Crossing the North Atlantic: 1 plane, 3 ships, and a guitarist

I came to America on a ship. That statement, which is true, can be useful in conversations. For example, when I want to emphasize my age. At that point in the conversation the fact that I came to America from somewhere else is usually apparent from the remnants of my English accent.

Proper-plane: Britannia

However, the truth is that my first visit to America was by car, from Canada, when I was six. And I got to Canada not on a ship but in a plane, one that had propellers on it, just like this:

That's a Bristol Britannia, which first flew a few months before I was born. The plane entered service in 1957 and my family flew on one from England to Canada in 1959. The Bristol company has a storied history dating from 1910 until the present. The flight was wonderful. I got to sit with the pilot for a while and received an enameled pair of B.O.A.C. wings.

Proper Ship: Saxonia

For about a year my family lived in Renfrew, Ontario. I attended Queen Elizabeth Public School. When we returned from Canada to England a year later, we traveled on the Cunard liner you see below, RMS Saxonia, built in Scotland in 1957:

Despite a rough late autumn crossing from Quebec City to Southampton, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. We were not in first class, but we had an assigned steward at our table in the dining room and he was terrific. For some meals I was the only one at the table (did I mention it was a rough crossing - my mother lost 14 pounds in 5 days). At the end of the trip the steward gave me a certificate he had drawn, stating that I not been seasick the entire trip. Little did I know that the Saxonia would reappear in my life many years later.

MS Mikhail Lermontov

Back in England, I attended King Henry VIII School for Boys and then went to university in Leeds where my first year roommate was guitarist Steve Donnelly. During the final year of my Bachelors degree I applied for and received a post-graduate teaching post at McMaster University, in Ontario, Canada. To get there I booked passage on a Russian ocean liner, the MS Mikhail Lermontov:

In the mid-1970s the Lermentov was making round trip cruises from New York, via London, to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in Russia. Traveling at a leisurely pace, the ship was a floating showcase of Soviet culture, and a way to obtain U.S. dollars from the mainly American passengers who took the round trip.

I have no doubt that my "student" fare of 100 Pounds Sterling for passage from London to New York - cheaper than airfare and a real bargain when you consider it included as much luggage as you wanted - was a ploy to expose young people to the wonders of the Soviet Union. These included some terrific Russian cuisine, Russian dance performances and all sorts of classes (balalaika, borscht, Russian literature and of course, the poetry of Mikhail Lermontov himself).

However, the most memorable cultural experience for me was passing under New York's Verrazano-Narrows Bridge at dawn and sailing past the Statute of Liberty as the sun came up. After that, the trip by Greyhound bus from New York to Hamilton, Ontario, was a bit of an anti-climax.

TS/S Stefan Batory

After graduate school in Canada I went back to England, choosing an ocean passage again, from Montreal to Southampton on a Polish ocean liner, the TS/S Stefan Batory that was originally built in the Netherlands in 1952:

The Polish crew were great and the service was wonderful. In fact, the Batory went on crossing the ocean from Gydnia to Montreal until 1988, the last regularly scheduled transatlantic passenger service.

Note: TS/S stands for Turbine Steam Ship. MS in a ship's name stands for Motor Ship, indicating that it is propelled by an internal combustion engine. These abbreviations are a great source of trivia questions, like what does the RM in RMS stand for? It's not Royal Majesty, but Royal Mail.

The Steve Donnelly Connection

Some 29 years after my last transatlantic crossing by ship I met up with my former college roommate whom I had not see in more than 30 years. To cut a long story short, and leave out the many expressions of wonder, it turns out that after Leeds, Steve had played guitar in a house band on the Saxonia! So my roommate had sailed the seas in the 1970s on the same boat that took me from Canada to England as a boy.

And get this, the ship Steve played on was Soviet at the time! It turns out that in August 1973 the Saxonia was bought by the Soviet Union-based Black Sea Shipping Company. She was renamed after Leonid Sobinov, a famous Russian tenor, and put to cruising!

Not only that - and this is where it gets really spooky - as the conversation continued, we realized that Steve had played in another ship band, on another Soviet vessel: the Lermontov! Apparently, she had been upgraded to a Western-style cruising ship in 1982.

A few years ago, I was at a wedding reception in Toronto and late in the evening the bride's father, a gracious host and serious follower of rock music, asked me: "What's the biggest coincidence you've ever experienced?" I had to tell him the one about the two ships and the rock band roommate.

The epilogue is a sad but telling one:  In 1986, in an incident that prefigured the tragic fate of the Costa Concordia, the Lermentov hit rocks while sailing close to shore and sank. That was in New Zealand waters. Steve was not onboard. In fact, all aboard were saved, except for one crew member. She now rests on the ocean floor and is considered one of the world's finest wreck diving experiences.

Epi-epilogue

Let me end this strange tale of ocean travels with Steve on guitar...he's the serious looking one on the right.

You will also find Steve on all Nick Lowe albums since Dig My Mood, and on Suzanne Vega's Nine Objects of Desire plus Sheryl Crow's eponymous album. Fans of Bill Nighy may know Steve from the 1999 movie Still Crazy, for which Steve provided most of the music and guitar solos. More recently Steve appeared on Bonnie Raitt's first studio album in seven years: Slipstream. Finally, check for the iconic Fender coming in at 1:48 in the following, that's Steve Donnelly:

Of Spiders and Sin

What follows is the definitive telling of my story about the Australian redback spider and its pedagogical employment in a theological context. This is a tale I have told many times in the company of friends but it has never been recorded for posterity, until now. I have included some notes below the story that might be of interest and will add more later as they occur to me.

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The phrase ‘liberal Baptist church’ might sound like an oxymoron, but I grew up in Coventry, England, and the theology of some English Baptists is quite liberal. Indeed, I was raised by a congregation of souls so liberal that I became a Sunday school teacher even though I had never been baptized and had not yet – nor have I since – accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. Back then, as the sixties were turning into the seventies, Sunday school was more about the geography of poverty, feeding the hungry, and boycotting companies that did business with the white regime in South Africa.

The person who leads the services in an English Baptist church is referred to as the minister, although said person might be addressed as Reverend. From time to time, our regular Reverend went on holiday and Sunday services were conducted by guest ministers, which is how I first encountered the redback spider.

The guest minister that Sunday was from the continent that is the home of said spider, Australia. The deacons who arranged his visit were apparently unaware that some Australian Baptists were much closer in spirit to their evangelical cousins in the southern states of America, and their manner of sermonizing more that of preacher than minister. Such was the case with this unfortunate fellow, as his address to our Sunday school children would reveal, quite painfully as it turned out.

“Good morning children,” this preacher began, “I come from Australia, a place some people call ‘the land down under,’ and in that land we have some amazing creatures.”

His unfamiliar accent, and his dramatic emphasis on the last two words, definitely got the attention of his young audience, which ranged from about four to fourteen. The preacher continued, “One creature, the redback spider, is no bigger than the nail of my little finger, but his bite is deadly.”

To my English ears, this last word, which should have carried a lot of weight, sounded like ‘diddly’ which may explain how this children’s sermon went astray.

He continued, “Although he is so small, just one bite from this little fellah can kill you … dramatic pause … dead.”

Again, the ‘dead’ sounded like ‘did’ to me but the preacher’s delivery left no doubt that death was what this small but fearsome creature delivered. One bite could end your life. I could see some of the younger children sitting up a little straighter, eager for whatever came next.

“Now then children, what does this remind us of?”

The preacher paused for an answer. Scanned the young faces. Nothing.

“Just one bite and you’re dead. What does this remind us of?”

More silence.

“Sin!” he proclaimed, apparently failing to detect in the faces before him the signs of confusion that this word caused.

The preacher took a deep breath and forged ahead, asking a question he assumed would solve the riddle: “How many sins does it take to keep you out of heaven?”

More silence with just a hint of embarrassed shuffling from the adults in the congregation. The preacher was undeterred.

“Come on children,” he continued, as though this was the first thing you learned in Sunday school, “How many sins does it take to keep you out of heaven? Is it two? Five? Ten? A hundred?”

The sequence of numbers was enunciated with what sounded to me like a mild but mounting sense of despair. It was at this point that young Mark Jacobs from my class shot up his hand. No more than seven years old, Mark was a bit of a handful, but very quick on the uptake. I could tell he was sure he had this one figured out.

“Yes!” exclaimed the preacher, extending his palms towards Mark, who loudly delivered his answer, a logical deduction from the clues provided, but also – I like to think – a reflection of the spirit of the church in which he was being raised:

“Infinity!”

My heart went out to the preacher as he stood there and said about all he could say at that point: “No. It’s one. Just one sin can keep you out of heaven. Now let us sing hymn number 127: “All Things Bright and Beautiful."

Notes:

1. The chorus of that hymn, written by Cecil Francis Alexander in 1848, goes like this:

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful:
The Lord God made them all.

I have no idea if Alexander had the redback spider in mind when she penned line two.

2. Very few renditions of this hymn today include the third verse of the original, which goes like this:

The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them, high or lowly,
And ordered their estate.

In fact, several members of our congregation refused to sing the hymn at all, owing to the fact that its author held views so opposed to their own.

3. The English Baptists believe in adult baptism, a belief I greatly respect because it holds that nobody should take this step in life unless they make an informed decision to do so. I was never pressured to make this choice, again something I greatly respect. I remain unbaptized, but always welcome at that church.

4. Many years later I encountered redback spiders in Alice Springs, Australia. They were pointed out by the very gifted engineer who worked on my wife's off-road racing vehicle, in a dark corner of his garage. He had recently been bitten by one, causing a very nasty injury, but fortunately he survived.

5. My wife was living in Alice Springs at the time because she was in charge of network security at a place called JDFPG for Joint Defense Facility Pine Gap, which is probably one of the largest computing facilities in the Southern Hemisphere.

6. JDFPG has a rugby team called the Redbacks with an awesome emblem. I know because one of their shirts is a prized possession of mine.

7. Theologically speaking one can argue that both Mark and the preacher were correct. Hard line protestant thinking on sins is that just one is enough to keep you out of heaven -- and thus send you to hell when you die -- unless you accept Jesus Christ as your savior and are baptized, in which case your sins are washed away. Technically, if you committed an infinite number of sins, you could still get into heaven because God's forgiveness is infinite.

 

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Fighting malware, cybercrime, and hemochromatosis = I've been busy

I enjoy reading a wide range of blogs. Recently, I was shocked to visit one of my own blogs -- this one -- and see that I had not posted anything since February. Surely I had written more than that? In fact, I have been doing a lot of writing, but on other blogs. So I decided to post a roundup of recent writings and presentations, for my own edification, and to show that I have not been slacking. Enjoy!

Living Security

A lot of my writing these days appears on We Live Security, the website that grew out of the Threat Blog at blog.eset.com. Here are some highlights:

• The state of healthcare IT security: are Americans concerned enough?: The privacy and security of medical records is a matter of concern to many Americans now that most are now stored electronically, but is there cause for concern? And who is most concerned?


• Malware is called malicious for a reason: the risks of weaponizing code: The risks of using government use of malicious code in cyber conflict are examined in this paper by Andrew Lee and Stephen Cobb: Malware is called malicious for a reason: the risks of weaponizing code.


• Could latest NSA revelations further impact online behavior, denting the economy?: Internet surveillance by America’s National Security Agency (NSA) has been further exposed by two new developments: the analysis of leaked NSA surveillance reports and the XKeyscore targeting code. Will these stories increase the number of Internet users who say they are inclined to reduce their online engagement due to the activities of the NSA and GCHQ.


• Facebook may face FTC fines over research into users’ emotions: With EPIC filing an FTC privacy complaint against Facebook, which is already the subject of a Consent Order due to a previous privacy settlement, the social network could be facing a hefty fine for emotion-based manipulation of the Newsfeed for research purposes.


• Cyber Boot Camp and tomorrow’s cyber security professionals: The top three teams from the fifth annual Mayors’ Cyber Cup will attend Cyber Boot Camp at the headquarters of ESET North America for five days of hands-on security training and lectures from IT experts, law enforcement, and career advisors.


• Encryption essential for cyber security: A million reasons to encrypt sensitive data: Encryption is essential to cyber security today, with encryption of personally identifiable information (PII) being a top priority for organizations large and small, to protect customers and avoid fines and penalties after data breaches.


• NSA faces fresh revelations as Snowden anniversary arrives: On the one year anniversary of Edward Snowden’s public revelations of mass surveillance conducted by the U.S. National Security Agency we look back on the impact, even as we face the prospect of more revelations to come.


• GameOver Zeus and Cryptolocker: Law enforcement hits gang responsible: FBI names as “Most Wanted” the leader of cyber criminal gang based in Russia and Ukraine responsible for both GameOver Zeus and Cryptolocker schemes, as law enforcement agencies crack down on cyber crime infrastructure.


• Behind Blackshades: a closer look at the latest FBI cyber crime arrests: Blackshades is a RAT and the FBI has just arrested a lot of people involved in its use and distribution. But what’s a RAT and how will these arrests impact cyber crime?


• Don’t forget flash: memory cards can be a data loss and infection vector: A reminder that malicious code can be spread via flash memory cards like SD cards, just as easily as it can spread on USB flash drives. Check these tips to get protected.


• Business continuity management: key to securing your digital future: Business continuity management is the key to securing your company’s digital future despite disruptive incidents, from power outages and IT errors to fires, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis.


• Taxing Times: Dealing with tax identity fraud in America: Filing your taxes on April 15? What if someone has already filed “your” income tax return? Sadly, this can happen, and it does happen, all too often. Here’s why, and what you can do about it.


• NSA revelations shake faith in U.S. tech firms as Harris poll shows public conflicted: The National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance activities revealed by former CIA contractor Edward Snowden appear to be taking a serious toll on public confidence in technology companies in America, such as Internet service providers and software companies, according to a Harris poll commissioned by ESET. The poll found that two-thirds of adult Americans who said


• New Harris poll shows NSA revelations impact online shopping, banking, and more: A new Harris poll shows that revelations about the National Security Agency’s digital surveillance activities are changing online behavior for many Americans and some say they are doing less online banking and less online shopping because of what they have learned about the NSA.


• STEM education, the Target data breach, and the Apple SSL vulnerability: Could holes in security code and major information systems in America be due, at least in part, to the dire state of education in subjects like Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)?

Being Security

I have also been writing some posts about security and privacy on my first blog, Scobbs Blogspot. The idea is to put security pieces there when they are not a good fit for We Live Security, for example, a strong personal opinion, or a speculative piece. (In general, I want to keep this blog here, Cobbsblog, for non-security stuff.) Recent posts on Scobbs Blogspot include:

• Is this your Sample Information Security Policy?


• Business Continuity Management: Sounds boring yet saves lives, companies, butts


• Internet voting security: a scary tweet that reached 227,391 (even before Heartbleed)


• A call to action we ignore at our peril


• The Privacy Meter Redux


• Why there is so much cyber crime: #1 It's our spending priorities


• My #4 personal privacy and security prediction for 2014: A BIG year for good/bad news

Security Slides and Webinars and Podcasts

You can find some of the slides from my security presentations at SlideShare under the zcobb account. These include slides that ESET graciously makes available for anyone who is working to increase security awareness in their organization. Here is a recent example from a webinar on cybercrime:



Some of my security education presentations are done as webinars and you can find these in the ESET channel on a service called BrightTalk. The channel requires a one-time registration process but is free and there are dozens of recorded webinars available from myself and my colleagues.

I have also recorded a lot of podcasts on security and privacy. These are available on this page but they are not marked as to author. All of the podcasts are worth a listen and feature my fellow researchers at ESET.

Earlier this year I answered several questions for a reporter while visiting the Latin America headquarters of ESET. Topics covered in the resulting video include the effects of Snowden's revelations about the NSA, the relationship between privacy and security, and social media issues for young people. Spanish subtitles are provided.

Fighting Hemochromatosis

My writings on hemochromatosis started here on this blog in 2008, with "dsgds". Then, in 2010, I created CelticCurse.org and post there when I have something substantial. Here are some recent posts.

• Introducing Hemo-Doc-Stars: doctors who ‘get’ hemochromatosis


• Death by Ignorance: Millions of Americans at risk from hemochromatosis, but few doctors know much about it

In addition to Celtic Curse, I created another channel of communication about hemochromatosis, the Hemochromatosis page on Facebook. This has reached over 100,000 people so far this year and led to the publication of the first ever "Hemo Doc Stars" list of recommended hemochromatosis doctors from around the world.

• Fight Hemochromatosis on Facebook

So, the next time I am wondering to myself "what have I accomplished this year?" I can look at this page and refresh my memory. And the above is not everything. I also got accepted into a postgraduate degree program in security and risk management in the Criminology Department of the University of Leicester, in England. I hope to have time to share some instructive tales of distance learning here as the program progresses.

Alpha woman and the days of sail

Chey at the helm of Alpha, a Bristol Pilot Cutter built 110 years ago.

Although we live just 5 blocks from the Star of India and other fine sailing vessels in San Diego Bay, we do not get out on the water much because of Chey's health. However, 20 years ago Chey was an active sailor, studying for her Yachtmaster on the Isle of Wight and sailing historic wooden sailing ships around Scotland.

Chey's favorite was Alpha, a 52 foot Bristol Pilot Cutter. On one trip she sailed Alpha from Scotland to Portugal and back, straight up through the North Atlantic and around the western side of Ireland. Bear in mind that pilot cutters were the "built for speed" boats of their day, sleak, stripped of deck rails and any other impediments to pace. Why? Because pilots made their money guiding large cargo ships through coastal waters and into port. The pilot who was first to reach an incoming ship got the job!

How to find $168 billion in annual spending cuts while saving the world

Allow me to explain where the U.S. federal government can find $168 billion. That could be a $168 billion cut in annual spending from the current budget, or $168 billion of spending shifted to more worthwhile endeavors. It could even end world hunger while giving us all tax rebates.

Lately, I've been looking at a lot of numbers related to safety and security, like how much money we spend on fighting wars and cyber crime, how many people die from different causes, and so on. I was inspired to research such things by a comment made to the press by my friend and boss, Andrew Lee, CEO of ESET North America, who was asked what he thought of General Keith Alexander's keynote at Blackhat last year. (The General spoke about mass surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) as revealed by former federal contractor Edward Snowden.) Andrew said that we should be asking ourselves if the levels of surveillance now being revealed constitute a proportionate response.

Personally, and I stress that this is my personal opinion, I think that the $50 billion my country spends annually on spying is way too much (BTW, for new readers, "my country" = the United States of America, the country of which I have been a citizen for more than 30 years).

To put that $50 billion spend on spying in perspective, it dwarfs the total spend on life-saving health research by the federal government is $30 billion (that's funding for over 300,000 researchers at more than 2,500 institutions). I'm pretty sure that $50 billion is about the same as the operating expenses of Google and Microsoft combined. Aside from the sheer amount, the challenge of oversight and efficiency across multiple agencies is huge, leading to some terrible decision-making, as revealed by some of the Snowden papers.

But let's leave the spy budget aside and consider what we spend to defend our country. Suppose we were to decide that the appropriate annual budget for defending America is twice the total annual military spend of our two closest rivals, China and Russia. Those two countries spend $166 billion and $90 billion respectively, or $256 billion combined; double that is $512 billion, which is $168 billion less than the $680 billion that the U.S. spends.

Surely we can adequately defend America by allocating twice what China and Russia spend combined. Still nervous? Want a comfort zone greater than 2X?

Consider the $272 billion annual military spending by our six strongest allies (UK, Japan, France, Germany, Australia, Canada). Figures are from SIPRI Yearbook 2013.

Want more perspective? With our $168 billion savings we could drastically reduce the deficit, lower taxes, and still have enough left over to END WORLD HUNGER (estimated cost of that is $30 billion).

So, let's recap, the Cobb budget plan for America would:

• Spend more on defense than China and Russia combined


• End world hunger


• Reduce the deficit


• Enable lower tax rates

What's not to love about that?

Happy Blogging New Year 2014!

Happy New Year! While it took me a few days to get around to this, I did want to mark the beginning of the new year with at least one blog post here on Cobbsblog. In fact, I have been doing quite a bit of blogging around the turn of the year.

Over on WeLiveSecurity.com I was privielged to present some of the 2014 security predictions from my fellow researchers at ESET. My colleagues in Latin America shone again this year, producing a 30+ page review of malware trends and predictions.

That report very rightly fingered privacy as a hot topic for 2014 and I am heading for Washington, D.C. in a few weeks to be on a panel about data privacy at a Data Privacy Day event at the Pew Charitable Trusts (January 28 is Data Privacy Day).

Predictions are one thing, but what practical good are they? What advice can they generate for IT security managers? I will try to answer that question in a free webinar happening January 15 on ESET's Brighttalk channel.

I made some information security predictions of my own, over on my security blog: scobb's information security blog. That blog was in fact my first, and lately I have been reviving it. My idea for 2014 is to use Cobbsblog for more personal posts, and put my security related posts on scobb's. Of course, in 2014 I will be writing about security on WeLiveSecurity.com as well, but sometimes I have things to say on the topic that don't quite fit there.

And sometimes my thoughts will migrate to other blogs. For example, Graham Cluley liked my prediction about the persistent misrepresentation of antivirus software, and reprinted it (with my permission) on his very information blog.

I wish you a safe and happy 2014 and pledge to do my best to provide you with informative and thought-provoking content all year long.

Bands to watch in 2014: NO doubt about NO

Warning! The link I am about to lay on you starts to autoplay some great music. It's by a band out of Los Angeles called NO and I think they are very good. Of course, this is an old guy talking, but an old guy who had enough love of good music to spend four days in the cold and rain to catch artists like Santana, Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Pentangle, and Fairport Convention at the Bath Festival in 1971.

That said, here is the link to NO. And here is a photo of the band I snapped as they were performing "There's a glow" on the rooftop of the Rio in Las Vegas last summer.

The significance of the setting, high above the Vegas strip, comes partly from the opening of the song that goes:

There's a glow up over the city the city.
There's a glow up over us all.

The other aspect of significance, apart from the amazing view and the electrified atmosphere of the up-close performance, is that the band is playing at a party thrown by my employer, ESET.

And I have to admit this was not my first time seeing the band live. They played an ESET party in 2012 as well. None of which would matter if the band was just okay. But in fact they are awesome when they play live, managing to create a huge sound without it becoming noise, and often generating powerful emotional tension by restraining that big sound until just the right moment.

In February of 2014 the band releases its first LP, with 7 new tracks on top of the 6 you can hear live on the website. Stay tuned to their site for fresh tour dates and try to catch them live. You won't be disappointed.