Your mission, should you choose to accept it: make passwords fun.
Not easy, right? That’s what Anthony Collette at Loistava Information Security is determined to do. He and his team are creating physical cybersecurity products (CASTALOT Dice, GhentWare) to help people build good habits.
You can learn more about Loistava Information Security by going to their website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Check out the Weird Marketing Tales website if you haven’t already. If you want to follow Weird Marketing Tales on social media, go to @WeirdMarketing on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Go to @WeirdMarketers on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok.
Chapters
0:00 How Loistava Information Security Is Making Passwords Fun
0:40 What is Loistava Information Security?
2:54 Filling the gap between intent and action
5:06 What does the word “Loistava” mean?
6:40 What are CASTALOT Dice?
9:33 Why large companies are interested in dice to create passwords
12:50 Encouraging good privacy habits at home and not just work
14:47 What is DiceWare?
18:24 What is GhentWare?
19:41 The bigger ambitions of Loistava Information Security
21:30 Return of a very old, but very secure, technology
24:33 How telegraphic codebooks are so secure (despite being so old)
31:07 How Loistava is encouraging different privacy and security behaviors
32:06 What’s next for Loistava?
33:53 Where you can find Anthony Collette & Loistava Information Security online
Transcript
Brandon Rollins: My name is Brandon Rollins, and this is the Weird Marketing Tales Podcast.
On this podcast, I interview small business owners, entrepreneurs, and creative professionals who are doing things that you probably didn’t know that you could do.
And so anybody who’s listened to the last handful of episodes that have been produced, you probably heard me say, “I’m super excited for this guest. I’m really excited to have them on.” And that is always true. Every single time. It really is.
And this time is no different. Absolutely no different at all.
Today, I have on Anthony Collette from Loistava Information Security.
Anthony, how’s it going?
Anthony Collette: Hey, Brandon, it’s going really well. Thanks for having me on today.
What is Loistava Information Security?
Brandon Rollins: Absolutely. So I wanted to give people a brief idea of how it is that we met, came into contact. how I know you. And that is through, the creation of the products that you’re working on right now. So super short pitch, which I’ll let you go into more detail on, is that you run an information security company that focuses on actual physical products.
And I know you through actually CASTALOT Dice which was this product we were working on. Where you could roll dice to create random passwords. But now you are also working on something else, which we’ll discuss in a minute. But first of all, have I missed anything in that intro?
Anthony Collette: No, I think you hit the high points, that’s you got it pretty close. I mean, we are convinced that, um, being safer online is a really important thing. All of the data breaches that we see, people’s accounts getting hacked. I had a coworker who was hacked four times in one year, which was really quite an eye-opening experience.
But our point of view is that, most of what the information security industry does is give people good advice and that’s great, but giving good advice only goes so far.
And we have a background in creating physical consumer products. And we thought one of the things we should try is to create these colorful, fun, energetic, physical products that can grab people’s attention, and that people can have fun using. And something in addition to just giving advice.
So that’s what Loistava is about and that’s what we do.
Brandon Rollins: See, that’s very cool. And I can’t help, but be reminded of a podcast, which I’m like 95% sure is gonna be out by the time this one is, where I was talking with Carey Parker who you actually introduced me to. He’s an information security guy for anybody, who’s just listening to this episode alone.
Anthony Collette: Awesome.
Brandon Rollins: Yeah! He is awesome. He’s very, very knowledgeable. And very good at what he does, because like you believes that, you know, there’s all this good information security advice out there. It’s not hard to find someone who will tell you to use a password manager or update your software or whatever. But it’s actually surprisingly tough to find someone, who will help you build the habits needed to actually take the steps that we all know are important to do anyway.
Filling the gap between intent and action
Brandon Rollins: And I think it’s interesting what you’re doing with Loistava. Because you’re actually filling that gap between intent and action.
Anthony Collette: Right! I mean, we’ve all had this shared lived experience where there’s been some sort of physical thing in the environment. You walk into somebody’s office and you see some physical thing. And you say, “oh wow, what’s that? Where’d you get that” and you know, a story begins from that.
It’s one thing to give people advice, but when there’s a physical thing in your hand or a physical thing in your environment that creates an opportunity to talk about it and discuss it, and maybe even argue about something, if you don’t agree on the, the topic at hand, but it’s a physical reality there that, really motivates people to start thinking and talking.
And like that’s the point of having something physical there and we’ve used physical, I mean in our teaching efforts forever in all sorts of teaching, and diverse, there’s been, you know, props and physical things and charts. And a variety of different physical things that are used for instance, in the teaching environment to help people focus their attention.
We think of these, each one of these physical information security products we’re developing. We think of each one of them as a catalyst to help speed up the adoption of information security best practices. Because there are things people can do or there are things people should do. The idea is you wanna move the needle quicker and move people further along that spectrum of doing what they can do to keep themselves safer online, protect themselves, protect their online accounts.
And so that’s our approach and these things, these products that we make. They can be used by individuals out in the community who just have an interest in this. They can be used by IT folks, as they teach people in their organizations information security best practices, or even there are folks who are information security specialists. We’ve talked to quite a few of those and they are very excited with the idea that there would be these physical products available to them that they can use in their classes, in their workshops. As they, you know, try to get these messages across to the people in their audiences.
Brandon Rollins: Yeah! And that makes a lot of sense. So one thing I just wanna make sure that we get in the show. What does the word Loistava mean?
What does the word “Loistava” mean?
Anthony Collette: Well, I used to live in Finland a long time ago and, uh, “Loistava” means “shiny” or “brilliant.” If you listen to very many British people, if someone says something that they really agree with, they’ll say. “Oh, Brilliant! Brilliant!” That’s really popular, common expression there in the UK and in Finland, they do the exact same thing.
They say, if someone says something they agree with, or that they really like. They’ll say “Loistava” that’s just, you know, brilliant. And so there’s, there’s that we thought that was a fun, fun word. And also from the physical standpoint of what sort of a surface do we want our products to have?
We do want them to have a brilliant, shiny surface. So that was another reason we chose the word Loistava. When it came to a branding point of view, there are a number of American brands now that are, that are using foreign words as a way to brand themselves and to be distinct and unique.
And in the tech world, there’s a wifi product called Eero which is a Finnish guy’s name, and I think Amazon, either Amazon or Google, recently bought that brand. But at any event it was a way to brand ourselves, to differentiate a bit. It’s a little bit unusual but, yeah, I think it is definitely distinctive.
Brandon Rollins: Yeah. And part of why I wanted to get that on the show is because I think it’s just such a perfect match between mission and name. Because the name itself is describing basically what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to create something brilliant or clever that is gonna help people do the stuff that they need to do anyway.
And it’s like you said, it also is a word that can be used to describe the actual look of the products themselves.
Anthony Collette: Right!
Brandon Rollins: So, yeah! That’s some clever branding in there for anybody listening for marketing tips.
Anthony Collette: Well, good.
What are CASTALOT Dice?
Brandon Rollins: Yeah. So about the products, what have you been working on so far?
Anthony Collette: So our, the big picture for Loistava is we want to start out with authentication in the information security industry. And what that means is how do you prove it’s you, when you try to log onto an online account. You use a, typically use a username and a password, and that’s how you prove that it’s you.
And although in the big picture, we want to move past the use of passwords. That’s not gonna happen anytime soon. The first two products that Loistava is producing, are the first product is called CASTALOT Dice. And that’s a set of 14 large dice that when you roll those 14 dice together, you get a 14 character randomly generated password.
These are not the kind of passwords you’d memorize, but these are the kind of passwords that are considered to be the strongest passwords you can create. And right out of the box by default, using these CASTALOT Dice, you get a 14 character password that’s composed of upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters.
It’s one thing if someone says, you should make a strong password. That’s one thing. But when you’re sitting in a room and, in front of you, you’ve got these 14 large dice and you’re throwing them around and they’re bouncing around and they’re making noise and they’re colorful and they’re swirly and they, it’s very dynamic and , and they’re loud, and it’s just a very different experience to create this incredibly strong password yourself. You’re sort of, you’re handcrafting your own ultra strong password, and you’re doing that with a fun physical product.
That’s what CASTALOT Dice is.
Brandon Rollins: Yeah, it’s the aesthetics and the physicality of it and honestly, even the noisiness of it.
That’s what makes it special.
I, got a lot of stuff that people have sent me over the years in my office, but I’d tell you that nobody else has sent me dice with a bunch of random letters and numbers and characters on them for passwords, like, that’s something that is genuinely unique.
Anthony Collette: It is! It’s genuinely unique and years ago, when we were just in the very beginning getting into this. The information security industry we thought we’ll just go, we thought, it would be nice to do a workshop about this. And to use dice similar to this and surely these dice already exist.
We’ll go out into the world and just buy a few sets of these and have fun with them. And we went looking for them and couldn’t find them anywhere, which seemed like an enormous omission. Because if you know anything about the dice world, there’s dice for everything, which we didn’t know in the beginning, but we had fun to like meet a bunch of dice people and have become more familiar with the dice world.
And there are dice for everything. Dice you can’t even imagine, there they are out there but no one had done dice that produced for character these passwords, but these four different types of characters in them. And so we designed those, we worked with a designer to design them.
Why large companies are interested in dice to create passwords
Anthony Collette: We got design patents all over the world on these. And we began manufacturing them and small quantities to test the molds that we had created. And now we’ve have at this point we have two large. Two very large companies that are have expressed interest who have asked us to send them prototypes.
So that they can play with them and experiment with them among their employees and give us some feedback. They themselves, these extremely large companies have had positive experiences using physical tools in training sessions before, and they wanted to have some sort of physical tool to use in their workshops related to information security.
But no one had approached them with anything other than a poster or something like that. No one had approached them with anything physical before to use. And so they were was kind of a nice positive benefit for us, benefit for us that, that they were already convinced. It was a good idea to have these physical, these physical products in their workshops and trainings.
So they were very receptive. And so now we’ve got some prototypes put together for them. And, and one of the things we needed to do, because there were 14 of these dice and they were very large. We didn’t have, we couldn’t find a dice tray that worked really well for them. So we developed a very large oval dice tray with an off white rolling surface. For most of the time dice were white.
And so the rolling surface was dark, like dark green, because that contrasted with the white of the dice. But you know, now there are so many really beautiful dice, and our dice are very colorful and very beautiful. So, we developed a very large oval dice tray with a white rolling surface so that the colors of the dice are accentuated against the white background.
So we’re also gonna be providing these large companies with this dice tray we’ve created, which they can also use with the dice in their training environments.
Brandon Rollins: That’s such an interesting direction that went because, initially, I remember working on this with you for crowdfunding initially. But it turned out that actually these big companies were really interested in it, because some of the dice folks say like it was kind of hard to find that crossover between dice and privacy security and that kind of thing. But the big companies get what you’re trying to.
Like they know exactly what you’re trying to do. And they also know if there’s anything that I can do well, yeah. They’re asking themselves, ” is there anything I can do to get employees to make secure passwords, actually make them, because if I can get ’em to do that, we’ll save millions, maybe billions of dollars in data that we’re not gonna lose in a breach” and other stuff like this! They get it.
Anthony Collette: They totally get it.
From the big company’s point of view, that doesn’t require any infrastructure.
You know, if you’re usually trying to sell into a big company, they have to there’s there’s some way they have to change what they’re doing or change. You know, they have to integrate some new software into the software they already have. But with our products, they function completely independent of any need for a large company to change anything internally.
So it’s really just a question of using these inside their existing training environment or their, they wanted to provide a set of CASTALOT Dice to their employees and say, take this home, we care about you, we care about you and your family. We care about you being safer online.
Encouraging good privacy habits at home and not just work
Anthony Collette: So here we are giving you a set of CASTALOT Dice. Take this home and keep yourself at home safer online. Uh, One of the issues that’s come up is it’s for businesses is that their employees are reusing some of their weak, personal passwords in their business accounts.
If someone has a personal account and a password that’s been, um, hacked. And now that password is available online that, it’s possible for the bad guys to try that password at a company that they know this person um, works at so, it’s so common for people to, unfortunately…
it’s so common for employees to use to reuse their personal passwords at work, which is a terrible thing to do. And businesses are, are certainly clueing into the fact that that’s going on and it would be great to find ways to, to keep that from happening.
Brandon Rollins: Yeah. And you can only, you can only go so far with telling folks what to do even in the office. I mean, if you were to theoretically install LastPass, a popular password manager, on everybody’s computer, it’s like, “okay, cool. It’s not gonna cost us that much. It’s a few bucks per person throughout the whole company, a penny compared to what a data breach could cost,” but of course there’s gotta be the training and you gotta enforce the actual use of it. And that’s not easy to do, that costs money. And all of a sudden, it’s not just money. It’s complexity that they’re adding to the business. And yet, all that can be undone. Like you said, if they just reuse something that they’re using at home.
You give them actual physical gift. You can influence, say, in a completely benevolent way behavior outside of the office where it just otherwise wouldn’t be possible, or maybe even ethical to do, you know?
Anthony Collette: Right. And that benevolent behavior you’re encouraging outside the business. Helps the business at the same time. So that’s a good thing. And so that’s what CASTALOT Dice is and we’re still very much involved in developing that and getting those samples and those prototypes out to companies.
What is DiceWare?
Anthony Collette: And we are still pursuing crowdfunding. And um, Loistava’s second product was always going to be a new revised updated, more modern version of an existing technology called DiceWare. So now perhaps 25 years ago, Arnold Reinhold, a fellow named Arnold Reinhold, came up with an idea to use dice in a very different way.
There was just five regular dice. And by rolling the dice, a number of times you would create an extremely strong pass phrase, and that’s what DiceWare was all about. It’s considered a rock solid, awesome technology that works extremely well.
From the standpoint of people like, like us at Loistava, people who have a background in creating consumer products, DiceWare was a great technology, but it wasn’t ready for prime time as a consumer product for wide distribution.
It was described as being a way to create a passphrase composed of words, but some of the words were not really words. And there was, there was a, just some, there was some jargon in there. There was a little bit of, uh, salty language in there. But we, as people who have some background in creating consumer products knew that as it was, it just wasn’t really ready for prime time. But thankfully in more recent times, there have been some new developments with DiceWare.
And now we can reimagine DiceWare for use as a modern consumer product that a lot of people would, would like. So that’s what we’re working on right now. We are working with a graphic designer to develop a look and feel for our initial introduction of this new version of DiceWare.
And that’s what Loistava’s second product will be.
Brandon Rollins: Oh, one thing I actually wanna toss in there for others.
If, If you’ve ever heard of DiceWare or something like it, you might have actually heard of it from the comic strip. People tend to call correct horse, battery staple.
Basically what it is if you roll different combinations of dice, you will get different words.
And those words, when you put ’em together, create a unique passphrase that is very easy to remember, but basically impossible to hack. For anybody who actually wants to see that comic strip, I’m actually gonna insert that in the transcript. So if you happen to be on the blog and you stumble across this audio, you can see the actual comic strip, which I’m referencing.
Anthony Collette: Perfect. Yeah, that’s very common. In fact, It’s very well known and we knew that people in the information security industry really liked DiceWare. And when we started talking to people and doing some preliminary advertising, we got a tremendous amount of response back from people telling us how much they liked it.
We didn’t know that their interest was that strong. I mean, we knew they liked it. We didn’t know, they had such an emotional attachment to it and a lot of people really do. So that’s really great. And what we are trying to do with DiceWare is, it was always a thing… if you were in the know you would know to go to the DiceWare side and download the word list and, you know, what the instructions were and what the best practices for using it were.
And then you’d have to go find the dice yourself somewhere. And it was always something you’d have to rustle up for yourself. There wasn’t, there wasn’t, a simple, complete kit or a simple package. What we are doing is we’re creating a complete package, which has everything in it.
It has a book with all the instructions. The word list, and the book. And these worksheets that people can use. They’re sort of like training wheels. If you’ve never done it before you don’t, you can use these these worksheets to create your first five pass phrases.
And there’s also the dice, we’ve had custom dice made, quite pretty dice, that are made specifically for this. So instead of dots on them, these dice have numbers, which is, makes them little more customized for this experience of creating pass phrases.
What is GhentWare?
Anthony Collette: It’s a complete kit in a standup pouch that someone who really likes DiceWare will be able to share their enthusiasm for DiceWare, with their friends, family, neighbors, simply by giving them the kit and the kit is all together, all in one. And it’ll be fun and colorful, interesting looking, and we are finding ways to associate, for instance, just the natural beauty of the environment where a lot of research was done recently that a, that was used to improve DiceWare, was done in Ghent, the city of Ghent in Belgium, which is one of the most beautiful Renaissance cities.
The city of Ghent, for 600 years, has been protected by this, golden dragon that’s protected them. And so, we’re just looking for ways to add interest layers of interest to this consumer product.
How do you take a technology that’s rock solid, but some people would consider boring. And how do you make it interesting and colorful? And so that’s what we’re up to there with our version of DiceWare.
Brandon Rollins: Yeah! Because you’re trying to keep it on people’s desks. And one way to do that is just by making it absolutely gorgeous to look at. So you’ve hired this really talented artist. I’ve seen this portfolio and I think that’s definitely gonna help, especially when you’re trying to capture the magic of a Renaissance city in something that actually stands on the desk. I think that’s gonna help a lot.
The bigger ambitions of Loistava Information Security
Anthony Collette: Yeah I hope so. I think it’ll look really, it’ll look really nice when it’s done. So I’m looking forward to seeing it when it’s all, when it’s completed. But that’s the second product there. And then beyond that we want Loistava, our goal with Loistava, is to look into creating products that might help people recognize information security as a potential career choice, because I think a lot of people aren’t aware that information security is a its own separate area. It’s sort of a specialty inside IT.
So, so we would like to make products that catch people’s attention and introduce them to the idea that, hey, this information security might be a career path I might be interested in.
And then beyond that the fourth area at Loistava we’re interested in, is this idea of how do you secure the content of your messaging? If you send emails or any sort of sensitive communication at all, one way like direct messaging, whatever that may be, how uh, are there ways to secure that?
And um, folks in the information security industry are coming around to the idea that, try as hard as we like, it’s turned out to be far more difficult to secure the content of messaging than people thought it would be. Even when people use solutions like uh, Signal, for instance, even using signal does not absolutely guarantee the content of your messaging will be completely secure. And also there’s just some real concern among people at the very top of the industry that some of these systems are just providing the security to the messaging, to the content that they would like. So anyway, that’s our fourth area of products that we’re developing. And, And basically we’re looking at an antique security technology and trying and reimagining that for use in the modern world.
Return of a very old, but very secure, technology
Anthony Collette: These are called telegraphic code books. There’s a, there’s an enormous part of our shared information security history that we’ve sort of forgotten. And it’s really kind of a it’s very interesting that there was a technology called telegraphic code books that were ubiquitous.
They were everywhere. Every industry used. So, whatever industry you were in, if you were Chiquita and you were selling carloads, you know, trainloads of bananas as a fruit importer, you would have telegraphic code books specific to that. If you were a company that owned live theaters, you would have telegraphic code books specific to live theaters.
If you were a law firm, there were legal telegraphic code books. If you were a stock broker. Stockbroker firm, there were telegraphic code books for stockbrokers. The issue was, in that period of time from about the 1840s to the 1940s, the internet of that era was the telegraph and it was well known to be extremely insecure, completely insecure.
The question was, especially if you were dealing with any sort of money transactions on online during that period. You know, how do you conduct a business online? How do you transfer money, et cetera? How do you deal with these sensitive financial transactions online if the telegraph isn’t secure.
Also the telegraph was expensive to use. So these systems were developed to make using the telegraph less expensive, and also to create security. So the question is? And there are people in the information security industry who have mentioned that we know this is something we should look at again. But I haven’t seen too many people pursue that idea.
Well, that was an idea that we pursued early on. So, to really look into what this technology was, who used it, how it was used, how it would be used today. So, if you would not use this technology, the way that 99% of the people used it. Like, if you were gonna use this technology today, you wouldn’t do that because that would be just a big information security disaster.
But if you were one of the one percenters of that era, if you were one of the richest people, one of the most influential people, if you were one of the J Paul Getty or you know, that crowd, the people at the very top of the social strata or the business world, who had the money to spend, to use this technology differently. If you were motivated because you thought maybe your child or your wife might get kidnapped while they were traveling, and that did happen, and that was a concern to the extremely wealthy folks at that time, then you would use this technology differently. So that was one of the, the, the stepping points for us is, ah, so the 1% of the people at that time use this technology differently.
How do they do it? What do they do? How would that influence how we would reimagine this telegraphic codebook technology for use today? So that’s what we’ve been working on and we’ve made a great deal of progress there. And what that product looks like is an information security product that works completely differently than anything we’re used to.
How telegraphic codebooks are so secure (despite being so old)
Anthony Collette: It works totally differently, and of course with there are pros and cons to anything. But in that case for that project, we imagine that as a fairly straightforward piece of software for use on the Windows machine and the purpose of that software is to create a customized physical product.
So it would print out two copies of a book, and then you would close the software. And you wouldn’t use the software again until you wanted to make another version of the book that you just printed. But basically there’s pros and cons to any approach. But in this case, this product, once it was printed, would work on any operating system.
It would work on, you know, if you’re communicating, using a Windows machine or an Apple machine or you’re using cell phones. Or heck it would work on in a letter or on a fax or on a, if you were sending a message by FedEx. Once the telegraphic customized book is printed, it works on everything exactly the same way.
So that’s one of the, one of the ways that, that technology is we reimagine it for use modernly would be different. But that’s the big arc of what Loistova is about. So how do you make people safer online by helping them with our passwords, their past phrases. And how do we introduce information security as a potential career choice to people who aren’t aware that’s available, and how do we move people into more secure messaging?
And one of the reasons that’s important, the messaging issue is because as an example, we have in America this idea that communications between a law firm and their client are kind of sacred and that people shouldn’t mess with that. But we are discovering more and more that there is an a dynamic where private investigator firms are being hired to hack law firms specifically so that they can get in between the law firm and their client, and get into that stream of communication between the law firm and the client.
And that is um, that’s simply happening more and more, and it’s unfortunate that this is just one example. But as an example, there, if there was a way to have communication between any two people or between a, let’s say a law firm and a client. Or between someone who is purchasing some products and they want their purchasing attention.
You know, if you’re bidding on a product and you don’t want people to know what your bid range is. You know, there are a variety of different issues for this, but in this case, the point is you could have this secure communication that is simply not hackable in any of the common, in any common understanding of the terminology.
It’s like completely separate from the ways that hacking normally takes place.
Brandon Rollins: Yeah! Totally different kind of hacking.
Anthony Collette: Well sure! The idea here is that there’s total physical separation. So one of the problems that we have using modern technology is that when you type a piece of content, let’s say you type a piece of content into a using a computer, like your laptop, you’re typing there.
So the plain text message is being typed into let’s say the Signal for instance. If your laptop or your phone is compromised already, then, say there’s a, a key logger already installed on your phone or your laptop. Then even if you’re using an application like Signal, someone who has hacked your piece of equipment will be able to know what you’re typing and what you’re receiving because your phone or your laptop is hacked.
Brandon Rollins: But if you had a code book of some sort, like a physical token outside of the computer, people wouldn’t be able to hack that at all.
Anthony Collette: Exactly completely outside of it, and there’s no connection. So the idea would be that, if someone was well… we don’t have to get too deep into the details of it, but that’s the idea, right? The book, the software that creates the book is on another computer, somewhere that at a certain point, just isn’t connected to the internet anymore.
Someone who wanted to do that seriously would just purchase an inexpensive laptop. Or would repurpose an inexpensive laptop. They’d put the software on the, on there, and then they would disconnect it from the internet and there’d be no need for it to be connected to the internet anymore. And then they would create these codebooks.
And since the codebooks are created completely outside of they’re created in an environment that’s completely separate from the environment where you are typing the messages in, then it doesn’t matter if your laptop or your phone is already hacked.
It doesn’t matter, if there’s a keylogger on there. It’s irrelevant. If you send a message to someone using a telegraphic code book, then it doesn’t matter if someone splashes that message on the front page of the New York times. It’s irrelevant. All they have are, are the codes that you’re transmitting. They don’t have content of the message.
Brandon Rollins: That’s cool because we also know this works because it, we’ve got 150+ years of history, proving that this works for messages that are sent through electronic means.
Anthony Collette: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, telegraphic code books were in constant use for over 180 years all over the world. So what’s unusual about this. The history of this technology is, it was ubiquitous. It was everywhere. It was used all over the world by different, obviously different people by businesses, governments, by militaries.
And there is a, an enormous pile of information about how this technology worked about how it succeeded and about how it failed. And it’s really good to know how something fails. So, it’s a really it’s an awesome, it’s an awesome luxury to have that much information about how these things worked and the different ways people used them.
And we also have some really pointed information from the NSA. From people who worked in the NSA who lived through those periods who used those products. You know, every day and they have mentioned and left us with some really useful bits and pieces. Some really useful data points, that are extraordinarily helpful if we are going to, as we reimagine this technology and use it again.
So we’re not just, you know, making things up as we go along, we have this enormous body of history to rely on. And then we also have. Very pointed information from people who were ultimate insiders at as an example of the NSA who know, security systems. And so, um, that’s been um, really quite fun to dig into and to explore.
Brandon Rollins: Yeah, you’ve got so much information to work with both just really old information and the absolute most new technology to work with too. It’s an interesting combination of stuff to have on your side.
How Loistava is encouraging different privacy and security behaviors
Anthony Collette: Yeah! So that’s what Loistava is about. So we’re starting with passwords and pass phrases because you know, basically the idea is with a pass phrase. You use a pass phrase to lock your device, instead of some random, difficult to type password. You create a pass phrase and you find a way to make it fun either, like maybe you say it. I don’t know, it depends on who you are?
But you know, if you’re of a certain age, maybe you would say your passphrase, like Marlon Brando, or you would maybe you’d say your passphrase like John Wayne. And if you were a younger person, maybe you’d find a way to memorize your password by saying it like Lizzo. Or you know, pick a, pick a celebrity and you know, their voice and the way they speak and just find a way to make memorizing and saying your pass phrase to yourself, more fun.
And then those two things using strong passwords for every online account and then using a pass phrase to lock and unlock your devices like your phone and your laptop, combine those two things together. And we’re a pretty far away on the way to making ourselves safer.
What’s next for Loistava?
Brandon Rollins: Absolutely. So there’s a whole bunch of products and software coming down the pipeline in the future. What is the immediate next step for Loistava?
Anthony Collette: The next step, what we’re working on right now is popularizing these two initial products. So we’ve got CASTALOT Dice, which we’re working with large companies to provide them in bulk to their own employees and we’re working on our version of DiceWare, which will be fun and colorful and interesting. And that will be a, that will be a consumer product that will market directly to consumers and also to large businesses for their own, for their internal use.
Brandon Rollins: If the landing page is up by the time this podcast is out, you can find that in the transcript and show notes.
Anthony Collette: Right! We’ll definitely have that down there and then the other thing that we’re doing is, I think people don’t know us that well yet because we’re new, just this year. We’ve introduced ourselves to the information security industry. So we’ve been talking to people in the industry.
Uh, We did a podcast with Carey Parker and then on the Loistava site, we did a blog post about that podcast and we found ways to connect with people online who might be interested in those topics. And then, we did some advertising for 90 days and we directed really close to 10,000 people to that blog post about this antique technology.
So that’s very encouraging as far, as what Loistava is up to now. It’s finding ways to connect with people online who are interested in these topics, directing them to our blog posts. Creating a community around folks who are very interested in these ways to stay safer.
Brandon Rollins: That’s very cool. I have a soft spot for good educational resources online like that.
Anthony Collette: Yeah! You know, there’s, we just need all the help we can get. There’s just a lot of craziness going on and anything that helps move the needle further in the right direction is definitely worth pursuing.
Where you can find Anthony Collette & Loistava Information Security online
Brandon Rollins: I completely agree. So with that in mind, where can people find you online.
Anthony Collette: So, our website kind of has a long name. It’s loistavainfosecurity.com, but I’m sure Brandon will be kind enough to his listeners to include a link. Also we’ll be doing over time more and more advertising on Facebook. You may encounter us there. And we do have a presence on Twitter you can also, find us there.
Brandon Rollins: All those social links are down there, transcript and show notes as well.
All right. Well, thank you very much for your time today. I really appreciate it.
Anthony Collette: Oh, thank you for having me on, I love talking about these things. I could talk about them all day long.
Brandon Rollins: Yeah. And honestly, there’s just, you’ve got a lot of cool products coming down the pipeline. I can’t wait to see, um, GhentWare, when that’s a little closer to, um, completion, I can’t wait to see the third and the fourth products as well.
Anthony Collette: I should have some initial artwork to show you maybe in about a week or two. So I’ll get that to you and you can take a look.
Brandon Rollins: Oh, man, I can’t wait for that. Very cool. I might just pop that in the transcript as well, because honestly, this is going up way in the future anyway.
Anthony Collette: Awesome! Well, great.
Brandon Rollins: All right. Well, at this point, I’m gonna go ahead and take us out. Is that all right?
Anthony Collette: Yeah.
Brandon Rollins: All right cool.
My name is Brandon Rollins. This has been the Weird Marketing Tales Podcast.
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