Whither RSA?
RSA is a puzzling event. On the one had it's a very successful meeting, fun to attend, and brings together the IT security industry for a week. On the other hand, when we saw old friends and exchanged the traditional show greeting "What have you seen that's exciting?" and the answer in general was "not much." That's paradoxical, or at least troubling. All the vendors were there and they were spending money like Persian Princes. And the security problems are as important as ever, if not more. So if the spending is there and the problems exist, why wasn't there much new? It's a puzzlement. Part of the problem is that it's a lot harder to solve today's criminal attack problems than it was to stop worms and viruses. And the customer now wants to talk in terms of intelligent risk mitigation rather than just "preventing bad things from happening" and that's difficult too. Maybe most of the vendors neither know how to prevent the modern problems nor how their customer should justify the expense. We can hope that things will improve by next year.


In the last month John and I took separate (but equal!) vacations in Paris. John completed the Paris Marathon while I took my high-school daughter to visit this wonderful city on her Spring break. On our way back we were routed through Heathrow and had the bad luck of experiencing British Air's now infamous Terminal 5 on its first day of attempted operation. The BA planes were full of wonderful and expensive propaganda about how amazing and wonderful T5 was going to be (reminded me somehow of those olds jokes about a computer salesman who never consummates his marriage instead spending each night telling his new bride how great it's going to be). It took over two hours for our luggage to be unloaded into the new and marvelous baggage hall that was designed to be so efficient that it doesn't have any food or even anywhere to sit down (because the baggage will come so quickly!). Only the Brits can screw something like this up so badly (all those old British Leland auto assembly workers must now work for BA). Anyway, as they often cheerfully say "Sorry!"
