More New School feedback
Our editor says that the Safari e-book edition of The New School is now available. Hardcopies should be out in a week or so.
Jon Pincus gives us a mention in his long article “Indeed! The Economist on “computer science as a social science”” and comments that we “explicitly include discussions of diversity in the social science sense.” (As he discusses, Jon has long been focused on computer science as a social science, and he gave us some great help in improving the diversity section.
Nick Owen thinks he won’t be invited to the prom in the New School, but he’s wrong. He turned me on to Bennett Stewart’s work, which influenced how we talk about ROI.
KJW/Code likes the first chapter. Decius on Memstreams says that our editorial blurb “makes a lot of bold claims without explaining how those claims are met. I eagerly await further reviews and shorter articles written by the authors to promote their book…”
Also, a couple of people emailed me asking for a table of contents and more sample content. Here’s the table of contents, and yes, Decius, there will be more that we’ll release over the next little while. We have a first couple of interviews lined up, and are eager to get the ideas out there in forms which are easy to digest.
Table of Contents
1. OBSERVING THE WORLD AND ASKING WHY
Spam, and Other Problems with Email 4
Hostile Code 7
Security Breaches 9
Identity and the Theft of Identity 11
Should We Just Start Over? 14
The Need for a New School 15
2. THE SECURITY INDUSTRY
Where the Security Industry Comes From 19
Orientations and Framing 25
What Does the Security Industry Sell? 27
How Security Is Sold 33
3. ON EVIDENCE
The Trouble with Surveys 46
The Trade Press 50
Vulnerabilities 52
Instrumentation on the Internet 54
Organizations and Companies with Data 55
4. THE RISE OF THE SECURITY BREACH
How Do Companies Lose Data? 64
Disclose Breaches 68
Possible Criticisms of Breach Data 70
Moving from Art to Science 74
Get Involved 76
5. AMATEURS STUDY CRYPTOGRAPHY;
PROFESSIONALS STUDY ECONOMICS
The Economics of Information Security 82
Psychology 95
Sociology 99
6. SPENDING
Reasons to Spend on Security Today 106
Non-Reasons to Spend on Security 110
Emerging Reasons to Spend 112
How Much Should a Business
Spend on Security? 116
The Psychology of Spending 122
On What to Spend 126
7. LIFE IN THE NEW SCHOOL
People Are People 132
Breach Data Is Not Actuarial Data 136
Powerful Externalities 137
The Human Computer Interface and
Risk Compensation 139
The Use and Abuse of Language 142
Skills Shortages, Organizational
Structure, and Collaboration 144
8. A CALL TO ACTION
Join the New School 149
Embrace the New School 153
Make Money from the New School 157
Final Words 159
ENDNOTES 161
BIBLIOGRAPHY 213
INDEX 229