Following the phenomenal[1] success of my ground-breaking[2] article 16 ways in which users are(n’t) like kittens, I’ve decided to follow up with a yet more inciteful[3] article on security folks. I’m using the word “folks” to encompass all of the different types of security people who “normal”[4] people think of “those annoying people who are always going on about that security stuff, and always say ‘no’ when we want to do anything interesting, important, urgent or business-critical”. I think you’ll agree that “folks” is a more accessible shorthand term, and now that I’ve made it clear who we’re talking about, we can move away from that awkwardness to the important[5] issue at hand.
As with my previous article on cats, I’d like my readers to pretend that this is a carefully researched article, and not one that I hastily threw together at short notice because I got up a bit late today.
Note 1: in an attempt to make security folks seem a little bit useful and positive, I’ve sorted the answers so that the ones where security folks turn out actually to share some properties with puppies appear at the end. But I know that I’m not really fooling anyone.
Note 2: the picture (credit: Miriam Bursell) at the top of this article is of my lovely basset hound Sherlock, who’s well past being a puppy. But any excuse to post a picture of him is fair game in my book. Or on my blog.
Research findings
Hastily compiled table
| Property | Security folks | Puppies |
|---|---|---|
| Completely understand and share your priorities |
No | No |
| Everybody likes them |
No | Yes |
| Generally fun to be around | No | Yes |
| Generally lovable | No | Yes |
| Feel just like a member of the family | No | Yes |
| Always seem very happy to see you | No | Yes |
| Are exactly who you want to see at the end of a long day | No | Yes |
| Get in the way a lot when you’re in a hurry |
Yes | Yes |
| Make a lot of noise about things you don’t care about | Yes | Yes |
| Don’t seem to do much most of the time |
Yes | Yes |
| Constantly need cleaning up after |
Yes | Yes |
| Forget what you told them just 10 minutes ago | Yes | Yes |
| Seem to spend much of their waking hours eating or drinking | Yes | Yes |
| Wake you up at night to deal with imaginary attackers | Yes | Yes |
| Can turn bitey and aggressive for no obvious reason |
Yes | Yes |
| Have tickly tummies | Yes[6] | Yes |
1 – relatively.
2 – no, you’re right: this is just hype.
3 – this is almost impossible to prove, given quite how uninciteful the previous one was.
4 – i.e., non-security.
5 – well, let’s pretend.
6 – well, I know I do.
Alice, Eve and Bob - a security blog 