Thomas Ptacek. Deletionista.
The Primary Objective, or, "why I'm here"
[edit]Remove Vanispamcruftisement from Wikipedia's under-policed computer security coverage.
Put more succinctly: pretend you're an article, and:
- If you're a bio, and your subject has never (a) been in the news, (b) written a widely-cited paper, (c) authored a book, (d) discovered a critical vulnerability (or blazed a trail of minor ones), (e) run security for a Fortune-500 company or government agency, or (f) been incarcerated, my goal here is to delete you.
- If you're about a company, and your subject's coverage in the trade press has been limited to 400 word shorts based on your own press releases, my goal here is to delete you.
This is painful for people to hear, but it's not painful for me to say. Please don't take it personally. Please consider: Wikipedia will likely be even more important 20 years from now. How likely is it that your article will make sense 20 years from now?
The Secondary Objective
[edit]Improve Wikipedia's coverage of computer security topics by actually writing articles.
The First Rule Of Wikipedia Editing
[edit]If an adjective is effective, it's probably POV, subjective, or nonverifiable. Write stereo instructions.
A Newly Discovered Second Rule Of Wikipedia Editing
[edit]If you're going to create a sock puppet account to add a vanity page about yourself to the Wikipedia, don't name it after your company.
Articles I Have Given A Shit About
[edit]ISCSI - Ioctl - CryptGenRandom - Mary Ann Davidson - Comparison of DNS server software - IPv4 address exhaustion
Stefan Savage - Daniel Bleichenbacher - qmail - Network Access Control - Hierarchical_internetworking_model
Zardoz (computer security) - Firewalls and Internet Security
I'll get there, I'll get there! W/I/P: /Vulnerability Research. Next, /Debugger.
Articles I Has Baleeted (or tried to)
[edit]John Flowers - StankDawg - Blacklisted! 411 - Fawn (musician) - William Quinn (phreaker) - Mark Anderson (Security)
Butchered From Inside - The Syndicate Of London - Gary Miliefsky - Vinod Mohan - BR Magazine - William J. Coldwell
Carlos Jimenez (businessman) - Simon Johnson (security expert) - Whitedust - Tomas Beaujean - Packet monkey(redir)
David A. Wheeler - Summer of worms - Hackcon - Hacker Voice Radio - Max Bianchi Godoy - Mark Hinge
Digital DawgPound - Jonathan Shapiro - Common Body of Knowledge - Miliefsky!!!!!!!!!!! - Radio FreeK America
Managed Security Metrics Provider - Melih Abdulhayoglu(redir) - SecurDisc - Holistic Information Security Practitioner
If it's red, America won.
Stop hating America.
- Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/StankDawg --- writeup in "IT Journal" and founding of Binary Revolution Radio prevailed at debate
- Packet monkey --- redirected, fine
- Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Butchered From Inside --- convinced to withdraw off-wiki
- Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/David A. Wheeler --- editor removed all security content, stopped being a bio I cared about
- Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Digital DawgPound --- proposed merge; first toil, then the grave
A Few World Experts In Cryptography
[edit]- Martin Hellman - The H in DH.
- Whitfield Diffie - The D in DH.
- Vincent Rijmen - The Rij in Rijndael, now spelled AES.
- Donald Coppersmith - The "Coppersmith" in DES.
- Daniel Bleichenbacher - Broke RSA. STARTED
- Adi Shamir - The S in RSA, co-inventor of differential.
- Eli Biham - Co-inventor of differential.
- Paul Kocher - Broke RSA.
- Taher ElGamal - the ElGamal in ElGamal.
- Xiaoyun Wang - Broke MD5.
- Hans Dobbertin - (the late) Broke MD5.
- Ronald Rivest - Invented MD5. Invented RC4.
A Few Notable World Experts In Security
[edit]- Martin Roesch - Author of Snort
- Gordon Lyon - Author of Nmap
- Thomas Dullien - Inventor of Bindiff
- Ivan Arce - Founder of CORE
- Bunnie Huang - Xbox Cracker Team, Has Scanning Electron Microscope in Kitchen
- Ilfak Guilfanov - Revolutionized Reverse Engineering
- HD Moore - Co-Author of Metasploit
- Jeff Moss - Founder of Black Hat and Defcon
- Michael Howard - Of Microsoft Turnaround Fame
- Elias Levy - Catalysed buffer overflow renaissance.
- Joanna Rutkowska - Famous malware researcher.
- Matt Conover - Heap overflows, Win32.
- Mary Ann Davidson - Lightning-rod CSO of Oracle DONE
- John Stewart (Cisco) - CSO of Cisco Systems
- Howard Schmidt - Former CSO of Microsoft
- David Litchfield - Famous Vulnerability Researcher
- Mark Dowd - Famous Vulnerability Researcher
- Chris Klaus - Founder of ISS
- Renaud Deraison - Author of Nessus
- Vern Paxson - Famous Malware/Internet Security Researcher
- Steve Bellovin - Godfather Of Internet Security Research
- Matt Blaze - Famous Practical Cryptographer
- Avi Rubin - Voting Security
- Stefan Savage - Broke TCP. STARTED
- Robert Tappan Morris - TCP Sequence Number Prediction
Notable Venues For Security/Crypto Research
[edit]- EUROCRYPT - IACR
- ASIACRYPT - IACR
- CRYPTO - IACR
- RSA - A second tier crypto venue, though a first tier industry venue.
- Usenix Security - A first tier security venue
- Transactions on Networking - The first tier academic network security venue.
- Black Hat - The top vulnerability research conference. Peer reviewed, selective.
- Defcon - A second-tier research venue related to Black Hat.
- CanSecWest - A first tier vulnerability research venue.
- Hack in the Box - A prominent Asian venue.
- Hackers On Planet Earth - A second tier vulnerability research venue (very little original research breaks here).
- SANS - A prolific industry venue, though not prominent for original research.
Smaller Recurring Venues
[edit]- OWASP - A monthly meeting of web security professionals
- ISSA - A regular meeting of security professionals
- DefCon (Meetings) - A semimonthly alternative to 2600 (Meetings)
- 2621 (Security Meetings) - A monthly informal meeting (adults only)
None of these are "notable" speaking events; you can speak at one just by asking.
All Of The Notable Security News Publications
[edit]- InfoWorld - see...
- Network World - via Ellen Mesmer (IDG)
- Network Computing - see...
- Dark Reading - the CMP trade pub
- Ziff Davis - (currently via Ryan Naraine)
- eWeek - Larry Seltzer and Lisa Vaas, ZDnet
- SecurityFocus - Rob Lemos
- Wired - 27bstroke6
- SearchSecurity at TechTarget - Bill Brenner
- Washington Post - via Brian Krebs
I'm missing a bunch of these. Will get there, and then get to work.
Flair
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