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Is Excel the most dangerous software in the world?
Well, whilst calling it the most dangerous software might be stretching it a bit, it could certainly be argued from a historical perspective that they had the potential to be "dangerous" and sometimes had actually proven to be so in fact.
My experience has been that Excel and Access have generally been the de facto financial black holes for a great deal of labour costs, where often non-IT personnel had spent many hours inventively developing one-off or prototype spreadsheet models and access database applications as business solutions to do often quite clever and useful things that simply could not have been done (at the time) in a timely or cost-effective manner using IT otherwise. Often these one-off solutions were tweaked to the stage where they could become so useful that they were commercially indispensable, and might even form a large part of the core legacy solutions for an enterprise.
A great strength of Excel and Access lies in their "tweakability" by the user - the extent of user control. That is also their Achilles Heel - there is a profound scope for human error in developing the logic and formulae in the models/applications, and that is why, from the perspective of stochastic and accounting accuracy, the models need to be independently audited and verified, but certainty in that regard (that all errors have been identified and fixed) is something that was and remains notoriously extremely difficult to achieve - despite the growth of things like spreadsheet auditing tools.
However, having worked on complex models such as ITEM (the UK Independent Treasury Econometric Model) and climate models of the North Sea, I would recommend skepticism towards any plea of incompetence - the "Oh dear, there was an error in the [insert name of scam] financial model" argument. These people aren't necessarily the fools they might have us believe.
For example, in "JPMorgan’s model had not captured this at all...".
Yeah, right.-IainB (November 12, 2015, 05:03 AM)
In... just don't. I like the idea of IoT. But the most secure way of engaging in IoT is... don't.-wraith808 (October 24, 2015, 02:14 PM)
Start using an old PC as a router (make sure it has 2 good NIC's) for your home. Router software such as Untangle and pfSense are perfectly able to block whatever communication takes place between IoT devices and the outside world. You know, in case you don't care about IoT, but aren't able to buy whatever device you need without IoT.-Shades (October 24, 2015, 08:20 AM)
Could Untangle run on something like a Raspberry Pi (or the more powerful Odroids)? That would be very low cost in both terms of the hardware and the electricity to run them.-Deozaan (October 24, 2015, 06:50 PM)
