Here at Symantec, one of our beliefs isthat keeping people safe online requires more than just a knowledge oftechnology. It requires a knowledge of how people - both good guys andbad guys - actually use technology. It also requires an understandingof how people view technology and safety. It requires the ability tocommunicate different types of ideas to a wide variety of people; fromteenaged users to the CFO, from the college educator to the data entryoperator. It's a huge job and I was just reflecting today on how veryfortunate I am to be working within a group that not only sees thevalue of the multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approaches, butone that actively supports and encourages it.
I recently spent a week at the Santa Fe Institute,learning about scientific advances in everything from the communicationpatterns of...
It's been a week since I finished my VB talk (almost on time). WhileI didn't get to the part of the talk exploring computer games and fun videosand their relevance to teaching people about security (and computerskills in general, and life skills, too!), I did get some interestingfeedback from some of the delegates. The one thing I've heard mostconsistently is that the ideas my talk put forth apply to technicalpeople, as well as not-quite-so-technical people. My first reactionwas—“wow”. I was hoping it would eventually get around to this. Onepurpose of the paper was to initiate bridge building between differentmindsets. The fact that I was able to get this across in the firstsegment of this research is just, well, unexpected.
Monday was a holiday in the United States, but since I’m in Canada I took advantage of that fact in order to not take the day off. My boss should like that. :) Instead, I created some more slides for my upcoming VB presentation;but, I didn’t have a very easy time of it. Some people are naturals atputting together presentations—complete with nice graphics,easy-to-read charts, and a minimum of animation. I’m not one of them.Not only do I fight (and I’m finally winning, I might add) theanimation daemon that seems to want to add flying horses and spinningcircles of yellow and black to each slide, I am dyslexic and I suffer from more than moderate dyscalculia, making charts more than a small...
I landed in Montreal on Sunday morning and immediately began sortingout pictures of my dogs (!) so I could put the finishing touches on myVirus Bulletin presentation. “Everything I Need to Know About Security I Learned from My Dog and a Country Western Song”is not your usual security paper title; in fact, the initial ideaevolved as a tongue-in-cheek “what if” mental exercise. However, themore I thought about it, and the more people I talked to about it, themore I realized the idea was worth pursuing to the next level.Somewhere along the way it changed to “two dogs”, I submitted theabstract to Virus Bulletin, it was accepted, and the paper began totake shape.
