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2012 Olympics Security to be Chosen by Sponsorship
denebian devil writes "In an Editorial/Blog at ITPRO, Davey Winder writes of a keynote speech at Infosecurity Europe by Member of Parliament Derek Wyatt. In this speech, which was about the IT security demands of running the 2012 London Olympics, Derek Wyatt MP dropped the bombshell that IT Security at the Olympics will hinge not on which companies show themselves to be the best in their field or to have the technology that best meets the needs of the Olympics, but rather on whether or not the companies were a 'major sponsor' of the Olympics. So who has bought their way into being the security experts of choice, and with whom our security and that of the visiting millions will rest? Visa."
Evaluating security products effectively can be very difficult and expensive. I have no problem with them doing this by sponsorship. But they shouldn't just hand over technical security to whoever happens to be the biggest advertising sponsor, even if it's McDonalds or Microsoft or someone else who doesn't know anything about it. They should solicit bids for a security sponsor. That is, companies place bids separately to run the security services for the Olympics. These bids could be positive (they pay the Olympics) or negative (how much the Olympics has to pay them), along with a proposal explaining what they will do to keep things secure and their experience in the field, etc. They also get a certain amount of advertising on things, "Olympic IT Security Provided by Whoever." If the ads say "Olympic Security Provided by Symantec," and the headlines are "Olympic Security in Shambles; website defaced, credit card numbers stolen, official Olympic records changed," this isn't so good for the company. Realizing this potential ahead of time, in placing bids, security companies will have a very strong incentive to submit competent proposals.
Visa isn't tied in so much in this way, because their bijillion ads won't specify that they're handling security. Also, if they got this by favoritism based on advertising sponsorship, and not based on competitive bids, then the Olympics is probably paying them too much for what they're getting.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
It does not free him from the responsibility of writing an accurate headline instead of one he has written to deliberately misrepresent the content, his frequent approach. For a recent example check out this whopper: "HP Stops Selling Printers, Starts Selling Prints." (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/19/16920 8)
Of course HP is not going to stop selling printers. But why let that stop him from writing a headline to make the story seem far more significant than it really is? Instead of letting the story stand on its own merit he needs to cook it.
And no, I'm not going to filter out his stories because I reserve the right to challenge him every time he does it, watering down one of my favorite websites with his bungled content.
Salt Lake City cleared all of the homeless out of their downtown area prior to the Olympics, and they still haven't returned in the numbers they were in before. I don't know what they did with all of them, but I was in SLC in 2000, and again in 2003, and there were far more homeless people the first time. It was really nice being able to go into one of the downtown malls without being hassled by a homeless guy, but you do sort of wonder where they all went.
I, for one, get Slashdot stories via an RSS live bookmark on Firefox, and I don't know that the headline refers to a story at it.slashdot.org - I have to agree that Zonk's headline is extremely misleading, as when I see "Olympics" and "security" I immediately assume the headline refers to physical security.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
the past few decades have demonstrated empirically that huge corporations seem to do crummily at the whole security thing
It's also show that government beauracracies do just as poorly or even worse. So what is one to do? At least the corporations seem to waste a little bit less money doing security poorly.