Wasn’t it just yesterday that we put XX1 on the bus for her first day of kindergarten? I guess if yesterday was August of 2006, that would be correct. Man, six years have gone by fast! On Friday she moves up to Middle School. As we watched the annual Field Day festivities with all the kids dressed up in their countries’ garb yesterday, the kindergartners seemed so small. And they are. Six years doesn’t seem so long, but against the growth of such a child it’s a lifetime.
One of the things I truly love about writing for Securosis and TidBITS is that I am rarely put in a position where I need to be first to write about something. As a writer, and occasionally a journalist, I consider time the ultimate luxury. Unfortunately, few journalists have this liberty, and even fewer appreciate it.
Data masking has been around a long time. I have been masking since the early ’90s to create test data from production copies of customer insurance records, as well as to alter database columns before sending database exports out for “data cleansing”. At the time masking was little more than UNIX shell scripts or home grown Perl scripts to alter particular columns in .csv files. A few years later I was giddy with excitement to have my first masking ‘program’, running on a paleolithic version of…
Rich and I – with help from Chris Pepper – compiled the Understanding and Selecting a Database Security Platform series into a research paper, and provided it to a number of people for initial review. We got a lot of valuable feedback and observations back. Commenters felt several topics were under-served, they believe others were over-emphasized, and more we failed to mention. We’re not too proud to admit when we’re wrong, or when we failed to capture the essence of customer buying decisions,…
Rich here. It amazes me how something completely mundane can be utterly fascinating the first time you experience it.
This morning I woke up about 5:45 as I heard my younger daughter waking up herself. If history held, she had been up for a little while and was ready to get out of her crib. Now!!! Nothing new there, and I started the painful process of getting out of bed (I d hammered my bad shoulder a little too much during my swim workout yesterday, leading to a painful night).
What ever happened to the sit-down family dinner? Maybe it’s just me, but growing up, the only time I really experienced it was watching TV. My Mom worked retail pharmacy, so normally I was pulling something out of the freezer to warm up for my kid brother and myself. And nowadays the only time we sit down for dinner is when we go out to a restaurant.
I’ve spent more hours than I can count studying compliance and governance. Reading and re-reading PCI requirements, Sarbanes-Oxley law, theory, and applied theory. Spent mind-numbing hours combing through BASEL and BASEL II docs. I’ve spent many long weeks with external auditors, internal auditors, assessors, risk management personnel, corporate governance officers, and government officials – trying to understand their jobs, their roles, and how the world functions from their perspectives. I’ve…
My conversation started like this:
“Do you know where the recorder is?” she asked.
“The what?” I replied.
“The tape recorder we bought you!”
It all started with an innocent call from my mortgage broker. He started with, “What if I could shave 75 basis points off your note, with no cost to you?” As you might have noticed, I’m a skeptical type of fellow. I asked, “What’s the catch?” He laughed and said, “No catch, I can get you from 4.25% to 3.5% and I’ll pay the costs.” I responded again, “There must be a catch. What am I missing?” He maked some wise remark about Groundhog Day and then told me there really is no catch. I can save a…
We have discussed the evolution of vulnerability management from a tactical tool to a much more strategic platform providing decision support for folks to more effectively prioritize security operations and resource allocation. But some vendors may not manage to effectively broaden their platforms sufficiently to remain competitive and fully satisfy their customer requirements. So at some point you may face a replacement decision, or to put it more kindly, a decision of evolution or revolution…