Turtles All the Way Down
Thinking about the future and browsing Wired, I got distracted by two articles by Bruce Schneier. This first describes my favorite security concept ever: “turtles all the way down”! “The World Wide Web sits on top of a turtle, and then below that is an older turtle, and that sits on the older turtle. You don’t have to feel fretful about that situation — because it’s turtles all the way down. Now, we don’t have to think about it in that particular way. The word ‘turtles’ makes it sound absurd and scary, like a myth or a confidence trick.” OK, so Bruce is using it to describe an architecture here and not a security concept, but this may be my favorite turtle quote of all time. It achieves the heretofore unachievable invoking the thought of turtles as scary!
For the obligatory security content of this posting, consider this article from Bruce Schneier about “How Perverse Incentives Drive Bad Security Decisions” with this key quote: “All security decisions are trade-offs, but the motivations behind them are not always obvious: They’re often subjective, and driven by external incentives. And often security trade-offs are made for nonsecurity reasons.”
It’s turtles all the way down!
Also, Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!