Tag Archive for: Sticky

A sticky story: How, and why, hackers love stickers on laptops

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“My other computer is your computer”, “Sniff networks, not drugs”, “Hacking is not a crime”. Anybody who knows cyber security will have seen laptops adorned with such stickers and when you see one in the wild, you know you’re in the presence of a hacker.

As an accidental cyber security journalist, this reporter often uses the term “cyber community”, and as a social anthropology graduate I am fascinated by stories of human communities and ideas, and am motivated to write about hacking because I want to know why people do the things they do.

We can talk all we like about indicators of compromise and common vulnerabilities and exposures, but at its heart, the story of cyber is far more human than it is technological.

What is a community anyway?

What does this have to do with stickers? To answer this, it’s helpful to understand how stickers, and other forms of cyber swag such as t-shirts or socks, tie to concept of community.

Anthropologists have struggled to define community for as long as the discipline has existed. American anthropologist Robert Redfield proposed four fundamental elements of a community. First, they are small in scale; second, their members exhibit homogeneity in activity and state of mind; third, they are aware of their distinctiveness; and finally, they are self-sufficient and sustaining. Others went deeper; George Hillery, who specialised in observing Trappist religious communities, identified more than 90 distinct characteristics – many of them highly specific to a silent order of monks.

Broadly speaking, Redfield’s four tenets show that the idea of sticking together in a community is an evolutionary advantage in humans, whether armed with spears and facing a sabre-toothed tiger, or armed with Dells and facing a Cozy Bear.

And for a group of humans who enjoy breaking things that other humans don’t want broken, it is easy to see how and why hackers stick together.

As BugCrowd founder and CEO Casey Ellis explains, being beyond the law was a fact of life for early hacking groups such as Cult of the Dead Cow, which pioneered hacker branding in the 1980s, and disseminated ideas and content that educated a generation of hackers,…

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Tariffs on Chinese rare-earth minerals create a sticky problem for US competitors

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truck driving out of rare earth minerals mine

Enlarge / A pick-up truck makes its way out of the Mountain Pass open pit mine in California in 2009. (credit: Photo by Jacob Kepler/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

President Trump’s tariffs on rare-earth metals from China should have been a boon to the only US rare-earth minerals mine in California. But a recent Wall Street Journal article illustrates that, given the complex nature of the global economy, those tariffs have actually put the Mountain Pass mine in a tough place.

A hedge fund recently bought Mountain Pass out of bankruptcy after several companies attempted to turn a profit from it. Six months later, the WSJ wrote, Trump announced tariffs that should have helped the mine supply more domestic rare-earths at a higher price.

However, most of the world’s rare-earth processing facilities are in China, which also produces more than 90 percent of the world’s rare-earth minerals. To develop its metals as cheaply as possible, Mountain Pass has first been shipping its ore to China, where the processed metals are then sold on the world market to makers of smartphones, laptops, and magnets that go into electric car motors and giant wind turbines.

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

All hail the mighty sticky note

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We know that more technology isn’t always the answer, so here’s a great example written up in the Harvard Business Review:

Imagine that you really need to convince someone to do something, such as following through on a task. You might be surprised to learn that one of the best ways to get someone to comply with your request is through a tiny nuance that adds a personal touch—attaching a sticky note.

A brilliant set of experiments by Randy Garner at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville found that a) adding a personal touch, and b) making someone feel like you’re asking a favor of them (and not just anyone) can bring about impressive results when done in tandem.

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Network World Paul McNamara

Sticky Password Provides Effective Protection Against Phishing Scams – TMCnet

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Dec 29, 2010 (PRWeb.com via COMTEX) — Sticky Password, the popular password manager and online form filler, is a valuable tool against phishing scams. The recent fake PayPal emails are a reminder that email phishing scams are not going away anytime soon …
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