Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? worries the classical Roman maxim: “Who watches the watchmen?” But the security vendors who stand guard over today’s networked information systems are under considerable scrutiny from their competitors, their customers, hackers and, increasingly often, governments concerned about national security. Scientific American’s editor in chief John Rennie sat down in Palo Alto, Calif., this past May with representatives from the security industry—and from some of the industries that will rely on the protections they provide—to discuss the challenges they will confront. What follows is an edited transcript of some highlights of those proceedings; a more complete version is available here.

—The Editors

This article was originally published with the title Improving Online Security.

2 Comments

1. 1. Assegai 05:51 PM 8/25/08

   security is paramount, but other major questions have been answered like copyright issues, the beauty of the internet is you can not cheat, you can hide facts from a controlled media, but thanks to the internet people will know the truth, yes nobody wants their info stolen, but do not forget, people who are blocked by the media because of silly reasons like racial issues will benefit, it becomes harder to still ideas and claim I thought of it and the big media supports you because of your connections to them, usually based on nothing but race and ethnicity, when that idea is already on the net, please more security, but do not destroy the net.

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2. 2. reprivacy 08:55 PM 12/12/08

   Privacy is not dead, its just transformed. Consumers must now actively protect their identity by utilizing an ever growing set of tools that collectively can anonymize parts or all of a users interaction on the web. Theres a good Privacy 2.0 blog called Arzoola
   http://blog.arzoola.com

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