Breaking the dialogues of the deaf

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I love how you think of everything in black and white terms... its refreshing. But what if you consider this cognitive dissonance in computing security to be a market itself? Most people don't actually understand very much about the subject due to not their capacity to understand it, but their preconceptions. Consider: SQL injection is actually a very simple concept which involves unescaped strings inside SQL statements. But to many people its equivalent to a kamehameha or [insert some other fantastic reference of choice here]. Since they cannot understand very basic ideas, they then must believe in big names and complex concepts that magically work. This is coupled with their preconception that security must be actively well... active, due to perhaps the idea of a security guard walking the perimeter making sure nothing untoward is occurring. Oddly enough I've found that many people enjoy having this somewhat mystical attitude to various parts of their life. It makes them feel safer, warmer or something. While I can understand, I don't sympathize.

All this boils down to the fact that the management of a company must feel like their security IS actually protecting them. Marketing strategies target this and work well. Consider those annoying microsoft video ads on this very page(very annoying because they occupy all my bandwidth each time I view a single commentary on this page). One of them is a 'robot' that runs around looking cool 'protecting' your computer system. This said, the management hires IT people to perform their jobs(shocking!), but neutralizes them with know-all attitudes and a highly interactive approach to what their security should be. This management attitude(something pretty much inherent to humans), coupled with cognitive dissonance pretty much insures that there will always be a large market for flashy security measures that don't necessarily have to function properly. Which means that your theory that that which works will take over in the long run isn't terribly probably. Especially considering that security issues don't have as great an impact on their bottom line as management and logistic issues do. All this is actually a problem with education. Most business and management degrees cover nothing in the IT security area, so they really cant be expected to have the basic knowledge to make the decisions necessary to protect their operations.

I guess it doesn't help that many IT people are two-bit dumbasses who barely passed high school and managed to get a MS certification or 3. Not to be insulting to said two-bits or anything.

Even you murphy have your share of cognitive dissonance: your belief of the inherent supremacy of Sun system architecture over that of intels. Well yeah, its great to have better IO and ability for CMP, but that is a SMALL(read very damn small) market. That is to say servers make up only a small portion of computers in use. Where applicable, this is a great benefit, if at a cost. Intel Core 2 chips excel in mobile and multimedia products though. Which leads me to suspect that they have been designed for that(No sarcasm or anything). Their Xeon chips do well on workstations and have better memory throughput and so on. Not knowing which architecture would actually be better, Intel's mobile dominance bleeds over into other areas by reputation and familiarity. I would like to note that servers are not used only for number crunching or handling 10,000 http requests per second. There happen to be a few others and each may have a different ideal architecture.

Posted by: isulzer   Posted on: 06/10/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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