AT&T Plans CNN-style Security Channel

An anonymous reader writes "Infoworld has a story about AT&T's upcoming effort to create a CNN of network security. From the article: "Security experts at AT&T are about to take a page from CNN's playbook. Within the next year they will begin delivering a video streaming service that will carry Internet security news 24 hours a day, seven days a week, according to the executive in charge of AT&T Labs.""

Comments

Early model

[BWJones]

Presumably AT&T is going to go deeper into the security game and this is a good move for them. If they want to build credibility, brand this channel with subtlety and simply report the news. But rather than providing this as a service to their existing customers, stream it live to the Internet for everybody's consumption. That will help to build the AT&T brand for security much more so than limiting the audience. The costs cannot be that much more, right?

Interestingly, the page the article is linked on has a signal to noise ratio for this particular article of about .2. In other words, 80% of the page is noise from advertisements versus 20% actual content that we are interested in by clicking on the link which gets me to thinking.....Given that they are modeling it after the CNN model, hopefully this channel will adhere to the model CNN had in the early days. It was "all news, all the time", kind of like MTVs early days where it was "all music, all the time". Right now CNN has degenerated into talk radio like TV with unbelievably biased commentators, and now they are towing the entertainment news line because they are part of Time Warner and their balance of ads versus news has been going down the tubes for years now. For instance, I had CNN on the other morning from about 9:30 to 10:00 and 60% of the airtime was devoted to commercials. It has been said that with the large conglomerate ownership of media these days, that the Watergate scandal would not have come to light. Think about that for a few minutes and see where it takes you. Scary, is it not?

Re:Early model

[xMilkmanDanx]

On top of that, is streaming video really the way to get security updates? Personally an outline text form lets me go straight to the areas that are applicable to me and what I need to keep secure. I definitely wouldn't want to sit through 15 minutes of (personally) irrelevant crap just to get the security info I need.

In the end, while there are some broad sweep security alerts that affect everyone or nearly so, most updates are probably important to 1 out of 10 people.

Delayed disclosure = Old News = Nobody Cares

[zanderredux]

A CNN of IT security?

Most companies deal with IT security in secrecy, only disclosing new attacks and vulns right before they're ready to release a patch.

By the time it hits the news outlet, they'll be just too old for security professionals to be deemed useful.

Watergate would have been blogged

[PaxTech]

It has been said that with the large conglomerate ownership of media these days, that the Watergate scandal would not have come to light. Think about that for a few minutes and see where it takes you. Scary, is it not?

I thought about it, and I'm not scared in the least.

If the Watergate scandal happened today, Deep Throat wouldn't have NEEDED the large conglomerate media to get the story out, he'd have just started a blog. If you doubt that a blog could have penetrated the cover-up and conspiracy, just ask Dan Rather, he's got some nice Word documents to show you. :)

I agree, mainstream media is a joke these days, luckily there is an alternative. No one needs a big corporate monolith to get news out, we all have access to the biggest printing press there is.

How useful is video?

[mcc]

The adaptation of general journalism to film and television, as correctly noted by Dave Barry, has largely gradually taken the form where the journalistic entity will find something that a 'reporter' can stand in front of and then film them standing in front of it, talking about it. (Television journalism follows this idiom so strictly that if a story occurs which concerns something you inherently can't film someone standing in front of, television media will generally just not cover it.)

I am just sitting here trying to figure out how, if at all, they will be able to adapt this idiom to computer security reporting.

"...and we go to Sharon for the story."

"Thanks bob. Well, as you can see, I'm standing in front of a TCP/IP packet and as you can plainly see, it is highly malformed."

Aside from this, I wonder if they're going to adopt a Headline News style "looping tape" format, or if they'll have shows. I actually could totally go for a Snow-Crash-CIC-wet-work style "reality" show demonstrating various white and black hats at work.

AT&T uniquely qualified for this

[mabu]

Since a huge portion of their networks are the main source of security breaches. Maybe they can run 24-hour tickers showing the amount of spam, worms and viruses they are unable to control originating from their network, and at some point, one of their idiot executives will agree that port 25 needs to be filtered from their broadband users?