• Posted by Tim Jarrett
  • On March 14, 2008

  • Filed under Internet

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Laws of the Internet, continued

It seems to be the day for oracular pronouncements about the Net. An engineer I work with told me about an intermittent network connectivity problem he had experienced yesterday. Sometimes he could get on the network and sometimes he couldn’t. The cause? A bad network cable! He said, “Normally with a network problem like this [...]

  • Posted by Tim Jarrett
  • On March 14, 2008

  • Filed under Internet

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Spafford’s axioms of Usenet, generalized

In looking for a source for the “https = armored truck between two cardboard boxes” analogy referenced in my previous post, I came across a list of other famous analogies by the author, Gene “Spaf” Spafford. Many of the ones cited need some context, but #7, which I reproduce below in its entirety, is completely [...]

  • Posted by Tim Jarrett
  • On March 14, 2008

  • Filed under Security

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Ripples from SOURCE: Boston: how much security is optimal?

I wasn’t able to attend this week’s SOURCE: Boston conference, which my company is cosponsoring, but reading about some of the talks and looking at some of the papers that are coming out of it has been fascinating. A few points:
If you think protecting digital systems is hard, what about analog systems like the telephone?

The [...]