Why is it, when the Committee wants to talk about an important subject like personal Internet Security they go and have people they invite marketing people along instead of technologists and security experts?
Apparently, the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee is going to be taking evidence today from council members of ISPA - the Internet Service Providers Association. Who will be giving evidence? James Blessing, Chief Operating Officer at Entanet; Matthew Henton, Head of Marketing at Brightview and Camille de Stempel, Director of Policy at AOL.
Not one serious technologist or security expert there that I can see. The closest thing is Blessing, who started out as a radio producer. The result in these circumstances is that you usually get people who consider themselves "strategists" promising all sort of things that are either (a) not technically feasible or worse (b) haven't been invented yet.
The first step in personal Internet security lies with the fundamentally poor security model in the leading Operating System. The second step is decent education of what is sane and what is insane to do online. And the third step is to engage with the white hat hacking community to ensure that what you suggest isn't instantly circumvented.
6 comments:
Dizzy,
You could try here or here or here.
Plenty of techies in there (including Alan Cox, who, by some counts is the senior techie in the UK) and at least a couple of notable whitehats.
And Richard Clayton is a special advisor to the Committee.
Sorry,
S-E
bastard press release was for today, didn't mention yesterday! Fair point.
Having said that, apart from Clayton a lot fo them still look like what get's commonly called "the business" in meeting.
Don't get me wrong btw, I'm not saying the committee won;t come up with good things, what worries me is that marketing people are even being asked about technology.
No sane person invites techies to meetings. Techies are best kept away from direct human contact and only communicated with through email.
Adam is on the money, -ish. A pure salesdroid would be a disastrous person to put in front of a parliamentary committee - but so would be a pure Dilbert.
As a company interacting with regulators/governments, you need to put forward someone with enough technical ability to understand what the engineers are saying, but (just as importantly) enough commercial acumen to ensure the message the regulators ultimately get is in line with your business objectives.
John B
Post a Comment