Cipher Issue 105, November 22, 2011, Editor's Letter

The deadline for submitting papers to the 2012 Security and Privacy Symposium has passed, and the program committee are beginning to consider the 300+ entries. The Symposium will be held in San Francisco next year, at the Westin at Union Square. This is an exciting change for the conference, and the organizers are in the midst of planning the conference amenities for a record setting crowd.

The Computer Security Foundations Symposium will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts in June of 2012, and it will be an outstanding event. This event moves between the USA and Europe, and this year it is returning to the USA from a sojourn in France.

This newsletter is an activity of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Security and Privacy (TCSP). The technical committees are represented withing the Computer Society through membership in the Technical Activities Committee (TAC). During the last few years, there have been many complaints about the inability of the TAC to set its own agendas or to get its concerns heard by the Computer Society. As a result, the TAC recently voted to adopt a resolution seeking changes to allow the TAC members to elect their own chair to represent them to the higher level entity, the Technical and Conference Activities Board (T&C Board). If it receives approval from the board, the changes should allow the TAC to choose its own chair next May, and then to embark on a pathway to improve the way conferences are approved and to open up more interaction between TCs and the Computer Society's publishing activities.

At the same time, the IEEE has clamped down even further on conference planning, and as a result, conference organizers will have to do additional work in order to get hotel contracts approved. IEEE giveth and taketh away.

Wash away this bureaucratic angst by reading Richard Austin's review of a new book about security for SCADA and more.

  The Internet is wild with might,
  It has devoured the little website.
  The little website is not aware,
  It has been orphaned by a DNS error.

      Hilarie Orman (with apologies to A. E. Houseman)