You got free time? Time?! That resource we want more of, or less of, the one we want to slow down, speed up, thank, curse, monitor, measure, ignore and obey. All often within the span of the same day. The very resource we so often run our lives by, yet waste at every turn. It too, like our digital world is a more abstract concept than the tactile analog world we live in. It too can be captured and tamed for fleeting moments in devices, yet like it’s digital cousin we think we control it, but we are nothing more than custodians of the memories it leaves behind. We are not good with time; we’ve had 6,000 years or so to get used to the idea of its passing and the consequences. We used to track it by the moon, nowadays we are ruled by atoms that are accurate to a millisecond every decade. So, why should we care? We waste so much of it. We allow others to dictate our use of it Our very existence is tyrannized by it We have watched the convergence of our digital world and that of time, and
This week we saw an attack against a city water system, in an attempt to poison the drinking water. Many of us have been warning about this for years. How did this happen? It must have been the work of sophisticated nation state attackers, it has to be hard to hack a water treatment plant because you know, people could die if that happened. The people in charge must take extra precautions, and have really good security practices in place to keep our drinking water safe. They must have been unable to prevent or avoid this attack. These are all things that we hope would be true, unfortunately the reality of what actually happened is far more disturbing. (Channeling my inner security Yoda) Sophisticated this attack was not, difficult to pull off was it not, prevented could have been, security basics lacking they were, practice good they did not. What happened was a multitude of failures in requiring and implementing the most basic and foundational of security controls. We have reac