About 14 years ago or so I saw Cliff Stoll the author of The Cuckoo’s Egg speaking at Cray Research in Minnesota. This was in the era in which the web was virtually unheard of and only computer science majors had email addresses at my college. Obviously it was a more innocent time. Viruses were only transferred by mistakenly booting a PC with a floppy in the drive. As I write this I am wiping tears of nostalgia from my eyes.
Anyway during this talk Cliff retold the story of tracking down a hacker that was using his university’s computers for the purpose of breaking into remote government computers. The talk was extremely entertaining. I wish that I could see a replay. Near the end of the talk, Stoll began to get visibly and rightly upset about our need for elaborate computer security in the first place.
Recently I’ve had to jump through insane hoops just to work on web sites and was reminded all the way back to this talk. In Stoll’s case there were military secrets at stake. In my case though less is at stake but the measures of protecting data and access seem as elaborate as something used by a government agency. I wish I could have all the time back that I’ve wasted having to configure a web site, or a PC or whatever just to prevent some hacker someplace from gaining access. Wouldn’t our lives be so much simpler if we didn’t have to deal with all this protection or at least just a minimum amount? Then maybe we could use that time for solving the real computing problems and still have time to leave the office early each day. We could all just leave or doors unlocked at night and not worry. I think that Stoll would probably think so.
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