Just a Gwai Lo - fun within prescribed limits

Dan Appleman speaks at the Barnes & Noble in Bellevue, Washington last night to promote his book Always Use Protection: A Teen's Guide to Safe Computing. While the book is targetted to what he calls "America's future", he reports that when doing media interviews, he was struck by not only the percentage of interviewers who actually read the book but by the amount of people who learned something from it. He (rightly) argues that computer security is not something that adults (specifically parents) have a lot of time for, but since teenagers are more and more likely to be the principal users of computers (especially to communicate: teens use instant messaging and LiveJournal like crazy) that not only do they have the necessary skills—if not the info—to practice safe computing, Appleman sees the potential for teens to market themselves to busy adults as computer security consultants.

Appleman is perhaps better known for such scintillating page-turners like Moving to VB .NET: Strategies, Concepts, and Code, Second Edition and Dan Appleman's Visual Basic 5.0 Programmer's Guide to the Win32 Api, but he says he looked for a book that taught computer security to teenagers, couldn't find it, so he took 4 months off to write it and promote it.