Book picks similar to
Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking by Christopher Hadnagy
psychology
non-fiction
nonfiction
security
Introducing Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People
Joseph O'Connor - 1990
NLP, one of the fastest growing developments in applied psychology, describes in simple terms what they do differently, and enables you to learn these patterns of excellence. This approach gives the practical skills used by outstanding communicators. Excellent communication is the basis of creating excellent results. NLP skills are proving invaluable for personal development and professional excellence in counselling, education and business.
Introducing NLP
includes:- How to create rapport with others- Influencing skills- Understanding and using body language- How to think about and achieve the results you want- Effective meetings, negotiations and selling
Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
Roger McNamee - 2019
He had mentored many tech leaders in his illustrious career as an investor, but few things had made him prouder, or been better for his fund's bottom line, than his early service to Mark Zuckerberg. Still a large shareholder in Facebook, he had every good reason to stay on the bright side. Until he simply couldn't. ZUCKED is McNamee's intimate reckoning with the catastrophic failure of the head of one of the world's most powerful companies to face up to the damage he is doing. It's a story that begins with a series of rude awakenings. First there is the author's dawning realization that the platform is being manipulated by some very bad actors. Then there is the even more unsettling realization that Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are unable or unwilling to share his concerns, polite as they may be to his face."
The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives
Shankar Vedantam - 2009
But what if our actions are driven not by our conscious values and beliefs but by hidden motivations we’re not even aware of?The “hidden brain” is Shankar Vedantam’s shorthand for a host of brain functions, emotional responses, and cognitive processes that happen outside our conscious awareness but have a decisive effect on how we behave. The hidden brain has its finger on the scale when we make all our most complex and important decisions: It decides whom we fall in love with, whether we should convict someone of murder, and which way to run when someone yells “Fire!” It explains why we can become riveted by the story of a single puppy adrift on the ocean but are quickly bored by a story of genocide. The hidden brain can also be deliberately manipulated to convince people to vote against their own interests, or even become suicide terrorists. But the most disturbing thing is that it does all this without our knowing.Shankar Vedantam, author of The Washington Post’s popular “Department of Human Behavior” column, takes us on a tour of this phenomenon and explores its consequences. Using original reporting that combines the latest scientific research with compulsively readable narratives that take readers from the American campaign trail to terrorist indoctrination camps, from the World Trade Center on 9/11 to, yes, a puppy adrift on the Pacific Ocean, Vedantam illuminates the dark recesses of our minds while making an original argument about how we can compensate for our blind spots and what happens when we don’t.
Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling
Edgar H. Schein - 2013
But all too often when we interact with people—especially those who report to us—we simply tell them what we think they need to know. This shuts them down. To generate bold new ideas, to avoid disastrous mistakes, to develop agility and flexibility, we need to practice Humble Inquiry.Ed Schein defines Humble Inquiry as “the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person.” In this seminal work, Schein contrasts Humble Inquiry with other kinds of inquiry, shows the benefits Humble Inquiry provides in many different settings, and offers advice on overcoming the cultural, organizational, and psychological barriers that keep us from practicing it.
The Asshole Survival Guide: How to Deal with People Who Treat You Like Dirt
Robert I. Sutton - 2017
Equally useful and entertaining, The Asshole Survival Guide delivers a cogent and methodical game plan when you find yourself working with a jerk—whether in the office, on the field, in the classroom, or just in life. Sutton starts with diagnosis—what kind of asshole problem, exactly, are you dealing with? From there, he provides field-tested, evidence-based, and sometimes surprising strategies for dealing with the rude, impolite, irritating, unpleasant, or just plain incompetent—avoiding them, outwitting them, disarming them, sending them packing, and developing protective psychological armor. Sutton even teaches readers how to look inward to stifle their own inner jackass.
Ultimately, this survival guide is about developing an outlook and personal plan that will help you preserve the sanity in your life, and will prevent all those perfectly good days from being ruined by some jerk.
The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business
Eric Schmidt - 2013
And, the Director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, formerly an advisor to both Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.Never before has the future been so vividly and transparently imagined. From technologies that will change lives (information systems that greatly increase productivity, safety and our quality of life, thought controlled motion technology that can revolutionize medical procedures, and near-perfect translation technology that allows us to have more diversified interactions) to our most important future considerations (curating our online identity and fighting those who would do harm with it) to the widespread political change that will transform the globe (through transformations in conflict, increasingly active and global citizenries, a new wave of cyber-terrorism and states operating simultaneously in the physical and virtual realms) to the ever present threats to our privacy and security, Schmidt and Cohen outline in great detail and scope all the promise and peril awaiting us in the coming decades.
Brandwashed
Martin Lindstrom - 2011
Marketing visionary Martin Lindstrom has been on the front lines of the branding wars for over twenty years. Here, he turns the spotlight on his own industry, drawing on all he has witnessed behind closed doors, exposing for the first time the full extent of the psychological tricks and traps that companies devise to win our hard-earned dollars. Picking up from where Vance Packard's bestselling classic, The Hidden Persuaders, left off more than half-a-century ago, Lindstrom reveals: • New findings that reveal how advertisers and marketers intentionally target children at an alarmingly young age – starting when they are still in the womb! • Shocking results of an fMRI study which uncovered what heterosexual men really think about when they see sexually provocative advertising (hint: it isn’t their girlfriends). • How marketers and retailers stoke the flames of public panic and capitalize on paranoia over global contagions, extreme weather events, and food contamination scares. • The first ever neuroscientific evidence proving how addicted we all are to our iPhones and our Blackberry’s (and the shocking reality of cell phone addiction - it can be harder to shake than addictions to drugs and alcohol). • How companies of all stripes are secretly mining our digital footprints to uncover some of the most intimate details of our private lives, then using that information to target us with ads and offers ‘perfectly tailored’ to our psychological profiles. • How certain companies, like the maker of one popular lip balm, purposely adjust their formulas in order to make their products chemically addictive. • What a 3-month long guerilla marketing experiment, conducted specifically for this book, tells us about the most powerful hidden persuader of them all. • And much, much more. This searing expose introduces a new class of tricks, techniques, and seductions – the Hidden Persuaders of the 21st century- and shows why they are more insidious and pervasive than ever.
Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control
Stuart Russell - 2019
Conflict between humans and machines is seen as inevitable and its outcome all too predictable.In this groundbreaking book, distinguished AI researcher Stuart Russell argues that this scenario can be avoided, but only if we rethink AI from the ground up. Russell begins by exploring the idea of intelligence in humans and in machines. He describes the near-term benefits we can expect, from intelligent personal assistants to vastly accelerated scientific research, and outlines the AI breakthroughs that still have to happen before we reach superhuman AI. He also spells out the ways humans are already finding to misuse AI, from lethal autonomous weapons to viral sabotage.If the predicted breakthroughs occur and superhuman AI emerges, we will have created entities far more powerful than ourselves. How can we ensure they never, ever, have power over us? Russell suggests that we can rebuild AI on a new foundation, according to which machines are designed to be inherently uncertain about the human preferences they are required to satisfy. Such machines would be humble, altruistic, and committed to pursue our objectives, not theirs. This new foundation would allow us to create machines that are provably deferential and provably beneficial.In a 2014 editorial co-authored with Stephen Hawking, Russell wrote, "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last." Solving the problem of control over AI is not just possible; it is the key that unlocks a future of unlimited promise.
The Practice of Network Security Monitoring: Understanding Incident Detection and Response
Richard Bejtlich - 2013
The most effective computer security strategies integrate network security monitoring (NSM): the collection and analysis of data to help you detect and respond to intrusions.In The Practice of Network Security Monitoring, Mandiant CSO Richard Bejtlich shows you how to use NSM to add a robust layer of protection around your networks — no prior experience required. To help you avoid costly and inflexible solutions, he teaches you how to deploy, build, and run an NSM operation using open source software and vendor-neutral tools.You'll learn how to:Determine where to deploy NSM platforms, and size them for the monitored networks Deploy stand-alone or distributed NSM installations Use command line and graphical packet analysis tools, and NSM consoles Interpret network evidence from server-side and client-side intrusions Integrate threat intelligence into NSM software to identify sophisticated adversaries There's no foolproof way to keep attackers out of your network. But when they get in, you'll be prepared. The Practice of Network Security Monitoring will show you how to build a security net to detect, contain, and control them. Attacks are inevitable, but losing sensitive data shouldn't be.
Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear
Frank Luntz - 2006
With chapters like "The Ten Rules of Successful Communication" and "The 21 Words and Phrases for the 21st Century," he examines how choosing the right words is essential. Nobody is in a better position to explain than Frank Luntz: He has used his knowledge of words to help more than two dozen Fortune 500 companies grow. Hell tell us why Rupert Murdoch's six-billion-dollar decision to buy DirectTV was smart because satellite was more cutting edge than "digital cable," and why pharmaceutical companies transitioned their message from "treatment" to "prevention" and "wellness." If you ever wanted to learn how to talk your way out of a traffic ticket or talk your way into a raise, this book's for you.
Threat Modeling: Designing for Security
Adam Shostack - 2014
Dobbs Jolt Award Finalist since Bruce Schneier's Secrets and Lies and Applied Cryptography!Adam Shostack is responsible for security development lifecycle threat modeling at Microsoft and is one of a handful of threat modeling experts in the world. Now, he is sharing his considerable expertise into this unique book. With pages of specific actionable advice, he details how to build better security into the design of systems, software, or services from the outset. You'll explore various threat modeling approaches, find out how to test your designs against threats, and learn effective ways to address threats that have been validated at Microsoft and other top companies.Systems security managers, you'll find tools and a framework for structured thinking about what can go wrong. Software developers, you'll appreciate the jargon-free and accessible introduction to this essential skill. Security professionals, you'll learn to discern changing threats and discover the easiest ways to adopt a structured approach to threat modeling.Provides a unique how-to for security and software developers who need to design secure products and systems and test their designs Explains how to threat model and explores various threat modeling approaches, such as asset-centric, attacker-centric and software-centric Provides effective approaches and techniques that have been proven at Microsoft and elsewhere Offers actionable how-to advice not tied to any specific software, operating system, or programming language Authored by a Microsoft professional who is one of the most prominent threat modeling experts in the world As more software is delivered on the Internet or operates on Internet-connected devices, the design of secure software is absolutely critical. Make sure you're ready with Threat Modeling: Designing for Security.
No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
Glenn Greenwald - 2014
That source turned out to be the twenty-nine-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency's widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a fierce debate over national security and information privacy.Now Greenwald fits all the pieces together, recounting his high-intensity eleven-day trip to Hong Kong, examining the broader implications of the surveillance detailed in his reporting for The Guardian, and revealing fresh information on the NSA's unprecedented abuse of power with documents from the Snowden archive. Fearless and incisive, No Place to Hide has already sparked outrage around the globe and been hailed by voices across the political spectrum as an essential contribution to our understanding of the U.S. surveillance state.
Data Science from Scratch: First Principles with Python
Joel Grus - 2015
In this book, you’ll learn how many of the most fundamental data science tools and algorithms work by implementing them from scratch.
If you have an aptitude for mathematics and some programming skills, author Joel Grus will help you get comfortable with the math and statistics at the core of data science, and with hacking skills you need to get started as a data scientist. Today’s messy glut of data holds answers to questions no one’s even thought to ask. This book provides you with the know-how to dig those answers out.
Get a crash course in Python
Learn the basics of linear algebra, statistics, and probability—and understand how and when they're used in data science
Collect, explore, clean, munge, and manipulate data
Dive into the fundamentals of machine learning
Implement models such as k-nearest Neighbors, Naive Bayes, linear and logistic regression, decision trees, neural networks, and clustering
Explore recommender systems, natural language processing, network analysis, MapReduce, and databases
The Death Of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters
Thomas M. Nichols - 2017
While this has had the positive effect of equalizing access to knowledge, it also has lowered the bar on what depth of knowledge is required to consider oneself an "expert." A cult of anti-expertise sentiment has coincided with anti-intellectualism, resulting in massively viral yet poorly informed debates ranging from the anti-vaccination movement to attacks on GMOs. This surge in intellectual egalitarianism has altered the landscape of debates-all voices are equal, and "fact" is a subjective term. Browsing WebMD puts one on equal footing with doctors, and Wikipedia allows all to be foreign policy experts, scientists, and more. As Tom Nichols shows in The Death of Expertise, there are a number of reasons why this has occurred-ranging from easy access to Internet search engines to a customer satisfaction model within higher education. The product of these interrelated trends, Nichols argues, is a pervasive distrust of expertise among the public coinciding with an unfounded belief among non-experts that their opinions should have equal standing with those of the experts. The experts are not always right, of course, and Nichols discusses expert failure. The crucial point is that bad decisions by experts can and have been effectively challenged by other well-informed experts. The issue now is that the democratization of information dissemination has created an army of ill-informed citizens who denounce expertise.When challenged, non-experts resort to the false argument that the experts are often wrong. Though it may be true, but the solution is not to jettison expertise as an ideal; it is to improve our expertise. Nichols is certainly not opposed to information democratization, but rather the enlightenment people believe they achieve after superficial internet research. He shows in vivid detail the ways in which this impulse is coursing through our culture and body politic, but the larger goal is to explain the benefits that expertise and rigorous learning regimes bestow upon all societies.
How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less
Nicholas Boothman - 1999
Now that connection is infinitely easier to make through Nicholas Boothman's program of rapport by design.How to Make People Like You in 90 Seconds or Less is the work of a master of Neuro-Linguistic Programming whose career is teaching corporations and groups the secrets of successful face-to-face communication. Aimed at establishing rapport-that stage between meeting and communicating-How to Make People Like You focuses on the concept of synchrony. It shows how to synchronize attitude, synchronize body language, and synchronize voice tone so that you instantly and imperceptibly become someone the other person likes. Reinforcing these easy-to-learn skills is knowing how to read the other person's sensory preferences-most of us are visual, some are kinesthetic, and a minority are auditory. So when you say "I see what you mean" to a visual person, you're really speaking his language. Along the way the book covers attitude, nervousness, words that open a conversation and words that shut it down, compliments, eye cues, the magic of opposites attracting, and more. It's how to make the best of the most important 90 seconds in any relationship, business or personal.