Hypercriticality

Fantastic post by the editor of Communications of the ACM that nicely captures some of the issues in the CS community:

Hypercriticality

I have long been a proponent that folks in the CS community have tended to operate as gatekeepers rather than prospectors. Hopefully more articles like this will create serious debate in the community regarding why our internal review process tends to be considerably more negative versus other research communities.

Back, this time for real (I hope)

With summer coming up, time to get the old blog posts a rolling again.

I have a nice, lengthy post coming up, courtesy of a review we just got from a journal (a good one too which makes it even more sad). The single review was in response to our paper examining public versus private firewall rules which asked the simple question, do you really gain that much by keeping your firewall rules private. Hint: the answer is way less than one would think.

Anyone, onto the money quote from the reviewer:

Firewalls are generally considered a hack, not any real guarantee of security. A backstop. Do we need to analyze this hack with such loving care?

Wow, just wow. One would be hard pressed to come up with a better example as to why industry ignores the security community.