Bob Lord
boblord.bsky.social
Bob Lord
@boblord.bsky.social
6.2K followers 610 following 530 posts
Cautiously pessimistic, esp. about cyber things. The owls are not what they seem. 🗻🗻🦉🌲🪵 🍒🥧☕️🍩 🕵🏼‍♀️ 👍🏻 Also: 🔐🔑🔒
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
Pinned
Reporters, this is a story worth covering. It might not be as glamorous as high-profile hacks, and it might not attract as many clicks, but it’s important. The quiet adoption of HTTPS has improved online security for billions of people, and it deserves attention.

medium.com/@boblord/the...
The Quiet HTTPS Revolution
In a recent post, I explained that the websites I visit on my Chromebook are almost all delivered over HTTPS. Better still, 100% of the…
medium.com
📣📣📣 It has come to my attention that Department Store Christmas is back on SOMA FM! 🎁☃️🎅🎄❄️
somafm.com/deptstore/
Department Store Christmas (Special) from SomaFM
Holiday Elevator Music from a more innocent time.
somafm.com
I also had a great time at the event!
🕵️ 👍🏻 ☕️ 🥧 🦙
Reposted by Bob Lord
In a world with increasing nuclear dyads, can emerging technologies make us safer? On 10/23, IST will host author & international security expert @nktpnd.bsky.social in Palo Alto to discuss his book on the new nuclear age & the changing landscape of nuclear security.
🌐 Register to attend:
Book Talk | The New Nuclear Age: At the Precipice of Armageddon
In a world with increasing nuclear dyads, can emerging technologies make us safer – or are we opening Pandora's Box? Join IST in Palo Alto, CA or virtually for a book talk with Ankit Panda.
securityandtechnology.org
Oh no! What should I do??
That one is malware. It should look like the one I’m using. Or is it the other way around? 🤔
Right back at you!!!
I'm writing this post while connected to the airport wi-fi. Is that OK? Am I in danger? 🤔🔒
Thinking about recurring classes of coding error, are there any patterns in the exploited vulnerabilities? What are the software makers doing to ensure they have eliminated those classes going forward?
Why do they call it "malvertising" when it seems that it's just another social engineering delivery mechanism? The user has to run a shell command, type a password, etc. It's not a direct launch of the malware. Or am I confused?
Reposted by Bob Lord
“Official statistics are a public good…Over the long run, there’s no replacement for the government. No private-sector company has the incentive to produce trustworthy official statistics that are available to everybody at no cost.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/b...
What if You Can’t Believe the Official Numbers?
www.nytimes.com
That's why I called them "legacy" MFA. Make them feel like tech debt that will lead to a breach. Because that's exactly what they are.
Reposted by Bob Lord
Not to pile on, but every 'c' in 'Pacific Ocean' is pronounced differently.
Defeatist logic often masquerades as insight or realism. Don't fall for it.
It will catch fire. We can do hard things! 🔐 💪🏻
It would be great to identity the features we’d like to see the OS vendors change so we have security baked in rather than bolted on.
I’ve seen scary things happen when people try to be more secure with personal VPNs.
Great speed. Fingerprint reader. 16G RAM. Good battery life. I liked the Pixelbook Go styling but this one is still good. The price was right!
One note: Signal doesn’t run on ARM so I can’t run it in the VM. Feel free to petition Signal to make ARM a first class citizen. 😇
Just got a Lenovo Chromebook and it’s fantastic. My last one was from 2018 so I really feel the improvement.
It’s about security. It needs to be baked in. Not bolted on.
You can't add salt to the dough after the bread is baked.
You still need to implement strong authentication, right? So FIDO is still a major part of the solution.
Getting all the major players to agree on a protocol and then to implement it? Big challenge.
To do that, you’d have to establish a protocol standard and then somehow get every OS and browser and major services to implement it. It would be hard work but then you’d basically eliminate an entire threat vector. Worth considering! 🤔
Reading the news of hacks lately, it occurs to me that someone should invent a form of identification that resists phishing. They could call it something like, “phishing resistant MFA”. Something that protects accounts even when the user does what the hacker says.

What do you think? 🤔