If you haven’t noticed yet, a lot of the useless sections of this site have been removed. The microblogs are also gone since they were kind of redundant. Nevertheless, I still have the urge to post random thoughts that I would like to share. So I will keep this information within the blog which is probably the best place this type of information can be listed.

So this is not a rant but observation which made me question whether humans are capable of seeing further then their nose. I was browsing through OpenSocial, just to check it out and see what kind of security risks it may introduce in the future. While doing that, I’ve found many 3rd-part applications that can be embedded within the OpenSocial platform. This is good. After all, OpenSocial and Google is all about mashups.

What I’ve noticed was a mess of brands. Now you visit a page and you are bombarded with brands regardless if you are advertising or not. Google dominates the space of course.

What does that have to do with security. I have no clue to be honest. I don’t want to say that it enables phishing because this is a fact. I don’t want to say that it is vulnerable to the same types of attacks everything else is vulnerable to (issues which occur due to insufficient input and output validation). But I know that it has a lot to do with our culture and as such that will impact us as a society in one way or another the same way Email and SPAM have impacted our past and present.

For more information regarding how culture impacts security, I would recommend you check out Isaac Mathis’ presentation on Hacking the Samurai Spirit (Shmoocon 2008).