Words of Wisdom. Uncommented

Novelty and Innovation

2011-02-18T09:44:00.000+01:00

When most people talk about the "new", they're actually talking about it after the fact. They look back and say how brilliant you were at seeing all this, and so forth. Well, it's all nonsense. When it is new, you don't know it. You're creating something for the future and you don't know exactly what it is.

Ed Catmull (PhD Ohio University and Pixar's President)

Not all Italians are Italians

2010-12-31T11:59:00.001+01:00

Dovremmo avere il coraggio di dire che le tasse sono una cosa bellissima e civilissima, un modo di contribuire tutti insieme a beni indispensabili come la salute, la sicurezza, l'istruzione e l'ambiente

We should have the courage to say that taxes are a wonderful and civilized thing, a way to contribute all together to such essential goods as health, safety, education and the environment.

Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa

Cloud and Outsourcing

2010-12-15T16:45:00.001+01:00

A single operating system locked down by experts is far more secure than two operating systems configured by sysadmins who aren't so expert.

Bruce Schneier

Is Software a Weapon ?

2010-09-30T13:25:00.000+02:00

I think we now have an existence proof for weapons-grade attack software. Policy-makers around the world need to take this into account; claiming it can't happen is no longer tenable. The real question is the cost of this sort of attack. Remember, though, that a single F-35 fighter plane is estimated to cost $112M 2010 dollars; that's not exactly cheap, either.

Steve Bellovin

Governing the Italians is Difficult

2010-06-03T12:52:00.006+02:00

The President of the United States earns $400,000 a year. The vice president's annual salary is $221,100.
Source

EMOLUMENTI MENSILI AL NETTO, CARICA PER CARICA (Giugno 2009)
Source

Secrets: Large or small ?

2010-04-15T13:13:00.001+02:00

Cryptosystems protect large secrets with smaller ones (keys). Unfortunately, modern computers aren't especially good at protecting even the smallest secrets.

Matt Blaze

In the hell, everything is organized by the Italians

2010-02-19T14:05:00.001+01:00

Naples, stop traffic fines: there are no more blocks

I know it seems a joke. I wish it was. See here.

Who is liable ?

2010-01-28T12:48:00.001+01:00

Security economics teaches that you're unlikely to get a secure system if Alice guards it while Bob pays the cost of failure.

Steven Murdoch and Ross Anderson

Unbreakable Cryptography

2010-01-08T11:43:00.000+01:00

Hackers don't break encryption, they break how encryption is used.

Robert Graham

Cloud Computing

2009-12-31T16:20:00.000+01:00

A few years from now, if you’re a business, having your own datacenter is going to look just about as smart as generating your own electricity.

Ed Lazowska

Cloud and Security

2009-11-17T08:50:00.000+01:00

The effect of the growing dependence on cloud computing is similar to that of our dependence on public transportation, particularly air transportation, which forces us to trust organizations over which we have no control, limits what we can transport, and subjects us to rules and schedules that wouldn't apply if we were flying our own planes.

On the other hand, it is so much more economical that we don't realistically have any alternative.

Whitfield Diffie

Programming Today

2009-10-15T08:59:00.000+02:00

Programming today depends more and more on combining large building blocks and less on detailed logic of little things, though there's certainly enough of that as well. A typical programmer today spends a lot of time just trying to figure out what methods to call from some giant package and probably needs some kind of IDE like Eclipse or XCode to fill in the gaps.

Brian Kernighan

Systems, Society and Technology

2009-10-06T13:40:00.001+02:00

Because the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.

Clay Shirky

The country of "smart people"

2009-08-27T18:14:00.003+02:00

La pressione fiscale effettivamente subita da chi non evade è maggiore di quella ufficiale, di circa 11 punti. In Italia chi non evade paga più tasse che in Svezia, il Paese dell’Ocse in cui il fisco è più esoso, e la differenza non è piccola, circa 6 punti in più.

Fiscal pressure for those who do not evade taxes is greater than the official one, approximately 11% more. In Italy, those who do not evade pay more taxes than in Sweden, the OCSE country with higher fiscal pressure, and the difference is not small, roughly 6% more.

Francesco Giavazzi

Bigger is different

2009-08-04T11:47:00.001+02:00

It's becoming clear that information at scale is changing science and engineering.

If you have access to enormous datasets, it opens up whole new avenues for scientific discovery and for solving problems.

John Ousterhout

Where to attack ?

2009-06-11T09:42:00.002+02:00

Why people don't get security (Robert Graham)

clipped from erratasec.blogspot.com

Nobody cares about the strength of your strongest feature. What people care about is the strength of your weakest feature.

Who cares ?

2009-05-13T09:47:00.002+02:00

Not once but 18 times. 18 times, in between 2002 and 2008, the local administration in Piacenza notified Anas (the in charge authority) that the bridge over the Po river was battered. Eventually the bridge fell down.

clipped from www.corriere.it

Non una, ma 18 volte. Per 18 volte, tra il 2002 e il 2008, il Comune di Piacenza si è rivolto all’Anas segnalando che il ponte sul Po era malandato. Finché il ponte, a fine aprile, è crollato per davvero.

Hacking in the real world

2009-04-24T13:27:00.004+02:00

Image by José Goulão via Flickr

Hacking doesn't work the way it's portrayed in the movies. In the movie Swordfish, the villain puts the hero in front of a computer open to a website, puts a gun to the hero's head, and tells the hero to hack into the website in 60 seconds "or else". That's not the way hacking works, the best hackers in the world could not do that.

However, you could tell a good hacker to break into any website in 60 seconds. In hacking, it's difficult accomplishing a specific, narrowly defined goal. The broader the range of goals, the more likely the hacker will succeed at one of them.

Robert Graham

Modern APIs

2009-04-17T16:42:00.000+02:00

One of the things I liked about the Unix development environment back in those days was that you could find things. If you said “man x,” then it either said it was there or it wasn’t there. If it wasn’t there, it wasn’t there, and if it was there, you found it. The problem today is finding methods and libraries that do things you want to do.

Steve Bourne

Software Testing

2009-03-25T13:35:00.001+01:00

Software is not continuous, so a successful test for one input says nothing about the system’s response to a similar but distinct input.

Daniel Jackson

Measuring Research

2009-03-25T09:07:00.003+01:00

Publication counts are not adequate indicators of research value. They measure productivity, but neither impact nor quality...
In assessing publications and citations, ISI Web of Science is inadequate for most of CS and must not be used...
Numerical indicators must not serve for comparisons across disciplines...
No tool will deliver a magic number defining the measure of a researcher...

Meyer, Choppy, Staunstrup, van Leeuwen

The Value of Internet

2009-03-06T11:17:00.001+01:00

The Internet is a general-purpose technology. It does not create value through its existence alone. It creates value by enabling us to do things we could not do otherwise, or to do things more efficiently.

(Barbara Van Schewick)

Computing and Innovation

2009-02-18T10:10:00.002+01:00

The computing field has a long history of creating revolutionary technologies that have helped drive U.S. leadership in the world economy. The computing community can cite concrete examples of how advances in information technology lead to breakthroughs that enable productivity growth and even create whole new industries...Wise investments in science and engineering research as well as in math and science education will create a stronger, more resilient economy and a more highly skilled workforce. And by investing in scientific research facilities, we will be able to create new jobs in a variety of trades and manufacturing while also expanding the horizons of a whole generation of young scientists and engineers

Gene Spafford

Italia ed Europarlamentari

2009-01-15T12:35:00.004+01:00

Gian Antonio Stella

clipped from www.corriere.it

un parlamentare polacco prende 28.056 euro, uno spagnolo 39.463, uno svedese 61.704, un francese 63.093, un britannico 82.380, un tedesco 84.108, un italiano 149.215. Quindici volte più di un ungherese, tre volte più di un portoghese, una volta e mezza più dell’austriaco, secondo classificato. E non basta: alla retribuzione base vanno aggiunti i benefit e le indennità di spese generali, di soggiorno, di viaggio e quelle per i portaborse che portano il totale, nel caso degli italiani, a una cifra fra i 30.000 e i 35.000 euro. Un sacco di soldi.

Il guaio è che i nostri europarlamentari non sono solo i più pagati. Sono anche, tradizionalmente, i più assenteisti di tutto il continente.

Biometrics for Identification

2009-01-15T10:16:00.001+01:00

Bruce Schneier

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk

The lesson is that biometrics work best if the system can verify that the biometric came from the person at the time of verification. The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system.

Wish vs Reality

2009-01-09T08:54:00.003+01:00

Measurement accuracy is the only fail-safe means of
distinguishing what is true from what one imagines,
and even of defining what true means.
..
a subtle but inevitable consequence of this attitude is that
truth and measurement technology are inextricably linked.

(Robert Laughlin (I got it from KC Claffy))

Internet as a critical infrastructure

2009-01-09T08:47:00.001+01:00

We now critically depend on the Internet for our professional, personal, and political lives.

But what do we know about it? e.g, what keeps the system stable or drives it to instability? How can we protect it from operational threats?

Researchers and policy makers currently analyze a trillion dollar industry in the dark.

(KC Claffy)

Security: Cost or Investment ?

2008-12-27T13:10:00.001+01:00

"ROI" (Return Of Investment) as used in a security context is inaccurate. Security is not an investment that provides a return, like a new factory or a financial instrument. It's an expense that, hopefully, pays for itself in cost savings. Security is about loss prevention, not about earnings. The term just doesn't make sense in this context.

(Bruce Schneier)

Engineering vs Security

2008-12-27T13:09:00.001+01:00

Good engineering involves thinking about how things can be made to work; the security mindset involves thinking about how things can be made to fail. It involves thinking like an attacker, an adversary or a criminal. You don't have to exploit the vulnerabilities you find, but if you don't see the world that way, you'll never notice most security problems.

(Bruce Schneier)

Innovation and Lottery

2008-12-22T11:21:00.005+01:00

clipped from www.businessweek.com

Too often, universities try to contain the results of research in the hope of commercially exploiting the resulting intellectual property. Politicians believe that setting up tech-transfer incubators around universities will bring significant economic gains in the short or mid-term. It could happen. So could winning the lottery. I just wouldn't count on it.

The Long Nose of Innovation, http://www.businessweek.com/print/innovate/content/jan2008/id2008012_297369.htm

(Bill Buxton is Principal Scientist at Microsoft Research and the author of Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design. Previously, he was a researcher at Xerox PARC, a professor at the University of Toronto, and Chief Scientist of Alias Research and SGI Inc.)

Italia e leggi (I)

2008-12-19T14:05:00.000+01:00

clipped from www.corriere.it

Siamo i gran maestri della teoria: la pratica è giudicata un'attività volgare. Nessun Paese d'Europa ha regole minuziose e severe come le nostre; nessuno è tanto svogliato e menefreghista quando si tratta di applicarle. Vale per il fisco, vale per gli appalti, vale per la velocità sulle autostrade. Vale per la guida ubriachi.(Beppe Severgnini)

Italia e Internet (I)

2008-12-19T14:02:00.000+01:00

clipped from www.beppegrillo.it

Nell'anno di Bernabè l'Italia telematica ha ottenuto un primato mondiale insuperabile. Per la prima volta nella storia di Internet il numero di famiglie di un Paese che accede alla Rete è diminuito. E' come andare contro le leggi della termodinamica.

How to design software (III)

2008-12-19T10:13:00.002+01:00

There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

Tony Hoare

Security: Technology vs Real world (II)

2008-12-19T10:13:00.001+01:00

Security mechanisms that are difficult to manage or support often degrade system security. Security incidents occur most often not when security controls are missing but when they are mis-configured, leading to misplaced confidence in insecure systems.

Microsoft Windows 2000 Evaluation Guide

Digital Signature (Firma digitale)

2008-12-19T10:12:00.002+01:00

Calling this a "digital signature" was probably the most unfortunate nomenclature mistake in the history of cryptography.

Bruce Scheneier

How to design systems (II)

2008-12-19T10:12:00.001+01:00

In allocating resources, strive to avoid disaster rather than to attain optimum. Many years of experience with virtual memory, networks, disk allocation, database layout and other resource allocation problems have made it clear than a general-purpose system cannot optimize the use of resources.

Butler Lampson

How to design systems

2008-12-19T10:11:00.002+01:00

Handle normal and worst case separately. The requirements for the two are quite different: the normal case must be fast; and the worst case must make some progress.

Butler Lampson

Software and Real World (II)

2008-12-19T10:11:00.001+01:00

People buy solutions, not computers.

Jim Gray

How to design software (II)

2008-12-19T10:10:00.000+01:00

We know complex things break in complex ways. The veterans want simple designs, with simple interfaces and simple constructs that are easy to understand and debug and easy to put back together after they break.

Phil Smooth, Hotmail Engineer

Software and Real World

2008-12-19T10:09:00.002+01:00

Technology can assiste the change, but it can't make it happen on its own.

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft CTO

How to design software

2008-12-19T10:09:00.001+01:00

If a program has not been specified, it cannot be incorrect; it can only be surprising.

Young, Boebert and Kain

Reliable Software

2008-12-19T10:08:00.002+01:00

One of the things I find fascinating is that we’ve been writing software for 30 years and the tools we have to create reliable software are not significantly dissimilar from what we had a long time ago. Our ability to write reliable software is hardly any better now than it was then.

Michael Stonebraker

Security: Technology vs Real world

2008-12-19T10:08:00.001+01:00

The organizational problems of building and managing secure systems are so severe that they will frustrate any purely technical solution.

Ross Anderson

Cryptography and Security

2008-12-19T10:07:00.001+01:00

I do not know to whom should be credited the important truth "Whenever anyone says that a problem is easily solved by cryptography, it shows that he doesn’t understand it"

Roger Needham

Italy: Various Truths

2008-12-19T10:00:00.000+01:00

Italians are genetically unable to work in any large and complex organization. (By a former vicepresident of Siemens Europe. An italian.)
In the hell everything is organized by the italians.
Governing the italians is not difficult. It is pointless. (I thought it was by Giolitti, but others believe it is by Mussolini)

What is "research" (II) ?

2008-12-19T09:58:00.001+01:00

A multiple man-year implementation effort does not of itself justify publication of a paper.

Roy Levine and David Redell

Writing Scientific Papers

2008-12-19T09:57:00.001+01:00

If you don't have sufficient concern for your material to correct errors in grammar, spelling, and usage before submitting it for publication, why should you expect a reviewer to read the paper carefully?

Roy Levine and David Redell

What is "research" ?

2008-12-19T09:53:00.000+01:00

A lot of times, when people talk about applied research, they’re really talking about advanced product development. That’s not really research. Research is something you can publish in a peer-reviewed conference or journal. It needs to stand up to the best people in your field.

Rick Rashid, senior vice-president of Microsoft Research