One of the great applied computer scientists, Peter G. Neumann, died on May 17. There have already been obits published, including in the New York Times. I knew Peter since at least 1992, and I’m honored that he considered me one of his colleagues and friends, even staying overnight at my house once. And that in itself shows another facet…
Steve Bellovin
https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/blog/control/ · 10 posts · history since 2023 · active
19 May
6 May
I have a new book out, Don’t Get Hacked! Protecting Yourself at Home. It’s released under a Creative Commons license, so it’s freely sharable and redistributable. I’m working on making print copies available.
15 Oct 2025
A rather bizarre bill has been introduced in the Michigan legislature, the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act, H.B. 4938. While there’s a lot to object to in the bill, I’ll leave the broader criticisms to others and focus on some technology issues. The goal of the bill is specified in §3(1): “A commercial entity, public institution, private actor, or internet…
25 Mar 2025
An amazing security lapse just occurred: a journalist was accidentally included on a group chat via Signal to discuss sensitive war plans. This was wrong on so many different levels—read the article; it’s one of the msot amazing things I’ve ever read—but what I want to talk about is what “secure” means. Let’s start with what Signal is. It bills…
22 Jan 2025
According to multiple news reports, the Department of Homeland Security has fired all current members of all DHS advisory committees, including the Cyber Safety Review Board. This is a dangerous move, based solely on politics, and is guaranteed to produce committees that will tell DHS what it (or, more accurately) Trump wants to hear. It’s also in flat-out contradiction to…
6 Nov 2024
I’m temporarily disabled: I fell and fractured my shoulder about a week and a half ago. My right arm is in a sling; I can’t write. It’s election season in the US, so I wondered what the experience would be like casting a vote in New York City. (Aside: I wrote this post with the assistance of dictation software. It…
4 Nov 2024
A few miscellaneous notes about voting… First, it’s a subject I’ve often blogged about before. Go to the tag index on my blog and search for voting; you’ll see a number of posts. Second: when I looked at the tag index, I saw that 16 years ago I’d actually written up something about my experiences as a poll worker. You…
A lot of attention in the technical elections community has to do with the actual mechanism for casting a vote, and in particular the use and type of voting machines, risk-limiting audits, etc. But the process of actually getting to cast the ballot is quite important, too. I was a poll worker in New Jersey in 2008 for Obama’s first…
9 May 2024
I’m in the process of retiring, and although I will not be settling back in my rocking chair—I have lots of writing I want to do—I’m no longer teaching. On April 30, I gave a farewell talk. If you’re interested, the video is here and the slides are here. (And you can always find both on my "Talks" web page.)
8 Mar 2023
This is not my usual blog fodder, but there’s too much material here for even a Mastodon thread. The basic question is why assorted early microcomputers—and all of today’s computers—use 8-bit bytes. A lot of this material is based on personal experience; some of it is what I learned in a Computer Architecture course (and probably other courses) I took…