Re: U.S. Cyber Security Forecast: Not So Sunny and Bright

[der Mouse <mouse () rodents montreal qc ca>]

> The United States, as well as any other nation hooked into the
> Internet, is losing the battle against cyberthieves and hackers
> looking to commit crimes and steal sensitive, and possibly
> classified, information from networks.  And it doesn't look like we
> will be able to improve the situation much in the near future.

Gah.  That is *so* factually misleading (not to mention the illiterate
confusion between metaphor and simile).

There is a *lot* of "able".  What's lacking is the "willing" to go with
it.  As one simple example, anyone running Windows will get a
substantial improvement in practical security by scrapping it.  It
doesn't even much matter what it's scrapped in favour of.  (Despite all
the theoretical reasons why Windows may be no less secure than
$OTHEROS, in practice, it is the least secure OS around at the moment,
against the kind of threats being discussed here.)  But people say they
"can't" scrap Windows when what they mean is they're not willing to pay
the prices involved; presumably this means they'd rather pay the other
prices, the prices of running it, instead.

> That sobering assessment comes from cybersecurity expert Seymour
> Goodman, who was in Washington, D.C., yesterday to give a talk on
> securing the Internet at the Hudson Institute.

More sloppiness.  The Internet does not really need securing (for the
most part - it does have its insecurities, but, again, they're not the
ones being discussed here).  It's users and uses of the Internet that
need securing.

/~\ The ASCII                           der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML               mouse () rodents montreal qc ca
/ \ Email!           7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.