Quotes from the book "A Hacker's Mind" By Bruce Schneier

Here is another great book I read recently "A Hacker's Mind" By Bruce Schneier. It is really interesting, here are some quotes I liked from this book.

When most people look at a system, they focus on how it works. When security technologists look at the same system, they can't help but focus on how it can be made to fail.

That's what a hack is: an activity allowed by the system that subverts the goal or intent of the system.

"Is that allowed" and "I didn't know you could do that" are both common reactions to hacks.

Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich is a tax evasion technique someone invented and a lot of companies used to avoid Billions of dollars in taxes across different countries.

Estimates are that US companies avoided paying nearly $200 billion in US taxes in 2017 alone, at the expense of everyone else.

A hack follows the letter of a system's rules but violates their spirit and intent.

No matter how locked-down a system is, vulnerabilities will always remain, and hacks will always be possible.

Markets need 3 things to be successful: Information, choice, and agency. 

• Buyers need information about products and services.
• Buyers need to have multiple sellers from which to choose.
• Buyers need the agency to use their knowledge about different buyers and to choose between them.

The economic interests of businessmen are often misaligned with public interest. The goal of businessmen and, of course, business enterprises - is to maximize profits. The goal of the public is to (more or less) Maximize product quantity, quality, variety, and innovation and minimize prices.

If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem. That's "too big to fail" in a nutshell.

Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.

If you can hack a mind, you can hack any system that is governed by human action.

Humans are complicated. Cognitive systems are messy. Any discussion of them will be messy as well.

"Spear phishing" is the term used when these emails are personalized.

"When people are insecure, they'd rather have somebody strong and wrong than someone who's is weak and right" - Bill Clinton.

There are three basic ways to exploit our tribalism.

• Find existing societal fissures that can be magnified into tribal divisions.
• Deliberately create tribal groups for some ulterior purpose.
• Create conditions for tribalism to naturally arise. Sports teams do this.

Negging: Backhanded compliments deliberately designed to undermine the recipient's confidence and increase their need to seek emotional approval by the manipulator.

When robots make eye contact, recognize faces, mirror human gestures, they push our Darwinian buttons, exhibiting the kind of behavior people associate with sentience, intentions, and emotions". That is how they hack our brains.

"Regulations 1.0" paradigm, where new ventures are deemed permissible and require no after-the-fact review or accountability, to a "Regulation 2.0" regime in which new ventures are subject to rigorous, data-driven review and constraint.

We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.

Happy reading !!!