, nearly two decades after the full class was determined outdated and cut from the curriculum.
That decision, in the late 1990s, made national news and caused a stir among the old guard of navigators.
Maritime nostalgia, however, isn't behind the return.
Rather, the escalating threat of cyberattacks has led the Navy to dust off its tools to measure the angles of stars. 
After all, you can't hack a sextant.

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/10/14/celestial-navigation-returns-to-naval-academy.html

Putting the political aspects of the GPS system aside, it is a single point of failure for navigation, at least until Galileo and GLONASS are properly supported by navigation devices. Furthermore, as the article mentions, the GPS system is open to attack from various vectors. The use of "legacy" (I love that word - It doesn't mean obsolete!) technologies such as the sextant address many of these issues.

For me the main thing here is that the sextant forces understanding of navigation - quite literally how coordinates are calculated which is something missing from GPS.

In other words, don't rely upon technology, or if you do, you'd better know how to drop back a level of automation...sounds familiar...it is the basic premise of the 'Children of the Magenta' talk by American Airlines (see here for an earlier blog posting, the video might be available on YouTube somewhere).


Thursday, 22 October 2015

Tryweryn and Welsh Devolution

It has been fifty years since the flooding of the Tryweryn valley in Wales in order to create a reservoir for the city of Liverpool. This week also saw the publication of the planned reserved powers for the Welsh Assembly.

The planned reserved powers when coupled with the planned English Laws plan introduces an scenario where it becomes possible for English MPs to veto a Welsh Law in cases where there might be a perceived affect upon England. The reverse situation can not happen however.

This then raises all sorts of strange constitutional questions; such as does this invalidate the results of the 2011 referendum of law making powers for Wales?

Another point then in the definition of what sovereignty means.

If we place the above into the EU-UK then this becomes the heart of the debate about whether the UK should in in or out of the EU.

To give a more concrete example of the convoluted ideas of sovereignty and national responsibility there's the point made by John Elfed Jones, former chairman of Welsh Water that Wales should be allowed to sell its water to England. The analogy drawn between food and crops from eastern England and 'Scottish' oil should spawn a very interesting debate.

To finalise, we have confusion in the UK about what sovereignty and responsibility means. At one political-economic level we demand responsibility and sovereignty, but at others not at all. So where does the boundary exist between these concepts?

Discuss.

Wednesday, 21 October 2015

Happy Time Travelling Day

As today is the day when Marty McFly arrives in the future (or present as it is now - at least until tomorrow) I thought it might be fun to reference back to the only thing that makes Titanic a bearable film...the fact that it is a prequel to Terminator.

If Jack hadn't saved Rose then the ship would have turned around in search for her, thereby avoiding the collision with the iceberg...and all the things that would have entailed from that.

Obviously Jack's mission was to save Rose - presumably she's somehow related to Sarah Connor - and unfortunately 1500 people die in the collateral damage.

Don't believe me, go read the thread on Reddit 

I particularly like the idea that Jack is really The Doctor rescuing a relation to a future potential companion...Rose... :-)

Now scientists have searched for time travellers making comments on social media, apparently without success. But then again time travellers might have very strict rules about such things...as seen in the 1992 film Timescape.

However there is evidence that Twitter featured on the cover of Amiga magazine in April 1988! Well, not quite..but you never know...

Anyway, next week's lottery numbers are 4,7,14,19,22,34 ... I think, sorry can't read my handwriting...

...oh, and I shouldn't say this, but next week James Cameron told me last week he was a time traveller....

#ICanChangeThePast2
#ICannotChangeThePast2


Wednesday, 14 October 2015

Privacy Engineering Tutorial Slides (TrustCom)

Here are the publicly released slides from my privacy engineering tutorial given at TrustCom 2015 in Helsinki earlier this year.
 

The slides should be used in conjunction with the book - Privacy Engineering: a Data Flow and Ontological Approach - supporting this.

NB: I notice there are some formatting errors in the slides - this seems to come from SlideShare's conversion algorithm as the original PDF appears to be fine. 

The full session also included talks by Jonathan Fox (Intel/MacAfee) and Antti Vähä-Sipiliä (F-Secure)
 

Thursday, 24 September 2015

Pluto in colour

Just released colour image of Pluto...and you thought last week's image was incredible...


http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/crop_p_color2_enhanced_release_small.png