Michael Gracie

BT acquired Counterpane Systems, noting…

“Counterpane is a welcome addition to BT’s global professional services community. As more and more of our customers seek to exploit the opportunities of globalisation, we are finding that increasingly business critical applications are dependent upon the resilience and security of their infrastructure. “

In separate news, Bruce Schneier, former CEO of Counterpane, will be blogging from Fiji, until April.

Most of you have never heard of him. But Bruce Schneier is one of my geek heroes. He doesn’t know it, but this co-founder and CTO of Counterpane Internet Security is the one who introduced me to the concept of public key encryption. My email has never been the same since (mostly because my friends can’t read my 4096 bit scrambled messages)!

No seriously…Bruce was the author of Applied Cryptography, which was one of the first books on encryption that didn’t require a PhD in astrophysics to understand. You could also send away for the source code associated with the book - I did, and six weeks later I had a floppy loaded with algorithms. I never compiled any of that source, but it led me to grab PGP, so it was worth the trip.

The reason I say all this is because Mr. Schneier is a guy who knows security. And by that I mean not only the code, but the processes behind them, and how they can affect users in our data driven world.

Now Bruce has commented on “identity theft,” and again it is worth listening to.
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