Warfare all over

[mike.patterson at unb.ca (Mike Patterson)]

daniel.schatz at hush.com wrote on 12/17/08 9:17 AM:
> Hi,
>
> i just read the 'Info War' article in winter edition of ISC2 mag 
> and couldnt help to wonder why 'Warfare' is used so inflationary 
> recently.
> Most of it doesnt even make sense - Personal Information Warfare? 

Without wanting to seem too insulting, I think it's because a lot of
hardcore techies like to think of what they do as being like war, even
though the association is loose at best.  We call what we do as being in
the trenches, we like reading Sun Tzu and trying to apply his aphorisms
to what we do, and so on.  We call this "studying military history" even
though it's barely even a surface understanding of military matters and
isn't history at all.

I don't understand why this is; large numbers of us really have served
in an armed force somewhere and presumably therefore understand that
there's a large gulf between literally being in a trench and shooting at
people, and securing a server against 10,000 Romanian cable modem zombie
machines.

Maybe we need new analogies.  Don't ask me what though.  I prefer to do
my thinking in more straightforward terms, and when I need to study
history in order to help secure my machines, I study the history of
security, not a battle fought by some obscure Greek general.

Mike

-- 
. . . A phrase that expresses a notion so beautiful that the mind
can't even hope to wrap itself around it. The phrase is:
"My brother-in-law, the bar owner." -J.D. Baldwin, monk