WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned
and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.
We think that they are Nature’s poetry,
and the most egalitarian of her displays, since
everyone can have a fantastic view of them.
We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it.
Life would be dull if we had to look up at
cloudless monotony day after day.
We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the
atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of
a person’s countenance.
Clouds are so commonplace that their beauty is often overlooked.
They are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul.
Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save
on psychoanalysis bills.
And so we say to all who’ll listen:
Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and live life with your head in the clouds!
“I love the clouds… the clouds that pass… up there… up there… the wonderful clouds!â€?
[The Stranger, Charles Baudelaire]
Inspiring. I especially appreciate the “blue-sky” reference as that’s something very true in information security and risk management. When you defocus on actual data and see only on the spots of blue, you end up missing the big picture and getting rained on “without warning”.
I’ll have to see about posting more of my cloud photos…
The mystery surrounding the Nyxem worm is starting to rattle the system. F-Secure was again first on the scene with a warning on January 20th that the growth and destructive payload of the worm were alarming. A week later all of the other large Anti-Malware firms are reporting the same thing, and security folks all seem to be looking at each other and wondering what’s the significance of February 3rd (the day it activates and deletes all your data — docs, spreadsheets, and databases), and whether this is the sophistication of attack we should expect going forward? The shift from quantity to “quality” of malware is happening right now. Who’s to blame?
Incidentally, just as we’re starting to get comfortable with using software to control the computer BIOS (very handy in the enterprise), someone points out that controls are lacking to prevent someone from BIOS attacks:
The firmware on most modern motherboards has tables associating commands in the ACPI Machine Language (AML) to hardware commands. New functionality can be programmed in a higher level ACPI Source Language (ASL) and compiled into machine language and then flashed into the tables.
While the earth gets warmer, the politics seem to get colder. According to the BBC Canada is vigorously staking its claim to the Arctic perhaps in anticipation of a waterway opening up:
The Conservative plans include the construction and deployment of three new armed heavy ice-breaking ships and an underground network of listening posts.
Listening posts, eh? It’s not clear what the US ambassador was hoping to achieve by telling Canada that they have no claim to the territory. He’s certainly given the Canadian conservatives more ammunition that they must stake a claim. Pot, kettle, black, no?
There should be one if there isn’t already. And unless someone objects, today seems like as good a day as any to celebrate the brilliance of his words, most of which I find useful in meetings about risk:
“No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.”
“Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous.”
“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers”
“The more I read, the more I meditate; and the more I acquire, the more I am enabled to affirm that I know nothing”
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets” (a softer variation is that some think it’s ok to write buggy code if you write so much of it that your pride and profit keep it going in spite of inefficiency and harm)
and finally, with regard to today’s news that the FTC has fined ChoicePoint $15 million…
“Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.”
Here’s to Voltaire and to his role in the age of Enlightenment!
He was a poet’s poet:
Understand idleness better. It is either folly or wisdom; it is virtue in wealth and vice in poverty. In the winter of our life, we can enjoy in peace the fruits which in its spring our industry planted. Courtiers of glory, writers or warriors, slumber is permitted you, but only upon laurels.
