The silly emperor

 

Image from Pixabay

Every now and then the weekly blogging day coincides with my birthday. I don't need any more reason to look for a fun topic. And so I went looking for a fairy tale, because we tell them to children and so they have to be pleasant. Right?

It has been a long time since I was read fairy tales, and we largely ignored fairy tales with our own children. So I had to look some things up. Fortunately, Wikipedia has an overview of fairy tales and they are conveniently summarized there in grown-up language. I have been reading several fairy tales this morning. My wife noticed it and asked scornfully: “Is that even work?” Yes, for me even fairy tales are useful!

Ultimately, my eye fell on The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen from 1837. For those who no longer have a clear memory of the story, I will provide a brief summary. The vain emperor is tired of his robes and orders his tailors to make a robe from the material that does not exist. (False) tailors appear who claim to have a fabric that is only visible to smart people. The emperor walks in a parade in the new clothes - in the nude, because a fabric that only smart people can see is of course a fantasy. No one dares to say anything until a child shouts: "Hey, look, the emperor is naked!" The audience holds their breath at first, but soon they are roaring with laughter. The emperor still plays dumb, even though he can see that he is naked. When they return to the castle, the now wealthy impostors are already far beyond the horizon.

I have titled this blog The Silly Emperor because this monarch was very easily fooled. If he had simply trusted his own observations, and not believed the implausible claims of strangers (!), he would not have been embarrassed. As far as I know, the story does not tell whether the incident had any consequences for the administrative career of this reluctant streaker.

I always feel a bit lost at trade fairs (and I only go there if I visit a conference that also has a trade fair linked to it). Afraid that exhibitors want to get me excited about a product that looks great on paper, but does nothing innovative or useful in practice. Fortunately, I can always hide behind the fact that I am not in charge of purchasing things. And I hardly do anything with those types of products myself; I leave that to technicians, who then report using all those great tools.

Sometimes everyone is convinced that you really need certain products. Take a VPN (Virtual Private Network; it ensures that you still have a secure connection even over an unsecured network). I also have one in use on mobile devices, because those sometimes accompany me to hotels, restaurants and airports, in short, in places where you cannot necessarily trust the free WiFi. But a while ago a colleague said on Twitter: public WiFi is safe enough for almost everyone, even without a VPN - even for banking. A few months later, a handy decision tree followed for the question: do I need a VPN? That tree offers three outcomes: (a) host your own VPN server; (b) fine to use a free or paid VPN service if you're comfortable with your data being sold or viewed; and finally: (c) you shouldn't do illegal things, for which you can also use a VPN, because, well, it’s illegal.

The emperor thought he was wearing a grand robe, and we all think we're completely safe with a VPN. But that is not necessarily the case. By using a VPN, you shift your trust from the provider of the network to the provider of your VPN: the network provider can no longer watch you because your connection is secured, but the VPN supplier can watch you because they have the security key in their hands. This means that a VPN only has added value if it does not do anything but what is advertised. In extreme cases, a VPN could even be less secure than hotel WiFi. For example, if you are in a hotel where they leave your traffic undisturbed, while you use a VPN from a bad provider that watches what comes along and who may sell your data to advertisers or others. That chance is probably higher with free VPNs , because hey, if something is free, then you are the product, remember?

Only if you host your own VPN - be it as an organization or as a private individual - you can be sure that no one else is secretly watching. And I think the crux of the first tweet is “safe enough for almost everyone”. The underlying idea is that most people are not important enough to be targeted with an eavesdropping operation. The only threat that remains is that a WiFi provider, who is not so fussy, sells data about you. But Google, Apple and the other major advertising companies already do that.

Hmm, the story ends even less pleasantly than I had in mind. That professional deformation again.

 

And in the big bad world...

• a Google chaos specialist advocates a refreshing way of phishing testing.
• independent phone repairers must pass on customer data to Samsung and destroy devices containing non-original parts.
• a hacker ‘ratted' a fake call center to its customers.
• malicious parties make sophisticated use of open source. [Dutch]
• researchers outsmarted even Tesla's latest security protocol.
• Maps of China are incorrect.
• iPhones share data about all Wi-Fi networks they see with Apple.
• I am going to eat birthday cake now (-;