The Myths of Security

Chapter 1. The Security Industry Is Broken

When I was in college, I worked on the Alice project, run by Randy Pausch of “Last Lecture” fame. Alice was a system for virtual reality and 3D graphics—working on it got me the few cool points I had in college. However, the primary goal of Randy’s project had nothing to do with virtual reality or being cool. It was all about making computer programming easy. Randy wanted high school kids to be able to write their own computer games without having to be computer programmers. The goal was to get them programming without noticing they were doing it.

After I got over the cool factor of fighting droids with a real light saber in a virtual reality environment (you held a flashlight in your hand, but it looked like a light saber in virtual reality), I found I wasn’t actually all that passionate about computer graphics. But Randy had definitely gotten me excited about making things easy for average people.

My first introduction to Randy came when I took his Usability Engineering class, which was about making software products that are easy to use. I was struggling with whether I wanted to go into the computer field at all. I knew I was good at it, but the previous coursework I’d taken had almost scared me off because it kept me dozing off…classes like Fortran and Discrete Math.

But on the first day of class, Randy showed us a VCR and talked about how difficult it was to do simple things, like set the time. He talked about how the buttons were all ...