A Look Back…

The subtitle of my blog is “Finding the balance between access and security.”  What I attempted to do with my blog was to look at information security issues.  Cybersecurity professionals are always trying to find the right mix between making something secure enough and at the same time, accessible.  In this process, there are always compromises. Most of the time, the right place to be is close to the middle.  But some things don’t have a clear, generally agreed on solution.

In many of the posts, the issues are pretty straightforward and I took a strong position on one side of the issue.  For example, I really think WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange was completely wrong to post a malware program on his website instead of giving it to security professionals who could work on a defense against the software (17 September).  In other posts, I stayed firmly in the middle.  In my post about ethical hackers being paid to find security flaws in software (1 September), I stated they provide a valuable service so we can defend against unethical hackers.

I encountered the topics for my blog in the radio programs I listen to and the blogs I subscribe to at work.  It didn’t seem difficult to find topics to write about. Most of the sources were IT tech blogs and they simply caught my attention.  I subscribe to about 8 weekly blogs on a variety of topics.  Most weeks I don’t read all of them.

Since I was generally commenting on someone else’s blog post, I feel that I wasn’t really adding anything new.  If I wasn’t required to blog for this class, I would comment on the blog with my opinion. Still, it was an enjoyable experience.   It’s a lot more fun to write about something I feel strongly about.  Doing so in a blog makes me think it through and organize my thoughts better.  On at least one occasion, I actually changed my opinion before I was done writing.