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Reasonably Accurate 🤖🧠 Transcript
Morning everybody. How are you doing today? In this episode of the show? We're gonna talk about James Harden the rules and how that impacts your cybersecurity and privacy. Now, that is probably one of the weirdest intros I've done in a while, but bear with me, I'm 98% sure that this makes sense.
So I'm a big basketball fan. Um and a part of that is watching some of the NBA even though I greatly prefer the W NBA uh and collegiate basketball uh to the NBA. But nevertheless, the NBA playoffs are in full swing and two Titans in the West are facing off in the second round and they had game one this weekend.
Of course, I'm talking about the Golden State Warriors, the reigning Champs against the Houston Rockets. Now, you don't have to be a basketball fan to understand this, but bear with me, we're going to use this example to show you two different faces of the same issue. So on Houston, there is a player called James Harden.
He is the, he is a previous league wide MVP. He is a scoring machine already a legend in the game mainly because he has taken the NBA rulebook, which I hope all the players have read and looked for holes and areas where he can push the boundaries and exploit to his advantage.
And that's a really good thing. Now, take a look at this clip from ESPN second half as it plays. Now, look at how the verticality changes shot goes up. Why child goes? Now, look at this. That's the verticality, right? That's no longer verticality. Look at the angle on that.
It's pretty much like he's laying on the beach in the lawn chair. We put a hat on him and put some glasses on him so he can relax. Ok. This is not a foul in this situation because that's the right call and he's lunging his feet into the player.
And this is how the, now this clip goes on for another few minutes and there's multiple clips from other shows where they're all talking about the rules and the issues uh in officiating from game one between Golden State and Houston. Now you don't have to be a basketball expert, but let me briefly explain the issue at hand here.
Essentially the way the basketball rules are written for the NBA is a little bit vague in these areas. And that's where Harden being the genius that he is, has realized it and he's pushing the boundaries and forcing officials to make calls that they're not used to calling. So we're not talking about his crazy step back three even though there's an entire video that explains why that's not against NBA rules though, against every other rule set in the world, including fa um, what we're talking about here is these three pointers.
So you, there's um, two rules that in basketball, you need to be aware of one around contact and you can't, um, there can't be contact with somebody who's making a shot, but it doesn't state which way the contact has to go. It doesn doesn't mean that, uh, it means that the defender can't initiate contact, but it also says that contact initiated by an offensive player at least implies that contact, uh, started by an offensive player is also a foul on the defensive player.
That's really, really weird. So that's one of the rules and the second rule has to do with this idea of landing zones. Essentially when you're in the air, you can no longer control where you go. So the rules state that if you take off whatever was clear when you took off needs to remain clear so that you can land.
So if you jump straight up, nobody can run underneath you. If you're jumping forward into a clear area, that area to remain clear. But if it wasn't clear when you took off, then it's going to be your foul, not the defending players. So the contention here is that James Harden is actually kicking his legs out into somebody else's area or into an unexpected landing zone.
And the question is whether or not that's a foul or should it be a no call? And if it's a foul should be a foul on the defender who's in that space or should it be a foul on James Harden for initiating, for making contact with somebody? It's a really gray area.
Now, we're not going to answer that question here, even though as a basketball fan, I would love to dive into that. What I wanted to bring up was the relation to cybersecurity and to privacy. I think there's two sides here. First, we're going to talk about your cybersecurity.
So James Harden has a job, he needs to fill up the bucket and help his team win and he's doing a wicked, wicked job of that and he's done it in a really ingenious way. Not only is he an insanely talented player, but he's read the rules and he's figured out an area where he can exploit.
So he has another um move that he's uh famous for uh where it's a step back three point shot. So he's mastered this and it's absolutely genius how he's mastered this because he's essentially standing next to the defender. Then all of a sudden he's 6 ft away, taking a shot that's essentially uncontested and everybody screams that that's a traveling violation, but it's not because he's read the rules and, you know, it's the very fine line that he can walk in order to make that work.
The analogy here is password policies. It security teams, cyber security teams go nuts when they see users passwords. And like, why did you use, you know, just one at the end of your password? Well, because the rules said I needed to change it and it needed to be complicated.
So adding one then going to 2 to 3 to 4 meets those requirements, even if it doesn't meet the spirit of the rules. And I think that's something we as cybersecurity teams need to be aware of is that people are just trying to get their job done while following the rules.
And if that means bending the rules or pushing the rules in an area in which you wouldn't anticipate, then that's what they're going to do because at the end of the day, they're not trying to break the rules, they're trying to adhere to them as best they can while getting their job done.
So if you're writing cybersecurity policy, you need to be aware of that because people are going to do this all the time. Now, the second side of this coin actually relates to your privacy. So we've seen what Harden is doing and now in this issue of shooting the three and swinging his legs forward to generate that contact is forcing the refs to make a call one way or the other, he's essentially saying, I know this is a weak spot.
I know what's possible and I think I can get away with it more often than not. And throughout the regular season, Harden did he more often than not got this call going his way. So he would hit a three pointer and then get an extra shot on the foul line to make it a four point play all while getting a foul on the defending player.
It was such a huge and effective play that obviously he kept going to enforcing the officials that way. And this is the first time. It's really kind of come to loggerheads where it's not going his way in a game and we'll see how it goes in the series.
Now, how does this relate to your privacy? Well, this is very much like social networks where in the terms of service, it says that they are allowed to use your data in certain ways, but then they are coming out publicly stating or making statements, you know, on their websites or an interview saying, oh, we're not going to do that.
Well, the rules say they're allowed to and they're going to push if they need to. So if push comes to shove and they need to win a game, they're going to go that way. And we've seen that time and time again, just like Harden knows that the rules are a little bit murky but allow him to do this even though that wasn't the intention, the intention of that landing zone rule is not that defensive player can jack knife their feet out and, you know, deemed to fall on their butt and make it look even worse.
But the rules allow him to do that even though that totally flies in the face of the intention and the spirit, we see the same thing with social media. We see the same thing with services where the law or in this case, the terms of service, the defining legal agreement says they're allowed to do something.
And as a user, we go well, no, but they said they wouldn't do that as a user. You have to understand that if the rules say they can, they're gonna do it. Someone is gonna do it. Maybe not everybody, someone is going to see that and push it to their advantage because in this case, it's the companies trying to stay alive, trying to make money, trying to gain market share and they're going to do everything they can to do it.
So that's an interesting set of thoughts maybe from a completely different angle. But I think it's really important and it was a really topical thing to see how Harden who's an amazing basketball player has read the rules and realized that there's a lot of gray areas that he can exploit as people who make cybersecurity policy as users of services online that have terms of service.
I think you need to be aware, the exact same thing will happen to you. People will either try to get the job done and push the policy or to their own business benefit, push things forward and take advantage of it because the legal defines agreement says they can.
What do you think? Let me know, hit me up online at Mark NC A in the comments down below for those of you in the vlogs. And as always by email me at Mark N dot C A. Look forward to talking to you about this and many other issues and if you want to shoot the breeze about basketball, let me know too.
Have a great day and we'll see you on the next show.
