Bruce Almighty
16 January 2007I will confess this much. I am in awe of Bruce.
My first introduction to any form of Information Security was Phil Zimmerman’s PGP. At that time, about a decade ago when I was still at school, I cajoled my brother who was a student in the US to get me a copy of Bruce Schneier’s wonderful wonderful book, Applied Cryptography. It set him back 48$ and was pretty expensive for an Indian family where the head of the family earned that much in a month.. but it was worth every penny.
I didn’t understand much of the math and many of the concepts, but he kept saying stuff like “People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people - cryptography can make them very afraid” :P and I just loved it.
I bet Bruce is aware that he has said (many more) things that he probably should have never said. The nice thing is he admits it. In his book “Beyond Fear” he admits he made a mistake when he assumed that with his book Applied Cryptography and Cryptography, all of the worlds free speech, privacy problems etc etc would all be solved.
But while Beyond Fear is not written in the same activist vein as Applied Cryptography and many of his essays and articles in Crypto Gram, I could not help feeling that he was doing it all over again. Will we see another book from Bruce with another apology?
That said, he’s probably done more to popularise the subject than any other person I can think of. There is a cult surrounding the man.
Here is a site that Bruce obviously loves. :)
SSL is invulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Unless that man is Bruce Schneier.
:P
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