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Identity, Security & Me » Blog Archive » InfoSec Europe 2007 - Thoughts

I was going to post about my own experience of Infosec on Wednesday, but Paul Toal beat me to it and, frankly, my summary is pretty much the same as his (that’s disappointing, if you don’t want to read his post ). The only comment I will make is about the vendor (I can’t remember who they were) that were giving away condoms - imagine explaining the presence of that to the wife - “It was a three day information security conference, pretty dull really”

What I did want to follow up on was what Paul said about Bruce Schneier’s presentation, which although not strictly relevant to what I do was interesting nonetheless. The general theme of the talk was about the permanence of data and the way that the “younger” generation feed every aspect of their lives onto the web - MySpace, Flickr, YouTube and now Twitter all play a part in this. Schneier’s main argument was that we (I say that like I’m an old man!) shouldn’t try to stop them, but should provide the tools to ensure that the data can be erased at some point in the future, or maybe even have a time limit on that. I’m not entirely sure, but I think that the permanence of data is one of the things that people like about this - the fact that I can give someone a URL to my holiday snaps on flickr and know that, pretty much, it’ll be there forever is a good thing. This was emphasised in this post by Mark Cuban in which he discusses the web as a personal, digital archive. His title hints at something that I discussed back in November (although I now have the top search result for my name!) about how search is so important - one of the areas that Schneier touched upon was that, kids being kids, things will get recorded that they may not necessarily want a future employer to see and that until attitudes change there will be casualties of a generational battle.

As if needed, I witnessed a further re-enforcement of this point about a generation gap this morning on the BBC in an interview with Jellyellie (frankly, I’ve absolutely no idea who the hell she is, but apparently, she’s written a book - thanks Google) and some guy who I didn’t catch the name of. The whole thing seemed like media tripe, but I did catch one choice quote from the guy saying that “chatting” to people on the Internet can never be as good as getting out there and meeting people “properly” and that sitting in a dark room the whole time is unhealthy. I agree on his second point, but his first just smacks of exactly the attitude that Schneier discussed - just not getting the point that, in some ways, the contact is better - a bigger, wider circle of friends, spread across the globe, with different interests and importantly where gender and race are unimportant.

This is important stuff - I’d read recently (original BBC article) about teenagers using online identities in a throwaway fashion and I wonder how this squares up. I suspect that certain aspects of online life don’t contribute to a person’s overall “sense of identity” and these can quite easily be discarded, but others (a blog, MySpace page &c) are kept and cherished (I also think there’s a correlation to be explored here with email addresses - whilst I use a single address for most of my dealings I keep other addresses handy for certain things - some of those addresses I could lose without a worry; many people deal with spam in this way). There must be a balance here and perhaps it merely demonstrates how easily one aspect of a digital identity can be removed before it causes a negative effect (a bad reputation could be likened to gangrene!) on the whole and this is something we can all learn from the younger generation.

On this day..

• Football - 2006
• The Year of the Appliance (again?) - 2006

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