Reaction: Personal Integrity
There is, on a daily basis, a choice you must make as a geek, as someone who is involved in technology — particularly in the world of computer networking. The choice we always face, every one of us, is whether to champion a particular product or service, or to champion solving the problem at hand. Between doing what’s best for a vendor — or even harder, what’s best for our career — or doing what’s best for our customer (whoever that customer might be). In other words, what to do with our personal integrity.
I know it’s hard, when you’re working for a vendor, not to just throw yourself into a product to the point of seeing it as the hammer that solves every problem, whether a nail or not. I know it’s hard, when you work for a smaller company, or in what feels like a “side alley” of our little industry (what Ethan calls a “mud puddle”) not to try to throw yourself at being famous, or warping the direction of the company so you can learn something new. I once worked on an account where I’d been asking to come in and help them switch from EIGRP Continue reading
Worth Reading Roundup: Security and Privacy
“If I haven’t done anything wrong, then I don’t have anything to hide.” This is one of those bits of nonsense that never seems to lose it’s power regardless of how many times it’s been proven wrong in history. Privacy is one of the most important freedoms we enjoy — the privacy to try, the privacy to work things out among friends, and even the privacy to fail.
So what does the ‘net say about privacy this week?
One of the most disturbing things is the growing tendency to engineer people for greater efficiency. This trend started more than a hundred years ago — remember this?
But there is something fundamentally dehumanizing about people like machines out of whom you can squeeze infinite amounts of bandwidth — but it seems to be something we’re pushing towards almost as fast as we can, in both the corporate world and in government.
Many countries are in the throes of a debate about the amount of surveillance a government Continue reading
Worth Reading: Connecting the next billion users
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Initial Thoughts: BroadView
What’s interesting about this “product,” produced by Broadcom, is they are open source. We tend to think software will eat the world, but when something like this comes out in the open source space, it makes me think that if software eats the world, profit is going to take a long nosedive into nothingness. From Broadcom’s perspective this makes sense, of course; any box you buy that has a Broadcom chipset, no matter who wrapped the sheet metal around the chipset, will have some new added capability in terms of understanding the traffic flow through the network. Does this sort of thing take something essential away from the vendors who are building their products based on Broadcom, however? It seems the possibility is definitely there, but it’s going to take a lot deeper dive than what’s provided in the post above to really understand. If these interfaces are exposed simply through Continue reading
Worth Reading: Smarter than our tech
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Reaction: Anonymity isn’t a bug
The problem with anonymity and the modern Internet is we tend to think of being anonymous as either “on” or “off” all the time. The only real reason we can think of to want to be anonymous is to do something evil, to hurt someone, to steal something, or to do something else considered anti-social or wrong.
But there’s a problem with this thinking — it’s much like pitting “the rich” against “the poor,” or any other time bound classification. There are times when I want to be anonymous, and there are times when I don’t care. It’s not a matter of doing that which is nefarious. It’s more about expressing opinions you know people won’t agree with, but which the expression of could cause you material harm, or about being able to investigate something without telling anyone about the situation. Continue reading
Worth Listening: Packet Pushers Show 263
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Worth Reading: The Future of Networking
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Castle versus Cannon: It’s time to rethink security
In case you’re confused about the modern state of security, let me give you a short lesson.
Your network is pictured to the left. When I first started working on networks in the USAF we were just starting to build well designed DMZs, sort of a gate system for the modern network. “Firewalls” (a term I’m coming to dislike immensely), guard routers, VPN concentrators, and other systems were designed to keep your network from being “penetrated.” Standing at the front gate you’ll find a few folks wearing armor and carrying swords, responsible for letting only the right people inside the walls — policies, and perhaps even an IDS or two.
The world lived with castles for a long time — thousands of years, to be precise. In fact, the pride of the Roman Legion really wasn’t the short sword and battle formation, it was their ability to work in concrete. Certainly they had swords, but they could also build roads and walls, as evidenced by the Roman style fortifications dotting the entire world.
But we don’t live inside concrete walls any longer. Instead, our armies today move on small and large vehicles, defending territory through measure and countermeasure. They gather Continue reading
QOTW: Ignorance
Contrary to folk wisdom, ignorance is usually not blissful. Generally, it produces the very opposite of bliss. Just ask the frightened hiker lost in some remote mountain blizzard who never paid attention to his Boy Scout instruction; or ask the new employee who never did her math homework, frantically trying to figure out the correct change for customers; or, worse yet, ask the frustrated and annoyed patrons waiting in the ever-increasing line as this new employee bumbles one purchase after another.
Phillip Dow, Virtuous Minds
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Worth Reading: The Cryptech Project
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