Spafford On Infrastructure Risks

nealmcb writes "In a major report from the AAAS, Eugene Spafford, director of CERIAS, summarizes the many risks to our information infrastructure (viruses, bugs, single points of failure, etc.), their causes (explosive growth, primacy of time-to-market over quality, lack of support for basic information security research, etc.), and the negative effects of the DMCA, CBDTPA, and other corporate maneuvers."

Comments

There Is Something Rotten in Software Engineering

[Louis Savain]

There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we create software. The solution requires a fundamental change in the way we program our computers. Software suffers from a seminal problem. The primary reason that software is so unreliable and so hard to produce has to do with a custom that is as old as the computer: the practice of using the algorithm as the basis of software construction. Moving to a pure signal-based software model will result in at least an order of magnitude improvement in both reliability and productivity.

There is something rotten at the heart of software engineering. We are using a software technology that was introduced one hundred and sixty years ago by Lady Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage. This was at a time when the best performance they could hope for that speed demon of theirs--the analytical engine, too bad they never got it to work--was maybe fifty cycles per second at the most. Times have changed somewhat since then. More details can be found at the links below:

Project COSA