The Woman Who Stopped Traffic Read Online Free PDF

for a due diligence trip involving an acquisition, and going on out to an electronic music venue with one of the guys from the team. She overheard the name Friendster every time they approached the bar.
    A technologist started the site, partly to improve his dating life. It took off due to the adoption of two distinct social groups: fans of the Burning Man new-age festival in the Nevada desert, and opinion-leading gay men. But ‘Fakesters’ soon joined these early adopters, whose goal it was to create blatantly fictional profile pages. Burning Man himself received one. This was not the vision of the founders, who started taking them down, citing house rules requiring profile pages to feature real people. The ‘fakesters’ morphed into ‘fraudsters’, assembling fake pages with photos and other profile elements that looked fraudulently real , hence much harder to detect. Pages appeared for the founder himself. “Eesh,” Natalie remembered wincing, when a friend pointed one out: “ that can’t be good for his dating life.” Eventually, all the ‘fakesters’ and ‘fraudsters’ were whacked, but not before the in-crowd had moved on. Tumbleweeds blew through the previously vibrant forums of Friendster.
    So perhaps Dwayne Wisnold had reasons to be wary.
    “He wants to wait. To let sleeping dogs lie,” Nguyen said. “But there may be other ways of coming at this. Look Nat, I know I’m preaching to the choir on this one, but security at a shop like Clamor can’t just be about technical engineering. It has to be about social engineering. That’s the higher order bit. And that’s why we need you on board.”
    The higher order bit . It was a resolutely techie term, recognizing what her old employer had ultimately been forced to accept: that in the end, the security of a corporate entity came down to its people. That software worms, trojans and viruses were not the real threat. The real threats had stalked the physical corridors of their old company, in powerful, insidious ways. “It’s not like I couldn’t build a bot to try and deal with what we saw yesterday,” Nguyen was saying, “flagging relationships of attributes: age, price field, image maps –” but Natalie’s thoughts were elsewhere now.
    She cast her mind yet further back. The real problem – the one that launched her career – was exposed to have been the behavior of her old company’s hyper competitive, over-achieving staff. In the federal antitrust inquiry resulting from the late ‘90s ‘browser wars’, the browser team had effectively made the Department of Justice’s case for it: that they should be split off from the herd. Natalie could still remember a startled Connie Cheung, the local Komo 4 newscaster, delivering the shock news: that a Federal Judge had ruled her old company should be broken up.
    And yet, it took the necessary survival steps, including that of recasting Security entirely. Natalie was chosen to sit on a top secret, cross-divisional task force, where she first met Tom Nguyen. She found herself working with the most able lawyers, the most trusted members of the Human Resources department. She’d gained a reputation for her psychological assessments of situations – and an ability to bring people together. In 2003, while still in her late-twenties, she’d been named Vice President, Security. She liked to think of it as her old company’s recognition that security began and ended in the social realm. For that was a dictum straight out of her father’s playbook.
    “So whaddaya think?” Tom was pressing her. He had that same, single-minded look as in his old job, when about to ship new software.
    “I’ll need to think about it. I’m actually heading up to Seattle, to see the old gang.”
    “Oh yeah, who?”
    “Stacey, Melinda, –”
    “Is Melinda still taken?”
    “ ‘fraid so.”
    “Too bad. Well look, at least come visit the office while you’re here. We’re having an offsite meeting tomorrow, about