In today’s Washington Post there was an article “Termites inspire construction robots?”, http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/termites-inspire-construction-robots/2014/02/13/e6ef44ce-941f-11e3-83b9-1f024193bb84_story.html. The article discusses an approach to making a building following the process termites use to build their large nests. Termites, and the… Stigmergic Systems
Last week I read about a research team at Harvard lead by George Church that encoded Church’s next book in DNA. As the write-up in the Harvard Medical School web page, http://hms.harvard.edu/content/writing-book-dna, said:
“Although George Church’s next book doesn’t hit the shelves until Oct. 2, it has already passed an enviable benchmark: 70 billion copies—roughly triple the sum of the top 100 books of all time.”
A Wall Street Journal write-up by Robert Lee Hotz, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444233104577593291643488120.html?mod=e2tw, quoted Church as pointing out that:
“A device the size of your thumb could store as much information as the whole Internet”
The articles go on to talk about the issues involved with the achievement, for example currently it is only possible to read the information sequentially and both reading and writing is slow, all of which in the end are engineering issues which will be solved over time.
The interesting issue to me is how it is increasingly useful to use biological metaphors to drive thinking about systems design and architecture and in more recent times of course using actual biology itself. And while we use the words, I am not convinced we have thought through all of the implications.
Using Biological Constructs As Metaphors For Developing System Architecture
This is my third (and thankfully to most readers, last) post about a class at I gave at George Washington University earlier this year. The professor, Dr. Robert McCreight, invites me to be a guest lecturer on cyber-security from time to time. I posted a copy of my slides in the previous two posts and do so again here:
George Washington University Slides on Cyber-Security
In the last post I returned as I often do to the question “How to be secure when each component of your solution is itself insecure?”. I find that most practitioners, and in particular their management, are in denial on this issue. While my first suggested step which is to practice security hygiene is useful it does not help against a determined attacker.
While I am not sure if anything short of not connecting to anyone will work all the time, two possible approaches seem promising.