Interview with Dan Farmer
;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution
For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.
Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.
As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.
I first met Dan Farmer during DEFCON 1, where I thought he had the most useful and interesting presentation there. I had heard of Dan because he had written COPS, a very early, if not the earliest, vulnerability scanner. I kept encountering Dan over the years at various USENIX conferences as he continued to write tools, papers, and work on improving Internet and *nix security. I also met Wietse Venema for the first time when Wietse and Dan were presenting their forensic toolkit in 1999 [1].
Dan has often appeared in the limelight, partly because he feels so strongly about the general lack of security, but also out of a deep sense of ethics (and contrariness) that has guided his life, often at the expense of his career.
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