Re: [fw-wiz] iso 17799

From: Dana Nowell (DanaNowell_at_cornerstonesoftware.com)
Date: 07/22/04

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    To: Frederick M Avolio <fred@avolio.com>, Dana Nowell <DanaNowell@cornerstonesoftware.com>, "Marcus J. Ranum" <mjr@ranum.com>, "Paul D. Robertson" <paul@compuwar.net>
Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 19:47:33 -0400

    At 07:04 PM 7/21/2004 -0400, Frederick M Avolio wrote:
    >Years ago Win Treese (Project Athena, DEC Cambridge Research Lab, Open
    >Market, etc.) came to the following conclusion: "not only is all human
    >knowledge on USENET, it's typed in every two weeks.
    >
    >The information you ask for is out there. And it has been repeated multiple
    >times. Having it in one repository only means it is one more place people
    >will ignore. Seriously. Nothing Marcus said earlier in this thread was
    >anything he and others hadn't said 10 years ago. No joke.
    >

    I agree lots of the information exists that's the easy part :-).
    Unfortunately crud exists at a ratio of 10,000,000+ to one gem. If you
    guys think I'm worried about creating the info, you're wrong, I know a lot
    of it exists. However, the organization stinks. I search on Google and it
    takes up to an hour or so to find a good in-depth article on some topic
    (2,000,000 hits, mostly marketing drivel). Now Paul needs it, so he spends
    an hour, then Marcus, then ... How about I find it (cost .5 hours, 'cause
    I'm good;), I post a link somewhere, Paul finds it (cost .1 hour), then
    Marcus (cost .1 hour) and ... Total number of hours saved per year could
    be anywhere from zero to a really big number. More available hours is a
    good thing. Of course this only works if the poster can be trusted and if
    the deluge of info/links can be categorized/searched/sliced/diced. Now
    let's toss in any papers written by us for the list (e.g., how does
    application X's protocol work), post them to a web site and link'em (more
    grist for the mill). What we have is a pre-vetted 'search result set'.
    The hard part is the vetting and the organization (search engine?). Toss
    in some automation to weed dead links periodically and magic, a helpful
    repository (assuming people actually post to it and the vetting mechanism
    works).

    Why is it helpful. People don't post some stuff to the list (risk analysis
    papers, long documents, sample configs, ...) because it is bad form to
    force feed it to several thousand uninterested people, we now lose that
    data/help. We now have a non-intrusive method to make that available.
    Some people are bad at using search engines and a small 'more on topic'
    search engine improves their ability to find stuff. Some people have no
    clue about the topic they are researching, it is new to them. They now
    have a source 'vetted by peers' to start from. I'm sure several other
    reasons will occur to others.

    It seems to me that the technology exists, lots of the information exists,
    the people with knowledge to separate the wheat from the chaff exist (on
    this list). What lacks is hosting, disk space, some possibly hard code, a
    politically correct and workable solution to the vetting issue, and the
    will to do it.

    >But, Dana, I have a suggestion. You can gather the answers together and
    >publish them. I am not kidding. Books written by someone who has to
    >actually deal with what they write about are terrific. (Don't take that to
    >mean big sellers... I have personal experience in that area.) And finding
    >someone to publish nowadays is really easy.
    >

    IMO, the information is too dynamic. Any book would be obsolete before it
    hits the store. We need a dynamic resource that ebbs and flows with the
    changes on the net. A new spiffy killer app/hardware doo-dad/protocol hits
    the street and we get links to several analysis/review papers, over time
    (weeks/months/years) the item gets less useful/popular/important, the links
    decay, and they get weeded from the knowledge base. Books can't really
    cover that very well.

    Besides, my spelling stinks ;). 

    -- 
Dana Nowell     Cornerstone Software Inc.
Voice: 603-595-7480 Fax: 603-882-7313
email: DanaNowell_at_CornerstoneSoftware.com
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