Dear Readers,
In looking over the archives of this newsletter, I realized that
the online version of Cipher was first published 30 years ago. That
was when Carl Landwehr took the groundbreaking step of
moving the snail mailed version to the newfangled "web". That
milestone, in turn, marked just about 30 years of the ARPA/DARPA
network that became the Internet. If history is to be our guide,
publication should be reaching a new paradigm shift just about now.
The research community continues to struggle with the meshing of
publication economics and need for quick and accurate dissemination of
research results. The future is cloudy, but Cipher trudges on.
Along the lines of "what's new with the Internet", this month we have Sven Dietrich's review of a book on that topic titled "Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet". It is available through traditional media: in print or via Kindle.
The disturbing trend in cyberattacks of late is massive disruption of business through attacks on middleman services. Business-to-business services form a large network that facilitate the movement and coordination of money and documents and processes. If one of these services is disabled by a cyberattack, the ramifications are immense. It is easy to conclude that such businesses should take security seriously. But, anyone who did that by installing Crowdstrike's Falcon software would have cause to curse security altogether. Some several days after a faulty release of the software disabled a percent of the world's PCs, some businesses are still trying to recover.
BSOD Mama
Lay that pointer down, babe
Lay that pointer down
Null exception mama
Lay that pointer down
Oh, hackin' data in a big array
Was I havin' fun
Until one byte wasn't addressed right
Now my OS won't run.
Oh, lay that pointer down, babe
Lay that pointer down.
Nothin' there but error
Lay that pointer down.
(with apologies to Al Dexter)