Firewall Wizards mailing list archives
RE: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right?
From: Chris Blask <chris () blask org>
Date: Tue, 31 May 2005 20:11:20 -0400
Hey, Tina! At 06:50 PM 5/31/2005, you wrote:
If user education was going to make the difference, humans would all exercise regularly, eat their vegetables, and practice safe sex. We can't fix the problem by educating folks, because we've been *doing* education (in a number of different ways) for a long time, and if it was going to work, it would have.
Education can and does make a difference, and has to an extent in our effort to date.
The scale of the entire Global Internet Training Process is just much larger than what we have addressed to date. Thing is, we have just begun to do it, the student population is exponentially larger than can be addressed richly in the necessary time (and segmented seven ways to Sunday), and we have other problems as well to keep it lively.
Whatever it is that we're trying to fix, I think the answer is to accept that we're dealing with issues of human nature, not technology.
Absolutely and undeniably correct.
Any solution based on humans doing the right thing (like working out, skipping dessertfor more veggies, and not reading pr0n on the Internet) is doomed to failure.
That's one way to word it, but I'd say it more like: "we need to accept that people will do what people will do, and any solution that requires radical modification of six billion people's behavior is doomed to failure." Whether the things people do are good or bad is a separate line of debate, whether they will do what they do is not a debate.
So I like solutions that help me to protect myself against the lowest common denominator: firewalled enclaves that protect really sensitive data; encrypted harddrives on laptops; endpoint inspection and context-sensitive access control...
Absolutely correct. And it will take a bit still to deliver all those encrypted drives and get them installed on every machine in the world, but it will happen. Until then, the firewalled (and the Sneaker Netted) enclaves nested inside bunkers bristling with guns is entirely the right place to store really hot data (for *really* hot data you can encrypt the atoms in the wires and I'm still not plugging it in).
I think the scale of this whole thing throws us off more than we know. If someone had drafted a good Project Plan for the Internet before starting it would never have been built:
"Thing's gonna take about 83 years and 14.5 Septillion man-hours to get up and running with most of the bugs shaken out. Think we can get funding so the guys can start on it next Wednesday?"
:-) -chris Chris Blask chris () blask org http://blaskworks.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ firewall-wizards mailing list firewall-wizards () honor icsalabs com http://honor.icsalabs.com/mailman/listinfo/firewall-wizards
Current thread:
- Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Paul D. Robertson (May 30)
- Re: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Chris Blask (May 30)
- RE: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Ben Nagy (May 30)
- RE: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Chris Blask (May 31)
- Re: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Fritz Ames (May 31)
- Re: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Paul D. Robertson (May 31)
- Re: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Marcus J. Ranum (May 31)
- Re: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Roel Jonkman (May 31)
- Re: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Paul D. Robertson (May 31)
- RE: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Tina Bird (May 31)
- RE: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Chris Blask (May 31)
- Re: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Chris Blask (May 31)
- Re: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Paul D. Robertson (May 31)
- Re: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Chris Blask (May 31)
- Re: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Paul D. Robertson (May 31)
- Re: Ok, so now we have a firewall, we're safe, right? Paul D. Robertson (May 31)