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Byte Wars
My friend who nodded as if this was the same game he played every day in the courtroom. If no one knew what was going to happen, the jury's instincts could be manipulated with a mixture of fear, sympathy and tribalism. Juries were always afraid of watching a good, relatively innocent man lose everything, he explained. Corporate executives were just as worried of the same thing happening to them.
The Y2K binge is long gone and the biggest effect on computers seems to be found in the bits representing the bank accounts of Y2K consultants. Gimmicks may fade but human nature and human fear remains the same. The destruction of the World Trade Center has given new life to the fear mongers who worry that someone may obliterate our electronic infrastructure. Edward Yourdon, the old school computer consultant who made plenty of noise about Y2K, is back with another book, Byte Wars: The Impact of September 11th on Information Technology .
When I say old school, I mean that he started programming and writing about programming in the mid 1970s and this shows in the way he spells ( "Obe Wan Kenobee") and talks about "paradigm shifts" instead of "memes." He comes from the age group that decided how much to spend on Y2K and he knows how to talk to the group that will control how much we spend on our fears of terrorism.
There is no mention of his record on Y2K on the book cover or the biography, but if you're interested, the net never forgets. The book does mention the scary days of December 1999 a bit in passing, but only to note that there was "very little awareness in the media" that some "small organizations did suffer moderate-to-severe Y2K problems." He also notes with some pride that many companies survived the turmoil after the World Trade Center attack because they made so many preparations for the turn of the millennium.
This time around Yourdon is blessed with a much more concrete threat and this both helps and hurts his cause. On one hand, no one can debate the power of airplanes as weapons in the same way we can still debate whether Y2K would make a difference to embedded controllers. On the other hand, it's not really clear what the latest attacks have to do with computer networks. He even notes that the DOD's computers were relatively unhurt by the destruction of the Pentagon. How many web sites or e-commerce sites can anyone knock out with a box cutter? One company I knew with offices on the 81st floor of the World Trade Center used a co-lo facility that survived. Their web site kept on pumping out hits even after their entire office turned to dust.
Yourdon dodges all of this by being politely vague and abstract. His chapter on risk management, for instance, counsels that we should find a "realistic assessment of risks" and weigh the probability against the danger. If we develop a process to deal with the risk, then we can ensure that the risks are shared between the stakeholders. Most of the chapter could have been written at any time about any risk , but he makes it all a bit more current by including a few references to kamikaze players who are shifting the paradigm.
Some of his advice gets so abstract that it's hard to know exactly what he is suggesting. He tells us to "examine the practical impact of increased security and decreased privacy." To him, that means warning people who rely upon the social freedom of "don't ask, don't tell" to realize that so much information about us will eventually be documented by the new security state. "Now is the time to think about such matters, not two or three years from now when you suddenly find that you can't get a job, or can't buy a house in a particular neighborhood." Should we rise up or acquiesce? Which side is he on? I'm still not sure. He does such a good job playing to everyone's fears.
Occasionally, he doles out some practical advice that is close to the needs of managers worried about the aftereffects of 9/11. We are told that terrorists may be posing as "ordinary employees" or even government employees who've "risen to high levels of trust and authority." He reminds us that "hardly anyone watches the programmers." Is some terrorist slipping in a buffer-overflow loophole? Or maybe just a crook? One of the most practical suggestions is that corporations should do more code reviews.
He's also hip to some of the latest intellectual fads. Emergent organisms like Napster can be useful and resilient. He's a big fan of empowering employees by cutting away bureaucracy so the organization can evolve some emergent intelligence. Of course, we must also be ready for more scrutiny from the security bureaucracy checking to ensure that the emergent organism isn't evolving buffer-overflow backdoors. This gets a bit confusing and he waves away much of conflict with abstract calls for balance.
In the end, Yourdon can't offer many answers because there aren't many answers to give. We had risks, terrorism, info warfare, bombs and whatnot before September 11th and we'll meet them again despite the security. Anarchists detonated a horse powered wagon filled with explosives in front of the NY Fed in the 1920s. Not much has really changed and the book ends up being a distilled version of the inchoate fears that haunt us.
The real challenge is determining how much fear we should have. Yourdon is far from the only person who automatically assumes that the attacks on New York mean more attention to cybersecurity. All of the major beltway consultants near Washington are gearing up with the new tools. The more I read the book, the more I began wondering why. Why do some kamikaze hijackers mean that the web needs to be locked down? Who really has time to worry about some al Queda l33t d00dz owning my site when so many people are dying true deaths that can't be fixed with backup tapes?
At the end of one of the chapters, Yourdon exhorts us to get our act together and secure our home computers. Our old, pre-9/11 computing style was equivalent to "living in a house with the doors and windows wide open", he says, something that was "a pleasant way to live if you were in a small town in the 1950s."
Ah, the 50s. He and everyone else should rent a copy of George Lucas's pre-Star Wars classic, "American Graffiti." In one scene, the teenagers cheerfully drop a cherry bomb down the school's toilet. In another, they destroy a police car by wrapping a chain around the rear axle. The laugh track blessed both events in the movie, but all of us know that they would bring out the SWAT teams today.
The movie managed to avoid much of the discussion about Eisenhower, Francis Gary Powers, the Russian H-Bomb, or any of the other fears rippling down our spines. The 50's seem so much more fun after editing out the fact that the Russians had (and still have) fusion bombs on the tips of missiles. No amount of frisking by airport security can keep them out of our airspace. Yet we survived and managed to laugh about kids trashing police cars.
Another solution is not to quiver and worry about Osama bin Hacker's script kiddies. We can redefine the terms of engagement in much the same way that the cops in the "American Graffiti" just laughed at those impish kids. Hacked web sites are easy to restore if you have adequate backups. Denial of service attacks from zombies on cable modems sound threatening, but they rarely last longer than Friday evening rush hour.
It's hard to argue with much of the plainspoken, largely abstract advice offered by Yourdon. All of it makes good sense. The harder problem is finding the right attitude to carry us through the night. This book is filled with worry for our future and awe of the unseen l33t d00dz hiding under the bed. There are bits of light and a stab at optimism near the end, but most of the book trades on the thoughts that will keep us up well past midnight.
Peter Wayner has two resilient books emerging this spring: Translucent Databases , an exploration of database security, and Disappearing Cryptography: Information Hiding, Steganography and Watermarks , the second edition devoted to hiding secret messages in plain sight. You can purchase Byte Wars from bn.com. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.
"one aimed at everyone concerned about online terrorism in the post-9/11 climate"
"Hey, how are we going to flog this tedious book about computers?"
"Simple - put something about terrorists in it. Get me some clip art of a Arab looking guy with a gun or something."
This is very useful. Damn Useful.
here is part of the info from the RFN story:
I love the insightful simplicity of the piece."It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I remember going to the Official Time Clock of the US Naval Observatory and seeing the time as "00:01 01/01/19100".
Best Slashdot Co
IIRC, Yourdon is something of an egomaniac.
I don't imagine that there are many subjects that he doesn't feel qualified to write a book about.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
This author looks like the run-o'-the-mill fear-mongering sort that the media loves to trot out when they've got no real news to talk about. So why on earth are we hearing about him at all?
Hmmm.... Maybe I should start writing book reviews for Slashdot! "Review: Discourses of Epictetus, a rational look at the problems of today's world politics and our individual lives"... written only 1900 years ago!
-Rick
- The end of the American programmer
- The end of the world in Y2K
Previously retracted...
- The end of the American programmer
- The end of the world in Y2K
The stuff on structured analysis and project managemetn is useful. That's about it.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I am completely disgusted with everyone milking the September 11th attack for their own benefit. If you have something on your agenda to promote, just find a way to attach it to September 11th and you're set.
suicide bombers. anyone who puts in the effort can do it. the reason or planet generally survives this is because the vast majority of people are not this way. I personally am in a position such that with the click of a few buttons, or by rewriting one line of code i could cause tens of millions of dollars of damage to multiple production facilities around the world. i probably could even injure people if i got the timing right. but I could just as easily strap on some bombs and detonate myself on a crowded subway too. yet i'm fairly certain i'll never do these things. but surely someone out there will, and we'll just have to deal with it, like we always do.
We've all seen pulp fucktion marketed through FUD before. Sensationalistic news sells. Look at the plethora of Jon Benet Ramsay books after the story broke. This is just supermarket tabloid trash.
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
Isn't this yet another example of someone trying to cash-in from 9/11?
/. effect cyberterrorism or free publicity?
I mean security has always been an issue. Perhaps 9/11 is a wake-up call but surely we don't need a book to tell us that.
Does he consider the
This is essentially what the problem is with developing security plans--you never really know when you are done. The other problem is that you never have one true answer. Sure a national ID card seems like a good idea, but is it the right answer to the right question? Anyway, you can find the article here: Wicked Problems.
Our old, pre-9/11 computing style was equivalent to "living in a house with the doors and windows wide open"
There is an OS called Doors? And Windows isn't Open, it is just broken, constantly.
- One company I knew with offices on the 81st floor of the World Trade Center used a co-lo facility that survived.
And what if the jet had crashed into that co-lo facility?I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Well, yes and no. He's certainly saner than Yourdon, but he does like to sell his monitoring service. Are we really secure? Schneier likes to wring his hands and worry alot too. I love the bogus counter clicking off the number of network events the company monitored. Sheesh. I guess I shouldn't be so negative. Security is important and you do need to make this obvious to people. But I wish there was a way that didn't involve being a scare monger.
Why else do you think religion has done so well? If you don't believe ______, you're going to burn in hell baby! ;)
The fear is not that the system crashes on y2k. The fear is that the system crashes, and crashes and crashes...on and on, also that data generated from those systems will become highly corrupted.
"Computers crash every day...."
Sure. But we weren't concerned about the average number of computers crashing, we were concerned about more computers crashing than normal. And these crashes being more difficult to fix than usual because so many people wrote their own (broken) date routines - there was no single point of failure. This could lead to cascade failures and it was not clear that any natural firebreaks existed to limit the damage.
The best analogy is probably the road net and accidents. You can usually handle a single big accident without a problem. Even two. But at some point you have so many accidents that the system can't cope. But even one really bad accident can shut down traffic citywide for hours, e.g., the torpedo spill at the intersection of I-25 and I-70 in Denver.
We saw this phenomenum in action after 9/11, when the air traffic system shut down, and later when there was the anthrax scare.
Was Y2K oversold? Of course, but the worst offenders were non-techies pushing their own questionable goods or techies trying to reach management too focused on a 6- or 12-month window.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
This article is more rant than review. The "reviewer" seems to be more into spin than programming judging by his extensive views regarding Y2K warnings. He has just used this book to express his views on the subject without telling us much about the content of the book.
Yourdon's early books were great, but now it's just a bunch of whiny garbage. It's rather sad that a once-talented CS writer is now reduced to jumping on the latest potential-tragedy-of-the-day for a subject.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
I remember back in college that was what marketing instructors would say religiously.
To sell you have two fundamental resources to use:
- utility
or
- emotion (fear and safety being the 2 best).
If you use any of the above 2 you will see all advertisements and call to actions are based on it.
In this instance fear.
Combating terrorism isn't about protecting against sophisticated attacks. It's about protecting against very cheap, very simple attacks that have wide-reaching effects. They are FAR more likely to backhoe a cable or bomb a server location than to try hacking into it.
Osama isn't employing hackers OR script kiddies, he's employing desert fighters whose expertise is real-world destruction.
Adding in safegaurds against buffer overflows may be a perfectly good idea, but it won't matter a whit to a terrorist bend on causing damage to the Internet.
-Tom
The Y2K binge is long gone and the biggest effect on computers seems to be found in the bits representing the bank accounts of Y2K consultants. Gimmicks may fade but human nature and human fear remains the same. The destruction of the World Trade Center has given new life to the fear mongers who worry that someone may obliterate our electronic infrastructure. Edward Yourdon, the old school computer consultant who made plenty of noise about Y2K, is back with another book, Byte Wars: The Impact of September 11th on Information Technology .
Becarefull This is Actually Katz in disguise. He is trying to get us to take him seriously!!!
"All I can tell the "lesser of two evils" folks is that if they keep voting for evil, they'll keep getting evil."-Lp.org
Is the book being promoted by Art Bell and Whitley Streiber too?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
People still read Edward Yourdon's books? Hasn't this sensationalist fear-monger been discredited enough? If I were him, I'd change my name and/or move to a non-industrial country in shame...
He also notes with some pride that many companies survived the turmoil after the World Trade Center attack because they made so many preparations for the turn of the millennium. Yeah. Those two extra bytes used to store the year are a good anti-terror measure.
Okay, terrorism is targetting and attacking unarmed civilians in order to create fear and terror on a large scale. (ie, detonating a bomb in a crowded restaurant).
It doesn't have anything to do with hacking computers. The terms "online terrorism" and "cyberterrorism" are meaningless and maybe even insulting to victims of real terrorism.
Terrorism isn't a blanket term for everything that's disruptive and annoying. I don't feel "terror" if the internet is subverted by al Queda hackers, or the 14-year next door for that matter.
Let's not dilute the meaning of the word.. It's enough we have idiots creating phrases like "industrial terrorism".
We already have a word for breaking into computers: hacking (or, uh, cracking).
I'm sure many of you have played "Bullshit Bingo," AKA Buzzword Bingo, where you go to meetings and mark off words and phrases such as "Going Forward," "Core Business," "Changing Paradigms," etc.
How about a new one for playing in the car or reading the paper? Marking off stuff like cars that have fifteen american flags on them. Or reading some off the wall article that has sudden relevence because of the "Post-9/11 Era." Or discussing the way it is impacted by the "War on Terror."
Bonus points for stores that put "God Bless America!" signs up, not only in their windows but on that giant illuminated sign with the two golden arches on it.
Sorry to be overly cynnical; it's a nice thought... but it really seems to ringing hollow now. People have just gone on about their comporate business, even if they have "heightened insecurity" in their personal lives. This book probably has interesting info in it, but now everybody is marketing it with "a sense of urgency due to the new world we live in."
If I hear "In the wake of September 11th..." one more time, I'm gonna punch a broadcaster in the nose.
Now if you'll pardon me, in the wake of my bottled water and NutriGrain bar breakfast, I'm going to get a hot bowl of soup for lunch in downtown Cleveland.
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
If Gore were president there would probably be two more very tall buildings in NYC.
If you find any sources to back this up, post it as a story on Kuro5hin instead. If you want a discussion, that is.
Heh. My situation is actually the mirror image of what this book discusses. I have been trying to find a way to exact some revenge (electronicallly) on somebody who has something coming to him (a real googly-eyed, drooling f*cktard). But I haven't been able to find any good ways to do this! (google, surprisingly, has been little help).
Any slashdotters have advice to help somebody who seeks a bit of online revenge?
sig my booty, check my website
byte THIS if you think I'm going to read your farking life story!!! Make your post SHORTER and maybe someone will read it!
Hey, the guy earned a name for himself in the days structured programming was the new buzz. Had his name on a lot of books talking about structured programming and system analysis.
Since then, he has deservedly lost his credibility.
I remember his Time Bomb 2000 LUSENET forum from the late 1997-1999. Full of kooks and nuts. Just the kind of folks who talked about commiting acts of domestic terrorism when the "gubmint" came knocking to take away their Y2K preps and put them into concentration camps with the rest of the "sheeple". Folks there talked about lynching public officials and all kinds of stuff like that. Most of them, including Yourdon, thought there would be massive Y2K disruptions.
When the clock turned over to year 2000, and TV was showing all the people having a great time in NYC Times's Square, and his "followers" were miffed over the lack of computer caused caos and disruptions they were NOT witnessing on TV, Yourdon was on line posting to his "followers" that the "powers that be" were probably rolling old film rather than providing real time coverage of all the Y2K disruptions to prevent public panic. What a joke.
This is the guy who wrote "The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer" in the 1980's, stating how US programmers were soon to be out of a job. Since then, jobs for programmers have boomed. He thought US programmers would be put out of work by the "software factories" of Japan and other countries. The guy is, IMO, a intelligent idiot.
Your-done-for, fearmonger to the masses, has squandered any good "karma points" he once had from the 70's or whenever selling fear and dread to whomever will listen to his latest spiel he's happy to offer along with some high paid consulting to "cope" and "manage" and "prepare". IMO, the guy needs some therapy for himself.
He's back selling a new bottle of snake oil in a book. Let him peddle his nonsense elsewhere.
The review was likely apt in that his platitudes and generalizations are vauge and nebulous. Just what a consultant like him selling over priced worthless "advice" to PHB and clueless managers that remember his name from their college days don't know any better than to buy.
This guy is an embarassment to IT. Surely there are better books by better authors with better things to say with a better track record of why we should pay attention to what they have to say. Geeze, folks. Time to put a cork in this geezers yap hole already.
Later.
I've lost all credence in this author since he published that stupid doom and gloom Y2K book. Sure, he makes good points in his previous books, but lately he just seems to be more sensation than substance.
Now, it's obvious the government wants their citizenry in a perpetual state of fear -- it's the best way to get extremely high approval ratings. We already know they fiddle with statistics, and keep their pockets wide and ears open in case anyone wants to drop in a few coins. I wonder if they even go as far as encouraging the writing of particular books... there are always theories about how Tom Clancy gets served up "information" for his scribblings.
Nah, I think in this case, it's simple capitalism, and someone wanting to cash in. After all, a whole real-time industry is based on the same... and no amount of "defence" is going to stop a determined man taking his life and others with him.
To stop yourself being harmed, earn the respect of as many people as possible, and so reduce the number of enemies. Ask yourself why Mother Teresa didn't go around in a bullet-proof car, but the Pope does. Ask yourself why Mo Mowlam (UK) had her bodyguards taken away within 6 months of ending her office in Northern Ireland, but hasn't yet been shitted on by dissident groups. Now ask yourself why Sharon, Arafat and Bush have a million men lining up to chop 'em.
Your page widening post owns.
Courtesy of : George W. Bush Message To Catholics PRESIDENT PUTS U.S. CATHOLICS ON NOTICE: "EITHER YOU ARE WITH US, OR YOU ARE WITH THE CHILD MOLESTERS" Remarks by the President to Assembled Boston Papists THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. I want to thank you for inviting my wife and me to Boston, and welcoming us into your incense-saturated place of worship. Laura sends her regrets, as she opted to go to our regular church this morning, inasmuch as she's pretty serious about going to heaven when she dies, and figures that any time spent with you people won't be much help on that front. Of course, normally I wouldn't be here myself, but my aides tell me that this little cult you call a religion is experiencing a bit of a crisis, and that I should take a break from ensuring a steady supply of cheap Arabiac oil and unfettered snowmobiling in our national parks to give you folks some long overdue advice. As you know, I'm a man who speaks his mind. When I've got something to say, I don't waste taxpayer dollars by pussyfooting around like some liberal pantywaist. And so this morning, I'm going to cut straight to the chase with you people. If you're going to worship Jesus Christ as the Lord and Savior, you've got to start doing it right, and stop listening to a bunch of sissies in dresses who can't even get themselves a little slice of poontang. I mean, it's no accident that there aren't any priests or mon-señors on my Presidential Prayer Squad. Hell, we've known for decades that every last one of them would rather be poking pre-teen poopers than preaching penitence. And let's be honest with each other for just a minute here - you folks knew it too. Everyone knows you did - which is why most folks are having one hell of a hard time feeling sorry for your cannibalism-reenacting asses. And so this morning, I'm putting the Catholics of America on notice. Every papist, in every state, now has a decision to make. Either you're with us, or you're with the child molesters. From this day forward, any church that continues to harbor or support priests will be regarded by the United States as hostile Christianity. And I strongly suggest you be against the molesters, for the sake of the children. You see, children are the future of America, especially if they're white, and it is our duty to protect them - all the way from conception up until the moment they exit their mother's birth canal, at which point they're responsible for receiving their own health care, except for random drug tests of course, which are wholly necessary for establishing eligibility to participate in public school activities such as "Christ Club," which I'm happy to report will soon be greenlighted by Justice Rehnquist's Supreme Court. So again, I urge you to renounce men in dresses who purport to speak the words of Jesus, lest you happen to be eager to spend an afternoon on the receiving end of an FBI body cavity search. In closing, I want to offer requisite, albeit empty thanks to Cardinal Law for having me here. While I'm obliged to denounce both his bizarre lifestyle and professional indiscretions, I nevertheless tip my hat to him for his determination to remain in office despite overwhelming evidence of incompetence and severe misconduct. Furthermore, I understand that he is the Boston spokesperson for his disease - an arch disease. As an avid jogger myself, I know how important healthy arches are, and offer my semi-sincere condolences to his dress-wearing holiness on that front. Thank you all for your rapt attention, and God Bless.
I'm glad i cashed in on Y2k
Read the above statement carefully.
My answer was: The machines crash every day. Why should it matter if it happens on December 31st?
/. web monkey. :)
Y2k wasn't about machines crashing, although I assume that some code could have caused this indirectly. I would have thought that the reason y2k was an issue wouldn't need to be explained here. I guess there are now two classes of geek... uber and
Nice review, but American Graffiti was set in 1962, not the 50's.
slashdot broke my sig
It didn't occur to anyone in our much feared power plants that
I never once heard this fix mentioned in the media when Y2K was coming, but I know that it would occur to engineers as soon as their computers went crazy...
Anyway, this is different from the issues with banking software and automatic mailers, but that's not life-threatening. Actually, nothing related to remotely hack-able computers can be fully life-threatening. You can always override the system or just unplug it from the network and have someone physically push the "FIRE" button the day we need to use the missiles.
But our wars will never be fought by robots or computers, only by humans who use them to be more efficient, and who should care a bit more about not letting their technology be captured by the enemy.
"Wireless : LAN
My answer was: The machines crash every day. Why should it matter if it happens on [insert-date-here]?
It matters because, while machines crash every day, they don't generally crash at predetermined times and in large numbers. Multiple computers (possibly serving as backups for each other) that are systematically "scheduled" to crash at or around the same time clearly have a larger impact than isolated, random, daily crashes.
Consider the analogy of cars breaking down. It happens all the time and any one incident is easily worked around. However, if there is reason to believe that a large number of cars are all going to stop working at the same time or around the same location, it could result in traffic gridlocks or blocking essential services.
Everyday we come closer to 2048!
Along with Diner and Rebel Without a Cause, American Graffiti is one of *the* perennial examples of 50s culture.
Stop being a nitpicky putz.
There is no point in paying attention to anything said by Ed Yourdon. His processes never worked (even in the 70s). Every prediction he has made about CS/IT issues has been wrong. In short. he is a waste of our limited resources, like oxygen. And knowledge.
Isn't terrorism about inciting fear? If you write books that incite fear, what are you?
% edit previous_book_file
> set OLD_DISASTER = "Y2K"
> set NEW_DISASTER = "9-11"
> from first_line to last_line replace $OLD_DISASTER with $NEW_DISASTER
> save to new_book_file
% iterate every three years
I'm sorry, I stumbled into the conversation late! But with all this talk about RMMM (risk management, mitigation, and monitoring) I was harkened back to my first seminar about Software Engineering and that Pressman book...
The only difference being that Pressman gives some examples.
And yes, it is a process, just like any other business/engineering process. Just let engineers run the world... we'll get it together!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Peter Wayner has two resilient books emerging this spring
I was wondering how a book that hasn't been published yet can be "resilient." Perhaps the cover is made of steel-reinforced concrete? Titanium? Galvanized rubber?
Go search for "19102", and you'll find about 300,000 hits, of which about half are dates that should read 2002. There's still considerable software out there that's not Y2K compliant.
By insinuating that the Y2K problem was a scam by consultants to make money by scaring everyone, you do the security and Y2K consultants a huge disservice. Y2K was a REAL problem, and the reason that absolutely nothing happened was because thousands of people did their jobs very very well to fix the problems before the deadlines.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Osama Bin Ladin's followers have been found stealing documents related to the 802.11b protocol.
Seriously, when did "hacking" (or cracking) on the internet became a viable "terrorism" act? Black hats have been out there since there was internet, and they didn't dramatically increase in numbers since September.
All those "cyber terrorists" stuff are just plain B$
She is a fucking lying bitch then. Good thing I didn't tip her like I usually do.
The reason "Death March" is a good book is that he wrote it by asking a bunch of his hacker-manager buddies about the nature of impossible-to-complete projects, and wrapped some text of his own around the results. This polling-the masses approach added a reality check that he clearly needs (vis. any of his other books that make predictions about the future - the ones that are uniformly wrong).
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
I was a Y2K consultant back in the (not so distant) day. And while the problem was more real than most would have you believe, (trust me on this, I was involved in some of the high-impact areas like utility infrastructures and healthcare, it could have been pretty bad), I swear we had just as much hassle dealing with the PHB's who'd read his stuff as we did handling the real issues!
The guy is a rabble-rousing fear-monger!
There is no such thing as 'online terrorism'. Period. Terrorism is a term with a well-defined meaning. American politicians and pundits have already misused many words (see "freedom", "democracy") to the point where they basically have no meaning any longer; they are merely cues which are used to evoke a vague emotional response of 'GOOD' or 'BAD' in a sheeplike populace. Let's please NOT take the word 'terrorism' and redefine it to mean "anything we don't like", ok? And how bout we stop tolerating those who use a single act of terrorism as a convenient excuse to destroy civil liberties and recreate America as a paranoid police state while we're at it?
Two things which closet fascists would like to see defined as 'terrorism': (1) hacking, (2) kids in balaclavas throwing rocks through Niketown's windows. Both are vandalism. Let's try to keep some sense of perspective here... terrorists use munitions, and terrorists kill.
Everyone seems really caught up in comparing the world to itself, before and after "9-11" (referred to as such because it's kinder and gentler than "the triple-plane bombings in New York that killed thousands of people, without a single weapon fired"). The world is only different in that the towers AREN'T STANDING any more! The banks and the entertainment industry still own the government of your "civilized" North American countries, not to mention Europe, or the rest of the world. And speaking of the rest of the world, are we so blind and arrogant as to celebrate the "six month anniversary" of "9-11," yet stand by and do nothing as men, women and children in Israel, Kosovo, South Africa, and almost any other country outside our own are slaughtered each day in conflicts we choose to ignore? And on top of that, now all the budding writers of the world (including Katz, if he isn't writing another book about his dog at the moment) decide they'll make their fame and fortune by comparing how "9-11" affected X variable, and what it means for society; usually absolutely nothing, or exactly the same thing it would have meant in either case. It really is disgusting how easily people are willing to cheapen the value of human life.
Please requestthat the author put his review on Amazon.
Thanks.
What problem does it solve?
It prevents unforseen problems
How well does it solve the problem?
Reduces them by 5%
What new problems does it add?
I don't think we need to answer this to demonstrate that this process can be applied to unforseen problems
What are the economic and social costs?
This too
Given the above, is it worth the costs?
Also.
Great, another piece of trash pulp-ware to help along the great American past time of fear mongering. Be scared of the big bad terrorist hackers. Terrorists that want real damage will use planes or b0mbs, not computers. To do real damage with a computer you would have to do something like hack the Fed Reserve. With the Fed you cannot hack what you cannot get to. Ooh so maybe a power grid or two could be taken down, maybe. I work with a number of brown skin fellows; I've seen their code. I'm not worried. I am worried when I get on a plane and one of those brown skin fellows is in the back sweating and praying. Worry about real tangible things, leave the fear mongering to the POS trying to make some money on a crappy book, god knows as a "consultant" this will be the only tangible thing they may ever produce.
The problem wasn't that Y2K problems weren't really out there lurking, its that Yourdon and others got caught up in the no matter how hard we try it can't be fixed in time syndrome. I worked on 3 different projects between 1995 and 2000. We had tested for, found and fixed Y2K bugs in all of them, and released the fixed versions. It wasn't really that hard to find and fix them. You should had to do it.
Yourdon made the mistake of analyzing the problem from a new software development point of view as opposed to a software maintenance problem. Software maintenance goes on all the time and fixes major problems in a reasonable amount of time. Y2K was a common potential bug, everybody needed to do maintenance for it and enough folks did.
As for Post 9/11. Hmm, its not clear to me either how this is going to work out. Some of Yourdon's concerns may and are probably valid, but that its the "end of the world" outlook is a problem when you've gotten it wrong before. I suppose I'd hate for him to ever get it right.
Basically, Schneier's 5-step plan is called the "Stock Issues" model for arguing a policy change.
Stock Issues has been around for a long time, which is not to say that Schneier is wrong in using it: to the contrary, he's correct. I wonder if he re-invented it, or if he knew about Stock Issues when writing that 5-step plan?
It's probably worthwhile to structure every "case" you hear for some change in the form of Stock Issues, even changes contrary to your own point of view. If you can figure out what the "case" for a change you don't like is missing, or where it's wrong, you can try to shoot down the change with that information.
Look at how many f*cked companies there are because of it!
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Sounds like motherhood advice. "Wear clean underwear". "Be careful". Sounds good, but doesn't give you any insight that's worth a damn.
Tastes like burning! - Ralph Wiggum
The terrorists are the only ones trying to deal in fear.
How many articles or books or TV shows have you seen that meantion how vulerable we are. Or exploit our imaginations with thoughts of death destruction and mayham.
I'll admit, it's good to know where we are vulnerable. It's good to keep people's eyes wide open. And it's good to care about these things. But really?
I'm so sick of people who are just trying to muster up some more fear in the name of publicity and the American dollar
Star Pirates
"deinen", you dolt.
It'll work again. You would have thought he made enought money out of Y2K to retire and spare us the histrionics about what is day to day standard computer work. About the only use it could be is to scare the managers into actually doing something about a problem that is often raised and then completely ignored, unless some snake oil salesman makes it sound like the world is about to end.
Microsoft - Where would you like to go today, Maybe Jail?
[rant mode: off]
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