Junk Science

I love Astronomy. As a young barefoot punk kid running thru the hills of Tennessee, I stopped many times to stare in wonder at the night sky. I lived way back in the woods so the sky was full of stars unhindered by light pollution of a big city. When I was in the United States Navy, I used to walk out on the deck at night and stare up at the sky and it was amazing. (plus I worn night vision glasses and used to scare the crap out of crew members...blog for later...) Navy ships run under a condition called; "Darken Ship" at night, so they actively try to make the ship as dark as possible. This means hundreds of miles out to sea with the only light being the stars...well...lets just say it is an experience that will leave you speechless.
So I jumped into the study of Astronomy bigtime. I love the absolutely huge numbers. I love it so much I have actually applied for a Grad program in Physics. The distances are measure by units of light, the cold is measured in Kelvins, it is just a study of massive numbers I am hooked. However, I am a networking Dude and like any networker, I look for trends. I started to notice a trend in astronomy that when something can not be explained, astronomers say an asteroid hit it.  These deviants of the galaxy seemed to cause many problems. For example:
    - Tilt of Uranus is 60 degrees. Asteroid must  hit it
    - Rings of Saturn are there because many asteroids hit they just happened to be close to Saturn
    - Dinosaurs died because of an asteroid
    - TechWiseTV guest farted on camera because they were thinking about asteroids...OK that was me
The mantra of some astronomers seems to be, if you can not explain it. Then a asteroid hit it. I think in the end, this is the problem I have with network analysis. It is junk science that has not been researched that well other then to grab a quick headline that is designed to be scanned and not read. For example in June 2003, Gartner stated:
Information Security Hype Cycle, IDSs have failed to provide value relative to its costs and will be obsolete by 2005. The Gartner Information Security Hype Cycle shows that IDS technology does not add an additional layer of security as promised by vendors. In many cases IDS implementation has proven to be costly and an ineffective investment.
Interesting...
Then just last month Robert Jamison the Undersec to National Protections Programs stated:
"Our adversaries are very adept at hiding attacks in normal traffic. The only true way to protect our networks is to have an intrusion detection system."
Junk science. Now all the folks that listened to this, are having to go back redo/relearn and retool their networks. Unless an asteroid hits the data center...

Jimmy Ray