Two interesting (if longish) articles lately on airport/airplane security:
1. A pilot on airline security
2. An interview between Bruce Schneier (Security Dude) and Kip Hawley (Head TSA Dude)
Both are, I think, interesting reading; and both avoid the Designated Stupid Zones (“Airport security is useless” and “Whatever it takes to Fight Terror”) at the polar ends of the debate.
Neither of these articles is directly related to Mozilla, but enough of my co-workers travel regularly that I’m gonna tag it that way anyhow, so that it shows up on planet – where our blogs all hang out and play together while we’re at work.
[Special thanks to nedrichards for the photo - I'm keeping this one around.]
20
Aug 07
SSL Infoporn
I’m not sure why, but when I tell people this (people, that is, who have any hope of being interested in such things; a small, biased, statistically indefensible sample,) they are surprised. I think mostly they expect the number to be higher. And in actual fact, it probably is, at least a little bit. I am reasonably certain, without even looking into them, that Netcraft’s methods are more prone to type-2 errors – false negatives – than they are to false positives. Nevertheless, it’s probably the right order of magnitude. There are almost certainly less than a million, for instance.
Netcraft doesn’t publish any numbers it may gather about the ratio, in that group, between DV, OV, and EV certs, but the informal vibe I get leads me to believe that there are around 2000 EV certs out there at the moment. Given that several of these have gone to extremely high traffic domains, though, that number probably under-represents their network significance.
I bring these numbers up here because they seem to surprise people, and surprises are generally more instructive than confirmations. In the last couple weeks, a fair number of surprising numbers have flitted across my radar, so I figured I would rehash a couple here, with no particular (conscious) effort to weave a narrative into them beyond, “hey look, infoporn!” Continue reading →