The US drops certain plans to increase Internet security - read this CNN article. First, I'm glad that the government is not going to (1) collect money to use for enhancing security (that would just increase the likelihood of preciptious action), nor (2) restrict the use of wireless networks (which apparently was a brainstorm of the Bush administration's main computer guru).
I'm going to view this event quasi-optimistically and say to myself maybe the government is learning that most problems with networks like the Internet are best left to the private sector to solve. The article references a number of gurus (like Bruce Schneier), which tells me we've got a lot of good minds thinking about security problems with networks. But my second question is: why was the Business Software Alliance involved in the initiative that the government had going? What do they have to do with network security? That's a rhetorical question, of course.
1:10:17 PM
Walk the straight and narrow - My dad is a psychiatrist, actually a psychoanalist, but he did a lot of clinical work during his career. One time he had this woman show up at his office who was very disturbed. He asked her about her background, and eventually learned that she was 33 years old and for some reason was "feeling crucified." Turns out that she thought she was Jesus Christ. So she had to be hospitlized and heavily medicated. Later she managed to sneak out of the hospital and was then found wandering the highway, walking very carefully on the white lines. When she was brought in to see my dad he looked at her and said "so...you were walking the straight and narrow." She said, "yes, how did you know?"
He knew because he has a deep appreciation for how important symbols are to human beings. It's one of those things about psychoanalysts. Symbols are the language of the human mind. And sometimes there's a power surge (or whatever you want to call it) and the symbol processing system gets distorted in a way that is obvious to other people but not to the person suffering the problem. I think about this a lot because it explains a lot. Not so much the people who suddenly think they are Jesus Christ because they are 33 years old and feeling crucified. That's easy. I look for the less obvious examples: people who believe (because they need to) that the United States Flag is so important that they would harm someone who burns it in protest. Or someone who needs to burn the flag to protest something. These too are sort of obvious examples. The point is that symbols are everywhere and our affinity for them is very strong. Yet we hardly notice it, just as fish hardly notice the water that they swim in. And yet these symbols are necessary for our existence, so important that we will fight other people and kill them if our symbols are threatened.
8:48:18 AM
