Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

A good academic friend pointed out to me the regular meetings of Lonix, and last Tuesday's talk by Ross Anderson in particular.

I signed up, and marypcb and I wandered along, to meet our friend and to here what promised to be an interesting discussion on the economics of security and bug fixing. It was. Perhaps a little light on the mathematics, but it highlighted an interesting application of thermodynamics and auction theory to security analysis - and with an interesting conclusion: that under ideal conditions there is little or no difference between open and closed source development models.

More details of the talk can be found on The Register here, and more on the fascinating topic of security economics can be found on Ross' web site here.

One thought that struck me was that as we look at component architectures, web services and the like, the economic models may need to be expanded to take into account options analysis - especially if at a security architecture level we are deliberately designing in honeypots and the like...

See this BBC article for details.

"The object, designated 2003 CP20 was detected on 10 February by the Linear automated sky survey telescope. It is a rocky body estimated to be few km in size."

...the Vectron Blackhawk...

Made with 3 powerful motors in a protective saucer ring, it flies, it hovers and it crashes into colleagues at head height.

As a bonus, a set of red LEDs on the outer ring spells out any words you like as it zooms around.