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Tag: Physical Security

Teachers as bodyguards

I’m a teacher. When parents told me I should carry a gun, I felt sick. by De Elizabeth (Vox)

I applaud those people who responded coolly to the most horrifying situations imaginable and made the ultimate sacrifice to protect their students, but at the same time, such superhuman bravery simply cannot be a routine expectation of educators. And yet it feels as though today it’s sneaked into the job description — an awful addendum in invisible ink.

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Don’t get me wrong. I would do everything I possibly could do to protect my students, and I would never put a student in harm’s way to save myself. But I also doubt that I’m the type of person who willfully throws herself into the path of bullets. And along with this realization came a huge wave of guilt.

On the heels of that guilt, however, came another feeling — one more like anger. Why should any teacher be forced to choose between saving students’ lives or coming home alive to their own families?

The rest of the world must be shaking its collective head at us.

Photo by Pablo Padilla on Unsplash

Risks of Trusting the Physics of Sensors

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Risks of Trusting the Physics of Sensors By Kevin Fu and Wenyuan Xu Communications of the ACM, Vol. 61 No. 2, Pages 20-23

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Kevin Fu is Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan.

Wenyuan Xu is Professor and Chair of the Department of Systems Science and Engineering at Zhejiang University.

And I love this:

Security is a system property. Thus, design of a sensor-driven, safety-critical system deserves supervision by a systems engineer with broad knowledge of computer security risks. Team leaders for such systems will need to master skills from physics, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering to computer science, information science, public policy, and ethics.
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The notion of interdisciplinary education is not new to computer science. In the 1990s, the software engineering community debated a shift toward interdisciplinary education beyond the confines of computer science.10,11 Similarly, a good engineer for embedded security will not simply be a good computer scientist or a good programmer. Interdisciplinary education and teamwork is key to ensuring security of sensor-driven, safety-critical systems.