front matter
foreword
In the early 1990s I was in my first graduate job in the middle of a recession, and they were having a tough round of layoffs. Someone noticed that each victim’s UNIX account was being locked out just before the friendly HR person came to tap them on the shoulder and escort them from the building. They wrote a small script to monitor differences in the user password file and display the names of users whose accounts were being locked. We suddenly had a magic tool that would identify the next target just before the hatchet fell...and an enormous security and privacy breach.
In my second job, as a programmer at a marketing firm, there were lots of password-protected Microsoft Word documents flying around, often with sensitive commercial information in them. I pointed out how weak the encryption was on these files, and how easy it was to read them using a freely available tool that was making the rounds on Usenet (your grandparents’ Google Groups). No one listened until I started emailing the files back to the senders with the encryption removed.