Dispatches from the cybersecurity wars

Random musings and notes from the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco this past week:

Cybersecurity has Washington’s attention: Chances are you could go to technology conferences all year and not find as many top government officials as we saw this week at RSA. The Cybersecurity Coordinator for the National Security Council, the Director of the FBI, and the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security all took the time to travel from Washington DC to speak to the gathering.

Watch out, they’re following you: Phil Dunkelberger of PGP Corporation got a good laugh when he came out for his speech shortly before Robert Mueller (Dir. of the FBI) and proclaimed: “Oh, no! I’m being followed by the FBI,” a sly reference to his company’s differences with the agency.

Glad to be out of Sun: Noted code expert Whit Diffie, when asked to name a highlight from the past year, told the conference, “I’ve left Sun Microsystems and I’m looking forward to doing more interesting work.” Ouch!

Better hide the silver: Former NSA official Brian Snow, noting that DARPA has hired a hacker to do cryptography work, said “This could be a collusion made in hell, but I hope it works!”

Time for an update: Bemoaning the lack of more compelling enterprise software today, Marc Benioff, the CEO of salesforce.com, pointed out that “Lotus Notes was created before Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder) was.”

But at least they’ll bring my slippers: P.W. Singer of the Brookings Institute described the current state of robotics as being similar to the status of computers in the early 1980s: big bulky devices that are getting most of the funding from the military.

Now if only a robot could write this column…….