Cipher Issue E97, July 2010, Editor's Letter

The IEEE Computer Society will hold its elections soon, and for those of you who are members, I encourage you to vote. The Computer Society is a wonderful organization with dedicated staff members who make it possible for us to conduct conferences, to publish papers, and to influence the computer industry. However, the Society has many challenges ahead: financial stress, modernization of its Information Technology infrastructure, and reaching out to more students and practitioners. In my opinion, new executive management is a necessity, and the choice of Computer Society President is crucial. Please read the candidate statements when they are announced, and I recommend voting for change.

This issue of Cipher, coming in mid-summer, probably finds many of you on vacation or combining conference-going with vacation. For your light reading, be it on a cellphone at the beach or an electronic book, we have our usual penetrating book review by Richard Austin and two reviews of recent conferences, casting light on the direction of the computer security research trends.

Photographs from the 30th anniversary celebration of the Security and Privacy Symposium are now online via the url http://ieee-security.org/TC/SP2010.

Should BP be put in charge of spam clean-up?
    Hilarie Orman
    Cipher Editor