Hacker News Reader

Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

Bruce Schneier isn't some random academic. He's extremely highly respected, and is the Chief Security Technology Officer of BT Communications. He has tons of experience with securing systems in the real world, and to say he "obviously [doesn't] know that much about OpenBSD security culture and history" is crazy.

View on HN

I'll go out on a limb and say this right now: Bruce Schneier almost certainly doesn't know much about OpenBSD security culture and history.

He is, as I am fond of saying lately, "many good things", but.

sorry I didn't mean to appear to disrespect Bruce Schneier, I've met him, gone to his book signings, own all his books, I even buy his books for gifts to my friends. I'm a huge fan of his work. We need people like him who have done highly advance studies in the security field; he is the best and an amazingly lucid writer. I never said he was a random academic or that his overall research should be disregarded. I really don't think you understand my original comment. Theory is not practice; they are two separate things. I guess I should have just said that. do you see my point now?

I am not so much a Schneier fan, so if you feel like you need cover for leveling any kind of criticism against anything he says, don't worry too much. Are you sure you believe Schneier would know anything about the code quality of a specific IPSEC implementation --- or really, about the code quality of any IPSEC implementation?

Alright, I will bite. What are your reasons for not liking Bruce?

(I can't wait for this)

I don't so much "not like him". But, compare cite records:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Serge+Vaudenay&hl=en...

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=hans+dobberton&hl=en...

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=eli+biham&...

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=bruce+schneier...

oh is that all. An entire generation were taught cryptography on the back of AC, so he definitely the widest read crypto dev.

He is definitely the widest-read crypto dev. There can be no question of that.

Out of curiosity, who else is out there writing essay-length on crypto and security in general?

One of the better recent sites has been RSnake's:

http://ha.ckers.org/

But he just retired from blogging about netsec and is done with the industry, I think (a lot of ppl get sick of it, I left the sec industry 10+ years ago and never looked back)

rsnake doesn't do any crypto work. Like, at all. A fine guy to go to for XSS or SQLI.

I highly respect Bruce Schneier, but he obviously has no clue on current subject like most anybody else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com