How secure is the internet? It is disgustingly bad, and Microsoft seems to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution! They are selling in more and more systems but pay no attention to detail and only seem to care about money. They don't seem to mind that their system is so insecure that they have to release a patch every two weeks! I pity those poor NT owners that have to spend days going through all the security patches trying to keep updated.
Is the net fulfilling its early promise? Yes, although I still think there is a long way to go in terms of security. Companies still need to pay more attention to security and not have so many holes in their systems. They are a big target and there are a lot of people out there hammering on Microsoft systems. There is something fundamentally flawed with their operating system and until they get that fixed and design from the ground up with security in mind, rather than convenience, there will be the opportunity to exploit those systems. All it takes is for someone scanning the IP address to find and exploit the service. There are a lot of dangerous scripts out there on the net right now.
Is it ironic that your new product is a firewall? A lot of us "old-timers" have gone over to the other side in as much as I consider myself an active member of a clean-up crew for the internet. The CrunchBox itself is a very proactive device and can be programmed to satisfy any company's security policy. It can also be programmed to do some pretty nasty things, should you want it to... like hack back! I feel sorry for the poor script-kiddie that runs into a CrunchBox defending an IP address. They are gonna be in for a nasty surprise!
Are you disappointed that hacking has become so malicious? It has certainly achieved a lot of notoriety in the press recently, and when I was doing it nobody knew about anything. I could have a blue box (see www.usc.edu/~douglast/202/lecture9/lbb.html) in my hand, wave it in front of a cop and he would not know what it was. In the early days, Steve Wozniak got caught in a pay phone with one and he told the cop it was a synthesizer. The cop told him it was out of tune, needed calibrating and that anyway a guy called Robert Moog had beaten him to it!
What computers were you using back then? The Apple II was the first computer I got my hands on. I built my own one with my own operating system but it didn't do very much! Nowadays I have moved over to Linux, which is getting a lot more popular. Linux with an Apache web server cannot be beaten for performance. The German government has completely removed all Microsoft products from their server lines and China won't even allow them to be used!
Favourite sites? www.securityfocus.com and www.whitehats.com
Visit: www.webcrunchers.com/crunch
