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I was teaching a class last week and mentioned something about privacy to the students. One of them shot back, “you’re paranoid.” And again, at a meeting with some folks about missionaries, and how best to protect them when trouble comes to their door, I was again declared paranoid. In fact, I’ve been told I’m paranoid after presentations by complete strangers who were sitting in the audience.
Okay, so I’m paranoid. I admit it.
But what is there to be paranoid about? We’ve supposedly gotten to the point where no-one cares about privacy, where encryption is pointless because everyone can see everything anyway, and all the rest. Everyone except me, that is—I’ve not “gotten over it,” nor do I think I ever will. In fact, I don’t think any engineer should “get over it,” in terms of privacy and security. Even if you think it’s not a big deal in your own life, engineers should learn to treat other people’s information with the utmost care.
In moving from the person to the digital representation of the person, we often forget it’s someone’s life we’re actually playing with. I think it’s time for engineers to take security—and privacy—personally. It’s time Continue reading
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This is a bit of a slow week in the US, and I’ve been deeply imbibing philosophy and theology this weekend (getting ready for the first two PhD classes), so I’m going to do something a little different this week. A lot of folks email me asking about which of my books are worth buying, or asking me if they should buy this or that specific book I’ve written across the years. So, herewith, an honest appraisal of my own books.
This book is based on single question—what have we learned from working on failed networks from the perspective of TAC and Escalation in terms of good network design? It’s hard to believe, but this was (AFAIK) the second book published by Cisco Press, in 1999 (that’s 16 years, 10 books, and two degrees ago!). While I have a fond place in my heart for this book, all the material here is generally updated and improved in Optimal Routing Design, below.
This started life as the EIGRP white paper, written based on a thorough reading of the EIGRP code base as it existing in 2000, along with many hours spent with GDB, Continue reading
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Yet it remains true that general progress needs peace and co-operation, and that it is greatly hindered by pettiness of mind. In face of others’ superiority, there is only one honorable attitude: to be glad of it, and then it becomes our own joy, our own good fortune.
Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life
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Nerd Knobs (or as we used to call them in TAC, knerd knobs) are the bane of the support engineer’s life. Well, that and crashes. And customer who call in with a decoded stack trace. Or don’t know where to put the floppy disc that came with the router into the router. But, anyway…
What is it with nerd knobs? Ivan has a great piece up this week on the topic. I think this is the closest he gets to what I think of as the real root cause for nerd knobs —
Greg has a response to Ivan up; again, I think he gets close to the problem with these thoughts —
A somewhat orthogonal article caught my eye, Continue reading
This is one of those places where I agree with the point the author is making, but I don’t really agree with the path they chose to get there… The bottom line problem is this—government, companies, and even individuals (yes, that means you and I) tend to slip into a mode of treating people as objects which either cost something, or produce something. From many perspectives, it’s easy to treat people as units of information, work, cost, etc.—but when you cross the line from using this as a useful abstraction to actually seeing people as an abstraction, then you’ve cross a line you shouldn’t be crossing.
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