The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History

Any computer program that can run is basically just an expression in a kind of very fussy and boggy discrete math. It might be a pain in the butt, but eventually someone would be able to figure it out, even if all the only resources they had were the code, a pen, some paper, and a lot of time.

If you want to do something like DRM, then you have to take Ada's feat and its implications into account. The key is that many forms of computer security are best considered as manpower issues involving two opposing and competing forces. The way computer software gets online patches nowadays halfway acknowledges this, but this fact is still poorly misunderstood by many people, resulting in recurring reddit posts like this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/e8xw2/why_does_ad...

In particular, there is a lot of commonsense knowledge that has been applied to opposing pools of manpower which has been around for centuries which security people have seemingly forgotten about, yet which is highly applicable to the current state of software security. If you haven't guesssed, I'm talking about basic military tactics. What increases the effectiveness of your own manpower while diminishing the effectiveness of your opponent's manpower? Can you make large portions of your opponent's manpower irrelevant in certain contexts and exploit those opportunities? There are a lot of dirty tricks of the kind ancient generals played on their enemies which are applicable to the modern conflict of computer security.

Also, thinking about a larger, strategic context is also highly applicable to computer security. If an ancient general decided to conquer a region, he not only thought about how he could outmaneuver his enemies' forces, or how his soldiers could out-fight the enemy, the best of the ancient generals would give some thought to why his enemies would fight to begin with. Can you deny your enemy a pretext to recruit his forces in the first place? Is it possible to further your own aims and never give your enemy a reason to organize and fight? Is it possible to deny your enemy the resources to support their efforts?

It's time for a more sophisticated view of the security ratrace.

EDIT: Companies that implement DRM or security are usually involved in what amounts to asymmetric warfare -- and as they are unaccustomed to thinking about, they are the underdogs. What history teaches us, is that there are ways for the underdog to win.