Reflections on Technology and Society

[Originally published in the January/February 2008 issue (Volume 6 number 1) of IEEE Security & Privacy magazine.] In 1970, the late Per Brinch Hansen wrote a seminal article ( "The Nucleus of a Multiprogramming System" ) that articulated and justified what today we call policy/mechanism separation. He introduced the concept in the context of an operating system's design at a time when experts felt we lacked a clear understanding of what the ultimate shape of operating systems would be. The concept, like other powerful memes, was so compelling that it took on a life of its own and is now an article of faith in CS education—taught without reference to the original context. The idea isn't original to computer science—it has existed for thousands of years. In martial terms, it's reflected in the popular paraphrase from Alfred, Lord Tennyson 's poem, Charge of the Light Brigade : "ours is not to reason why; ours is but to do and die." Separation of...

How much did C. S. Forester's successful Horatio Hornblower series have to do with the launching of Patrick O'Brien's even more successful Aubrey/Maturin series? Back in the late 1980s a friend introduced me to Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin novels. I started Master and Commander but did not get excited about the story and abandoned the book after a chapter or two. Some years later in an airport about to board a plane and desperate for something to read I picked up a copy of The Surgeon's Mate . This time I was hooked. I devoured the first seventeen novels over the next few years, and then hung around the bookstore door impatiently as the rest were published, snatching first editions of the final three novels practically from the hands of the bookbinders. After O'Brien's death in 2000 I despaired. No more stories of life aboard wooden ships. Finally, I decided to try C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower stories. I had rejected the recommenda...

(This article was originally published in 2003 by Secure Business Quarterly, a now-defunct publication.  Not having an original copy handy and not being able to refer people to the original site, I have retrieved a copy from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine ( dated 2006 in their archive ).  The text of the original article is reproduced here for convenience.) After the flames from Slammer's attack were doused and the technology industry caught up on its lost sleep, we started asking questions. Why did this happen? Could we have prevented it? What can we do to keep such a thing from happening again? These are questions we ask after every major security incident, of course. We quickly learned that the defect in SQL Server had been identified and patches prepared for various platforms more than six months before, so attention turned to system administrators. Further inquiry, however, shows that things are more complex. There were several com...

Last year I rode in the 2011 Five Borough Bike Tour and blogged about it.  The photo service that took pictures of riders got three very good pictures of me, which I purchased and published on my Picasa page , suitable for blackmailing me in the future :-). I rode again in 2012 with the BronxWorks team (Tamara [unofficial captain], Jane, Declan, Julio, Josh, Cristina, and me).  We raised money for BronxWorks, a wonderful settlement house in the Bronx that runs programs to support homeless families with children.  Several of the riders on the BronxWorks team  volunteer in programs at the organization's facilities in the Bronx.  All of the riders raised money to support the organization's activities, including me . This year's ride was on Sunday 6 May 2012.  The weather was cool and overcast in the morning, clearing and warming by mid-afternoon when I got home.  Conditions were perfect for the ride.  Cool enough to help riders dissipate the heat o...

So 2011 represents my second year of Kindle use, and it's been quite an eventful year. In 2011 I adopted a policy of not buying dead-tree books any more. And, while I had intended to sustain my use of the Nook, it didn't really work out and I'm not even sure where my Nook is any more. I still like the Nook's business model better than the Kindle's, but my momentum is with the Kindle. I bought 60 books for the Kindle in 2011 and, as before, read some but not all. I have been reading my Kindle library on a wide range of devices: on my Kindle, of course, as well as on Kindle software for our iPad, our two Android tablets, my Android cellphone, my wife's iPhone, on all of our Macs, and on the Chrome browser. This really makes it much more attractive for me to continue to acquire books for the Kindle than for any other medium because my library is available to essentially any device I end up using. Title Author Read Fight Club: A Novel Palahniuk, Chuck Yes Loyal Char...

The day was perfect for riding. Not too hot, not too cold. Not too humid. I rendezvoused with my teammates Jane and Tamara at the corner of 70th Street and Columbus Avenue at 6:20 AM. After pumping up our tires and adjusting our bicycles, we headed downtown five miles to the starting line. Because we were riding for them, Noelle Ito of BronxWorks arranged for us to start near the head of the pack, enabling us to get moving soon after the starting gun (it wasn't really a gun, but rather big jets of flame emitted from the starting gate). The first few miles, north on Sixth Avenue (Avenue of the Americas, for tourists) were slow, but we began to move more smoothly once we entered Central Park. We rode north along the eastern side of the Park Drive, exiting at 110th street and continuing north through Harlem to 138th Street, where we cut over to the Madison Avenue bridge and the Bronx. We didn't spend long in the Bronx, returning to Manhattan by the Third Avenue Bridge ...

Four years ago, just before I joined Google, I wrote "The Art Ecosystem and the Digital Museum" on this blog. At Google I worked to promote the digital museum concept and found a number of similarly motivated folks. A team in Europe had worked with the Prado to put a number of the masterpieces from that museum online in a dramatic way with tremendously high resolution images. Others turned up from around Google and joined in. [By the way, you can look at the fourteen Prado pictures in amazingly high resolution using Google Earth. Just turn on 3D buildings in Earth and then navigate to the Prado and you'll get a popup for the images.] Today Google launched the Google Art Project ( http://www.googleartproject.com/) with participation from seventeen major museums around the world. The site is very cool.