A rare subject on with 'tptacek and I agree! Not long after the original monoculture paper came out, there was a buffer overrun in a software firewall, and the

A rare subject on with 'tptacek and I agree! Not long after the original monoculture paper came out, there was a buffer overrun in a software firewall, and the 11,000 infected machines generated enough traffic that it messed up a lot of the internet. To me this really highlighted problems both with the superficiality of model in the paper and the limitations of the biological metaphor. That said I did think the paper was very valuable at putting the discussion on the table. Some of the risks of monoculture are very real. I was on a National Academy of Sciences panel at the time with Charles Parrow (whose book Marcus Ranum approvingly cites, although Charles actually agreed with Bruce) and we spent a lot of time discussing the arguments for and against.