14 DAY TRIAL // We’re at the Okura hotel in Amsterdam, attending the 2012 Hack in the Box security conference, and the second day seems to be as impressive as the first one. It started off with a keynote held by Bruce Schneier, the world renowned security guru and chief technology security officer at BT, who held a speech on “Trust, Security and Society.”
Based on his most recent book, “Liars & Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive,” the talk covered some of the most important issues that directly affect individuals.
He began by highlighting the trust society puts into different things, noting that trust is basically the foundation for everything that goes on these days.
Speaking about his flight, Shneier said, “I don’t trust the particular pilot, but I trust the airline company that produced him.”
He provided a number of other similar examples. For instance, the trust we place in ATMs, other banking systems, and in the people that surround us in general.
He then moved on to describe the parasites in cooperative systems, which he calls “defectors.” According to him, these defectors have a limit.
Among the examples, he mentioned thieves that steal from the bazaar. If there are too many of them, the bazaar will crash and there will be nothing left for the thieves to steal.
Another situation which we deal with on a daily basis is spam. If there would be too much spam in the world, no one would bother to read their emails anymore, thus making spam useless.
Take a look at a short teaser of Mr. Schneier’s speech. Of course, this is only a small part of a vast topic, so if you want to learn more, you can buy the book called “Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive.” Also, once HITB provides the recordings of the talks, we’ll make the complete video available .
