My general philosophy on the state of computer security is to have basically given up entirely on securing my systems beyond the abilities of their inherent platforms and operating systems. As you may have noticed of late, excess verbiage is beginning to rear its ugly head around my apartment, as I attempt to bulk up on my vocabular inbrain RAM for the Climbing story. It's really coming along quite well, despite the difficulty of actually getting Scott to be himself around me.
Anyway, I have a frightening trust of the Internet as a whole. I honestly wouldn't have a problem with leaving my credit card numbers on my own website, nor my address and so forth. I sincerely believe that the only dangerous place for my information to be is in a database somewhere. 500 credit card numbers, all available in one place is much more tempting than one in another. I have nothing much to hide, really, and I wish more people and corporations worked this way. What would be the harm in allowing 100% of all company documents and memos into the public domain at all times? They've got email and Instant Messaging services. They can use those for their naughtiness, just as they could confine their illk-doings to a chat and a handshake. Even openness in research projects would be a useful thing to offer society as a whole.
I think there is a distinct difference between working very hard to create something that will benefit society and doing all that same research to create something that is known will sell well, but will not improve the lives of anyone who purchases it. What is the harm of keeping all knowledgge public? If two drug companies are racing to find a cure for the same disease, why not combine forces and work together? The holy grail for these pharmecutical companies is to create a pill you take that makes you thin. That has no benefit for humanity. But the research behind making that pill can be quite informative and help advance our understanding of human physiology. That type of work should be known by all.
To some extent, this is already done in the University system. I'm sure this helps immensely those that would otherwise be doing the exact same research and coming upon the exact same results.
Anyway, I've been writing and so forth. The spelling error in the Seropian piece was caught, and fixed long ago. Thank god. It wasn' my fucking fault, after all.