Security quote of the week
Some people enter the technology industry to build newer, more exciting
kinds of technology as quickly as possible. My keynote will savage these
people and will burn important professional bridges, likely forcing me to
join a monastery or another penance-focused organization. In my keynote, I
will explain why the proliferation of ubiquitous technology is good in the
same sense that ubiquitous Venus weather would be good, i.e., not good at
all. Using case studies involving machine learning and other
hastily-executed figments of Silicon Valley's imagination, I will explain
why computer security (and larger notions of ethical computing) are
difficult to achieve if developers insist on literally not questioning
anything that they do since even brief introspection would reduce the
frequency of git commits. At some point, my microphone will be cut off,
possibly by hotel management, but possibly by myself, because microphones
are technology and we need to reclaim the stark purity that emerges from
amplifying our voices using rams' horns and sheets of papyrus rolled into
cone shapes. I will explain why papyrus cones are not vulnerable to buffer
overflow attacks, and then I will conclude by observing that my new
start-up papyr.us is looking for talented full-stack developers who are
comfortable executing computational tasks on an abacus or several nearby
sticks.
— James
Mickens in the abstract for a keynote at the 27th USENIX Security
Symposium (Bruce Schneier recommends
watching the video of the talk that is available with the abstract.)
