Bruce Schneier on the Predator drone unencrypted video snafu: Sometimes mediocre encryption is better than strong encryption, and sometimes no encryption is better still. Read through to the end; Schneier makes a good point about how the key management requirements of the NSAs Cold War era encryption schemes are limiting their use in today’s military environment.

Intriguing: Airlock allows your Mac to lock itself, plain and simple. Using your iPhone or iPod Touch, Bluetooth, and a smidgen of pixie dust, Airlock determines whether you’re near your computer.

Bruce Schneier points to a paper that explains why terrorism doesn’t work. I’ve always wondered why people think that terrorists are out to kill everyone. From Schneier’s post: People tend to infer the motives — and also the disposition — of someone who performs an action based on the effects of his actions, and not on external or situational factors. If you see someone violently hitting someone else, you assume it’s because he wanted to — and is a violent person — and not because he’s play-acting. Read more

I’ve been holding off posting about the “Bomb Scare” in Boston yesterday because I wanted to see what Bruce Schneier would say about it. Most of the time he articulates my position on these sorts of things much better than I could. Schneier just posted his reaction. The first sentence of his post is “The story is almost too funny to write about seriously.” Thankfully, the folks who the Boston Police arrested have the right attitude: