I am a hacker and you are afraid and that makes you more dangerous than I ever could be.
Quotes from work
Topic: Miscellaneous
11:33 am EDT, Jun 19, 2009
[discussing where to go for lunch] Sam: And of course there is Panda Express Billy: which does not serve panda Sam: You can't eat panda... they are too greasy! Prajakta: I thought he was going to say 'because they are so cute' Sam: Cute almost always tastes good!
"It's not about me. It's about what these locks protect," Tobias says. "Medeco locks are the best in the world—that's why they're used by the Pentagon, the embassies. These agencies believe that the locks can't be picked in under 15 minutes, that they can't be bumped, that you can't trace keys onto plastic. It's the definition of high security—and it's wrong! We proved it."
"Look," he says, taking it down a few notches. "If we can do it, so can the bad guys. Medeco needs to acknowledge it and let the locksmiths know it—and the DOD, FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and all their clients."
Tobias blinks frantically, trying to clear this appalling reality from his view-screen. "You know, they could have just admitted the problem. Just said, 'Marc, you're right and we're wrong and we need to admit this publicly and fix it.' But did they do that?"
Tobias waggles an emphatic no. "Instead, they called me an extortionist and trashed the Marc Tobias reputation. And they're going to pay for that," he says, stabbing the defenseless tablecloth for emphasis. "Oh yeah, arrogance does have its price."
I am intimately familiar with exactly this feeling. It's the feeling of "why in gods name are you denying this? Why aren't you fixing this? Why is your 'solution' to this calling me a crank?"
"We saw what was coming out with HTML 5 and these browsers, and the question was how far can we push this?" says Hoffman, who manages HP's Web security research group. "We started digging in and said, 'Oh my goodness, this might actually be possible.'
I would never say "oh my goodness" ;-)
"Matt and I know, it's not just us presenting something and saying, 'Look how cool this is,' " Hoffman says. "The cool stuff is not going to come from us, it's going to come from everybody taking the idea and running with it."
"Running a start-up is like being punched in the face repeatedly," he says. "But working for a large company is like being waterboarded."
Why does the world need so many little software companies? He looks at me as if I'm insane. "Imagine that instead of starting Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin had taken jobs in some research lab," he says. "They would have written a little piece of an operating system that might not even get used and maybe some boring academic papers. Think of how much more they did for the world as start-up founders."
