I am sitting here at my desk in New York City, typing away at the tail-end of a Friday. I hear a siren ricocheting by in my front window, and I hear someone sawing away on something in my back window where my home-office bedroom changing-room romance-center is located (this is NYC, you see), and all of a sudden I'm struck with the notion: is this all just an illusion?
There's that whole branch of philosophy (OK, maybe it's not a whole branch, but I think they made reference to it in some teen movie once), that believes the universe really is all just a figment of your imagination. But then, if this universe really is all just part of my imagination, why would I imagine so many good-for-nothing cybercrooks and cyberscumbags?
Which brings me to an article on Information Week suggesting that in fact computer security doesn't exist, and all it really offers the illusion of control (this was from a speech given by Ian Angell, professor of information systems at the London School of Economics, at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas). As Angell puts it, "Technology is intrinsically statistical, and that means that it cannot deal with the singularities that emerge spontaneously when it merges with human systems."
In response, all I can say is, I first moved to New York City back in '93, where even the illusion of control over crime didn't exist. The city truly was at a tipping point, and no one was sure if the city was going be become a completely unmanageable place of total anarchy or start to gain some amount of control. And if I had known which way NYC was gonna go, then I definitely would have bought one of those Upper West Side brownstones selling for around 70 grand (cost now, as Mastercard would say, priceless).
And the internet isn't even like New York City in the early 90s, as Time Magazine isn't exactly running cover stories wondering if the whole Internet thing was over and done with. So sure, a home alarm doesn't totally guarantee your home is not going to be broken into any more then a application security package is going to totally guarantee your application won't get hacked: but me, every evening I walk into my apartment, you can hear me turn the deadbolt with a resounding THUNK!
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