Fable 2
Guitar Hero World Tour
Fallout 3
C&C Red Alert 3
Endwar
Gears of War 2
Far Cry 2
And I’m still trying to finish Dead Space and Lego Batman. I didn’t think this year could beat last year in terms of amazing titles but good lord I’m drowning here. The title I know is going to be sucking up a lot of my time is probably Fallout 3, but I expect the RTS games to give it a run for its money as well.
Truly we live in a golden age of gaming.
I fly a lot. I hate it, but I do. According to my frequent miles thingie I have taken 16 domestic trips and 15 overseas trips since December of 2005.
I have carefully transcribed a series of etiquette rules for airline travel. Here they are.
1. If you are in the Aisle seat you will, without comment or complaint, always get up for the middle and window people to walk around or go to the bathroom, even if you are napping on the flight. This is because you have the best seat. Deal.
2. If you are in the window or aisle seat, you cede your middle armrest to the person in the middle. They have a shitty seat, and you both get more room than them. Deal.
3. If you are in the middle and the aisle seat is occupied, and the window seat is unclaimed upon take off, you move from the middle to the window to give both passengers more room. You also put your below-seat bag in your new window seat so both passengers can stretch their legs into the middle below-seat slot.
4. If you have a screaming newborn, you will look contrite and apologize. You will not glare offensively at all the passengers as if you have the god-given right to bring a creature less than 18 months old on an airplane where it cannot cope with its ears popping without screaming. I’m sorry your family refuses to come to visit you, you have no right to visit your screaming spawn on the rest of us without apologizing.
5. If you have children more than three but less than six you will give them Benadryl or a suitable mild sedative. Six year olds on a plane are cute. three/Four/five year olds still think they are two, and think screaming will get them their way. Like the newborn, this is not our problem so don’t glare at us like we are the assholes here. You are the asshole. I’m sorry but let’s be clear: you are the asshole.
6. I know, deep down, you think the airline rules are stupid regarding cell phone and computer use during the flight. Hell, I tend to agree. However the reality is that the rules are in place and we all have to deal. So if you whip out your cell while we are trying to get off the runway under the guise of "these stupid people don’t understand electronics, and I do not have to obey their rules", don’t complain if I BEAT YOU WITHIN AN INCH OF YOUR GOD DAMNED LIFE WITH YOUR OWN CELL PHONE for potentially endangering us all.
7. Do not watch porn on the airplane. Hey I’m a big fan of porn. I have no problem with it in general, but like grooming my privates, everything has a time and a place. I don’t care if you have the porn version of an all you can eat Netflix queue. I do not want to look up from my crappy impulse purchase airport bookstore Dean R. Koontz paperback only to see Jenna Chesty Boobs nom nom nom’ing on Peter McPorkSausage’s magical marble sack on your compensating-for-something-else Gateway 20 inch laptop screen one seat ahead of me.
8. On the order of your fourth alcoholic beverage, when the flight attendant says you can’t have any more, if you still persist in ordering one more, I will pipe up from next to you and say "He told me he had a gun in his cocaine pack strapped near his heroin bags!" Know when to say when.
9. Seriously #6, I will punch your ass in the neck over and over again until you put that god damned device away while we land. Do not tempt me.
I personally feel these are simple rules. Can’t we all follow them?
I think we can!
So I’m sitting in a meeting today and just before it starts I pipe up and say "Has everyone made sure to get today’s out of band update?"
Blank stares.
"Oh come on guys it’s important, make sure you download it."
"What the hell are you talking about?" someone asked.
"Today’s security update!" I said.
"Oh, I have mine set to automatic, what’s the big deal? It will install like normal right?"
"Yes," I replied, "but this is out of band so you might want to force install it now."
"What the hell is out of band?" someone else asked.
"It’s when we release outside of the monthly update cycle," I said, "that’s rarely done, and only for severe issues we see in the wild."
"We do them monthly?" the first person said, "I never noticed, how long have we done that?"
That’s when I realized it is five years ago this month.
You see, before Oct 15th, 2003, we released security updates every week on Wed. at 10am pacific. There was no advance notice, you either checked the security site or Windows Update on Wed. mornings or you weren’t responsible for security updates in your org.
I remember at the time I was very much against moving to monthly updates. It struck me as leaving people vulnerable for way too long.
Boy was I wrong. A couple of customer visits cured me of that notion, as I saw first hand how customers could not handle having critical updates every seven days. The risk model to update reaction time was not scalable for even medium sized organizations. After a ton of research, 30 days was determined from customer feedback to be the optimum spread to make sure organizations could evaluate and deploy updates on a manageable schedule. I think it’s turned out well. (weirdly, Oracle would later mimic us but feel like they had to make it different so they made quarterly security updates.)
So on today’s out of band update, I wish a very happy birthday to consumable and predictable update schedules, and more protected customers in the intervening time.
On 11.19, you’ll get to make one of these:
A few months ago I was asked to keynote the SecTor security conference in Toronto. A million things flashed through my mind, like "Would I do a good job?" and "What would I talk about?" and "Do I speak Canadian?"
Thankfully I was able to harness my special powers of fear and stagefright to craft up something passable.
The conference was packed, a variety of security researchers, security IT pros, and security vendors were in attendence. It was my first trip to Toronto. Although I arrived insanely past my scheduled arrival time–
Wait, that was such an event in and of itself, I had to include it in my keynote.
It was an 8am flight so I was already kind of bitchy and cranky because if there’s anything I hate more than repeatedly being punched in the throat, it’s air travel.
Sure enough, the pilot comes on after we’re all seated. The flight plan computer in the cockpit has a non recoverable fault and they were going to have to, get this, reboot the airplane.
This involved turning the plane off, turning the plane on again, and waiting for the flight team to recertify the flight.
This process takes 30 to 40 minutes.
That didn’t work. So they…did it again. And it didn’t work.
So the pilot came on and said well folks, rebooting hasn’t fixed the problem so we’re going to potentially have to cancel the flight but first we’re going to…reboot it one last time.
And that time it worked.
So I got there insanely late and had just enough time to catch some crappy wings and a guiness with JJ, Jamie, and the Hoff before crashing.
Tuesday was a load of press interviews followed by what was probably the best event speaker dinner EVAR. It was at the Bier Markt downtown. OMG. All the beer. All the amazing food you could ever want. Best. Food. EVAR.
The talk was security trends, how awesome the food was, which was the next beer, how awesome the food was, security trends, beer, food, security? Wait Xbox? food. Beer? Security! Beer! wait what? SECURITY! wow. We were there until way way insanely late, and we stumbled back to the hotel.
Next morning I woke up early, hit some coffee, and gave my keynote. I hear it was good but to be honest I was a bundle of nerves and in the end realized the deck I provided was missing three slides from my practice so I actually ended 10 minutes early and was a bit mortified. Luckily the audience had questions. Here’s the text, along with a description of the slides in brackets.
It was overall a great experience with fun presenters. I can’t wait for SecTor ’09. Thanks to all who were there and went to my talk.
