Living in a War Zone

I live in a war zone. Less than one mile from my house is a border which I have never crossed. Many have died on both sides of the border and many probably will die here in the future. But when I jog along the border, with the wonderful view you can see at the top of this page, listening to the birds sing, it all seems quite unreal.

Is the quietness deceptive? Am I secure? Maybe this perspective enables me to understand better than my fellow information security technologists that nothing is really secure. Security is relative. One can be more secure than his neighbor, or more secure than he was last year, but nothing, never, is just secure.

The most obvious outcome of this viewpoint is that my research area, unlike most of my peers, has always been protecting information systems rather than breaking into them. It is just not that much fun to break things that are inevitably breakable.

The other outcome is that this site is not secured. I don’t feel it is worth my time and effort to make sure nobody breaks into the site as it does not contain any sensitive information. With good backups, I should be up and running in no time if someone does break in. But actually, why should somebody do that?