John Pescatore

(with acknowledgements to Herb Caen)

Gartner laid off 120 people yesterday, never fun. You learn a lot about your company, good and bad,  by how they handle layoffs…  Whatever happened to Verisign selling off its managed security services business?… When a bank gets robbed, the cash lost never seems to be more than $10,000 – where is all the money, really??…  Has there ever been a cease-fire in history when either side had any will to fight left?…  I really hate the term “redundancy” that most of the rest of the world seems to use for “layoff”…  

Remember how all the privacy lobbies fought crypto export controls so that individuals could have the right to use encryption? Have you ever seen a normal individual using encryption these days?… If Google and Microsoft gave out identical candy bars to Trick or Treaters on Halloween, people would gladly chomp into Google’s while they would x-ray Microsoft’s candy bars looking for pins… If you are a CISO, make sure you keep a good “scrapbook” with all those emails you sent warning about the risks of doing x, y or z…  If retail shrinkage and theft in the real world are never ending problems, why does everyone want to flap their gums when information security incidents are a never ending problem?…  When i was a kid, my mom took us to the NY World’s fair and I saw a guy flying around using a backpack rocket. I bet we will all be doing that before we are all using digital rights management…  

If Apple gave out those same candy bars as Google and Microsoft, everyone would want those candy bars in the vending machine at work…  The same people who believe that security is really a people problem, and that only by educating people can we get more secure,  probably believe we don’t need traffic lights, either…  Have the bees come back? Everyone was all worried about them disappearing, but no worries now. The hype cycle at work again…  

What does Windows do during the ten minutes it takes to boot up or shut down?…  It already seems like it has been 2009 forever… There are actually people in this world who believe that movies like “Eagle Eye” and “Enemy of the State” are documentaries…  More hype cycle news: President-elect Obama has already just passed the Peak of Overinflated Expectations, poor guy…  How come I can drive my car and control just about everything in this world using just one hand, but to start my Windows PC I need two hands to CRTL-AL:T-DEL?… Maybe that is why in movies and on TV shows, everyone uses Apple PCs…  

Will there ever be another security IPO?…  Due to the economic morass, Gartner also cancelled a number of conferences in 2009 – I gotta say, there are just way too many conferences, anyway…  There will be a massive denial of service attack in the US on February 17th – it is called Digital TV Conversion…  The Unix clock rolls over in 2038 – is it too early to start the Y2.038K hysteria?…  NPR just said the Fed says most of US dollar bills are in Argentina – bank robberies over there must be more lucrative…  Maybe that is why Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid headed down that way…  

Anyone out there a ham radio operator? I’m K3TN… I can file my taxes with nothing but a password, but the American Radio Relay League requires the use of digital signatures for ham operators to electronically confirm conversations…  How will global warming impact cloud computing?