Stairway to poetry

 

Image from author

The Hague, Ministry of Justice and Security. From the top floor, the 36^th, you have a magnificent view of the surrounding area. Even on a meteorologically challenging day like last Monday, with alternating sun, snow showers and strong winds. If you have a meeting here, you have to accept some loss of time due to looking outside. But there is more to experience.

A stairwell in an office building is often boring, because, especially in a high-rise building, hardly anyone goes there. But there, at Turfmarkt, they wrote sayings on the risers of the stairs. The following is written on the stairs between the 35^th and 36^th floor: Accidents are just around the corner. Happiness is everywhere else.

For people like me, who are professionally concerned with anything that can go wrong, this puts things into perspective, perhaps even more than for 'ordinary' people. We are looking around the corner, searching and picking, while in general we see relatively little serious misery. Yes, there are regular news reports about data breaches, ransomware and DDoS attacks, and criminal phishing actions, but most of the time, they are not disruptive. Even in Ukraine, which has been suffering from war violence for two years now and where the cyber part of the war started much earlier, the digital society is still up and running. It seams unbreakable. So you might think that in general, we don’t go around that corner, but instead we go everywhere else.

Whenever something like this comes up, I like to recall the year 2000, or more precisely: the turn into the new millennium. That is almost a quarter of a century behind us, which means that there is now a working generation that has not experienced this transition. Well, guys, there was a lot of fuss going on, and that fuss had a name: the millennium bug. While you may be reading this blog on your smartphone, which is in fact a pretty powerful computer, it's hard to imagine that computer memory was a scarce resource in the last century. Today a gigabyte is the smallest unit we talk about, but back then it was kilobytes. That makes a difference of six zeros, or a factor of a million. While you can now buy a 64 GB USB thumb drive for less than a tenner, we used to have to make do with 512 KB floppy disks, which you bought in boxes of ten. The next generation, which could store 1.44 MB (more than twice as much!), felt like a major leap forward. When installing an application on your PC, you were a disk jockey: those products came on a stack of floppy that you had to insert one by one. Downloading had yet to be invented.

Storage memory was in short supply, and it was skimped on wherever possible. For example on date fields. Why would you write 1977 if 77 was sufficient? This was common even in the real world: I learned the date format 24-5-'65 at school. The apostrophe indicated the century, but you could just as easily leave it out. In computers it would save you two positions for each date. But as the turn of the century approached, a problem came into view. Suddenly 31 would no longer necessarily mean 1931, but could also be 2031. Computers would choke on this, for example if they had to sort data. Heaven and earth were moved to avert disaster. In the Netherlands, an estimated nine billion euros were spent on this, and worldwide three hundred billion dollars, according to Wikipedia.

When the gunpowder fumes from the fireworks had dissipated, it turned out that very little had gone wrong. Then there was a lot of criticism: did we spend all that money for nothing? I still get quite excited about so much naivety. Why do you think things went so well? Because of that great effort of course! It's as clear as day: there’s a problem, you solve it, danger averted. At this level of abstraction it doesn't get any harder than this.

Back to the stairs of the ministry. That saying is wrong. An accident being just around the corner means that mischief is very likely to happen. The second sentence of the stair writings, on the other hand, pretends that hardly any accidents really happen and that most things go well. The fact that things are going relatively well in the digital society is due to all the measures taken to prevent problems, and to a quick, adequate response if something does happen. The saying on the stairs should therefore read: Accidents are just around the corner. Grab a broom and sweep that corner clean.

 

And in the big bad world...

This section contains a selection of news articles I came across in the past week. Because the original version of this blog post is aimed at readers in the Netherlands, it contains some links to articles in Dutch. Where no language is indicated, the article is in English.

• foreverdays are much worse than 0-days.
• A Russian student has been arrested for allegedly helping Ukraine with cyber attacks.
• this young man not only raps about cybercrime, but also commits it.
• AI is used to make you believe that someone you know is calling you.
• Tens of millions of stolen passwords have been circulating on the Internet for months.
• the Dutch Fraud Help Desk is primarily a reporting desk. [DUTCH]
• even information security has a history.
• This study examines ransomware from the victim side.
• credit card company ICS was fined for failing to carry out a DPIA. [DUTCH]