Dear Readers,
The Computer Society recently held an election for officers, and we are pleased to note that Terry Benzel will be the 2028 president. She is a pioneer and leader who started in the early days of the Security and Privacy conference. She has created and guided research initiatives in our field throughout her career. Currently she is managing director of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California. We look forward to the continued success of the Computer Society under her leadership.
Why hasn't the world collapsed? Two months ago it seemed that AI agents were on the verge of running amok through the Internet, attacking everything in sight. In the intervening time, more news of disturbing behavior has surfaced. Calls for reining in AI clash with voices saying that our survival depends on AI success. Nonetheless, there seems to be little real change. Are we about to fall into the abyss, or will AI be our protective friend? The only thing that I have noticed about AI safety is that Claude now asks for permission before downloading website data. I'm not sure how much I trust it to *always* ask.
We have been working to automate the construction of our online calendar of security and privacy events by making use of AI. It is our intention to find the event announcements and create the calendar entries using a database of past information. This makes us less reliant on having the information sent to us by program chairs and increases the number of conferences that we can track. However, we sometimes find ourselves at odds with the privacy policies of the privacy conferences. Some of them block automated downloads, making us reliant on secondary sources for the information. Decades ago we complained about conference websites that were encoding the conference information in clever images instead of text. That made it impossible for us to use our time-saving semi-automated text processing system for extracting data from CFPs. In our bright new AI future we find ourselves battling not just web page designers, but system administrators who are thwarting the act of information gathering. Why can't we all just get along?
So There!
A data center is a beast,
That feeds on power west to east,
That power makes our AI faster,
And pulls us closer to disaster.
AI may find my verse displeasing,
I wrote it by myself this evening.