Panacea
I spent the latter half of this week at the Information Assurance Workshop in West Point. A more beautiful campus is seriously hard to imagine.
(I didn’t take that. I stole it from this page, which is probably considered treason. Oh well.)
So at any rate, here are two pet peeves I discovered during panel discussions at the conference.
“Panacea". If you’re using that word in an argument, 9 times out of 10 you’re arguing with a straw man. “Open-source software is not a security panacea.” “Drug testing will not solve all of baseball’s problems.” These statements are true. The problem with them is that NOBODY DISAGREES WITH THEM.
Solution X is almost never a panacea for problem Y. Nonetheless, solution X can often go a long way towards alleviating problem Y. If you don’t approve of solution X, say so - don’t paint all proponents of solution X as making extravagant claims, even if a portion of them do it.