As for the main point of Mikko's post, I have never understood why so many folks in the netsec industry are arrogantly pessimistic about the innovation of others. I found Flame jaw-droppingly amazing.
Infosec is an inherently pessimistic enterprise, although spending time here makes me think it's not a perspective limited to security.
Just look at how almost every post here ends up littered with comments like "This isn't new. My XYZ already does all of this." People like to feel superior (it helps reinforce the individual nerd exceptionalism)
> This isn't new. My XYZ already does all of this.
This is exactly the attitude used by some negative minded mediocre people to demotivate free thinkers. To be fair, to most of them it probably also doesn't seem new in reality, because their grey cells lack the sophistication required to understand the difference.
I think it is more a case of the public information security field moving from a small, highly technical niche of hackers (example list[1]) to a mainstream career path that openly trains and employs thousands of people that may not have a traditional “hacker mind-set”[2][3].
BIFF[4] is still remembered by many within the early niche group of hackers. It is likely that similar psychology has been driving the ridicule at hacker conferences in recent years towards mainstream reporting on “cyber” topics and use of buzz phases such as “Advanced Persistent Threat”.
Infosec is an inherently pessimistic enterprise, although spending time here makes me think it's not a perspective limited to security.
Just look at how almost every post here ends up littered with comments like "This isn't new. My XYZ already does all of this." People like to feel superior (it helps reinforce the individual nerd exceptionalism)