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Date: 2001-08-26

John Young: Babbage, RAND & Security


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John Young über Charles Babbage, das Deprimierende am
Zu_früh_auf_der_Bildfläche_Erschienen_Sein und vergessene
Propheten des frühen IT Zeitalter, genannt Sixties. Wie immer,
wenn der wort/kärgste Dokumentarist das Wort ergreift, der je über
diesen Planeten wandelte, ist auf wenigen Absätzen mehr Content
als sonstwo in fetten Datenbanken vorhanden ist.

post/scrypt: Wer hat da schon wieder "Sie wollen uns zu
Kakerlaken machen" laut hinausgesagt?

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It is indeed wondrous to watch a new profession flower from the
muck.

Who would have thought 20 years ago that there would be a need
for computer security consultants on the open market.

Willis Ware of RAND called attention a while ago to a paper he
wrote in the early 1960s for a small number of people who were just
beginning to worry about computer security, then limited to
government, in particular the military, and the first task faced was
how to define the problem, presuming there was one. He wrote a
paper on that which was not widely known, though seminal.

Discussing this with Willis I learned about the computer history
archives at the Charles Babbage Institute somewhere in the Mid-
West USA, and was able to retrieve Willis's aboriginal paper on the
range of issues compsec entailed -- which as far as I know has not
been surppassed, now some 40 years later. And I wonder if his
scary prescriptions are covered by the upstart accrediting bodies
and agencies.

A few months later my beloved and I were wandering the streets of
London and ran across a house bearing a tablet which claimed
Charles Babbage once lived there. I near wept upon gazing upon
that domicile of Mr. Babbage and remembering how long he
labored without recognition, much less well-paid commercial
licensing, for an alchemy nobody knew how to even acknowledge
existed, or if it did must be highly classified post haste to prevent
the public from learning about it.

Is there a Babbage archive in the UK?

Slowly, as if pulling molars, we are eliciting from the National
Security Agency what it knows about Non-Secret Encryption
before or consurrent with Diffie-Hellman. The agency has written in
the past week that the material on the topic it holds is voluminous
and, unless I wanted to wait until 2006, could I narrow my initial
request for all such information.

Yes, I faxed, please release to me the earliest information you have
about NSE, and would you be so kind as to also release a timeline
of when the technology was discovered, or invented, assessments
made and policy of deployment throughout its history.

The simple point is, as ever with compsec, what you do not know
can be well beyond wondrous, even fatal,though more probably
ridiculously humiliating.





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edited by Harkank
published on: 2001-08-26
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