Category: philosophy

  • The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

    A monumental work… what a great line as well.  From the immortal Goya. Always stay vigilant….   (Image from the truly marvelous Met Museum of Art web pages, they have wonderful hi-def scans of so much… thanks!!!  What a tremendous way to bring art to the people – this bit isn’t even being physically shown…

  • cats who stare down goats

    I went to the 2011 USENIX security conference… admittedly not expecting much, but wietse was going to be there, and I must say a really, really fine show.  Yes, this is ancient history now… but so am I! Most of us spend a fair bit of time encased in two tons of steel, glass, rubber…

  • …losing a half day of my life… and I’m running out of half days.

    This line did it: $ENV{‘PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME’} = 0; Net::Nessus::XMLRPC, which calls LWP::UserAgent, didn’t emit any hints why something that had been working for many months suddenly doesn’t when I am forced to port to a new system… same OS, how could it go wrong? Turns out LWP changed the default behavior that had been around forever –…

  • philosophizing

    I realize this is a bit old now… but I keep coming back to it. For posterity.  A wise sage once said: There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — [pauses] — shame on you. Fool me — [pauses]…

  • DARPA, I’ll miss you when I’m gone

    So I’ve been winding down my project at DARPA and thought I’d put down some at least close-to-final thoughts on it. I’ve been asked a number of times about how much people should charge for their work.  Three things on this: The government is doing you a favor if you get accepted – you get…

  • security strikeout

    Everybody’s Talkin’… no one’s doing? Talking to a CSO of a fortune 500 company and a CSO of a bank… asked them if they ran scanners or vulnerability assessment tools on their home systems. No. Of course no. 0-3. And pretty much no one I know in the security profession does… it’s way too painful,…