Security in Ten Years

Schneier has posted a conversation between himself and Marcus Ranum, Chief Security Officer for Tenable Network Security, Inc. looking at where security is headed. "[...] at a meta-level, the problems are going to stay the same. What's shocking and disappointing to me is that our responses to those problems also remain the same, in spite of the obvious fact that they aren't effective."

Comments

Re:Creativity

[Kadin2048]

yeah wow so creative at cable box makers/companys have been trying the same nonsense for the better part of 10 years and look how well it's worked for them - it's spawned a legion of hackers all trying to out do each other at the speed they can create hacked cable cards. Yeah, and how many people do you know who have hacked cable boxes? I don't know any, and I have some pretty geeky friends.

The point isn't what a few elites can do, it's what regular people can do. That's the benefit of technology, because it's what drives social change. (Incidentally, I think it's what a lot of geeks don't "get" sometimes.) History books will write about the Internet as a 1990s phenomenon, even though it existed long before, because only in the 1990s could most people use it. And it was only when lots of people started using it that it started to have effects that could be felt everywhere; that's when it started to change everything.

Dismissive hand-waving about hackers misses the point: when you limit the number of people who can effectively use a technology to a small number of hackers or hobbyists, you hobble the technology and you sharply reduce the effect that it could have had.

It's a pernicious problem because it's difficult to quantify the loss due to technology that the masses either never get, or never get in a form that's useful to them. How do you quantify the social benefits of a CableCard or DVR standard that doesn't suck royally? (The ability for everyone to do what I can do on a MythTV box: pause a program on one TV, walk away, and resume it from another one in a different part of the house an hour later?) It's not something that's easy to measure, but there's obviously some benefit there, even if it's not exactly a cure for cancer. Every time a company locks a product up and makes it difficult for a user to really take full advantage of its capabilities, we all lose a little. Or rather, we just fail to get something that we could have.