Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Friday 21 March 2003, 7:36 PM
Friday
Friday 21/03/2003
The only good thing about the goings-on in Mesopotamia is that for once, Microsoft can feel like it's not the most attacked entity on the planet. And it's been a bad week otherwise for the Redmond tribe: two major security alerts, one of which was promptly used to bring down US Army servers, and a fix that was in some circumstances worse than the problem it cured.
But never mind. The company is more than ready to employ the healing balm of irony to get it through these awkward times. How else to explain that it is sponsoring part of a computing degree course at Leeds University, and that the module to proudly bear its name is one on trusted computing? Yes, let Microsoft show you how to write secure, reliable code that can be guaranteed to run correctly and securely. It's very difficult, says Microsoft, unless you get the right idea from the off -- and who better than the security world's most trusted, most effective and most admired company to point the way, say I.
And on that note, I shall repair to a weekend indulging in war porn. I have shortwave radios tuned to frequencies that must not be named, I have cable TV, broadband news feeds, digital radio set to rolling news and an infinite supply of barely trustworthy bookmarks. I can track completely false rumours as they ricochet around the world, while worrying mightily about Israel, Turkey, oil, WMD, the Arab Street, international law and terrorism. What very bliss is it to be alive...
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