Tom Elrod

A character on the TV show "L.A. Law" once said, "It was the 60s. Safe sex meant keeping the parking brake on." In the early days of public networks security carried a similar sense of urgency. In fact, the network was its own best defense. One of the authors remembers accommodating a colleague by spending an afternoon plotting the hops, gateways, and contorted syntax necessary to send an e-mail from Brooklyn to Michigan. (How many computer scientists does it take to send an e-mail?) Those unlamented days have given way to a world in which an early protocol like FTP, which, in active mode, requires a data transfer connection from the server to an anonymous port on the client, seems either charmingly naive or shockingly promiscuous (depending, perhaps, on when you were born). Of course, to be fair, passive mode, in which the client makes the data connection, was int... (more)