I want to talk about professional humility.

IT Security is hard because doing IT correctly is hard.

That is not aggrandizement, or tribute to its practitioners - who too often have little more to offer than scolding.

It is criticism. It shouldn't be hard. But it absolutely is.

The world we have today was not designed. It is the result of designs - independent and irreconcilable.

Designs incepted on the shoulders of bold ventures into the dark by people before us. A world not discovered, but built.

They were solving their problems in naïveté of fate.

Fate, that we would still be riding on their designs, literally scratched on napkins 30 or 40 years ago.

Fate, that human systems would not be run by some expert class of professional – but their work democratized beyond imagination across people and time.

Whose fault is that?