Security and travel

"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action."

William Shakespeare, Hamlet (III, ii, 16)

Travel is fun when you're young. It's fun to see different airports, travel by plane, stay in hotels and eat at restaurants. After several years of this, however, it stops being fun and gets to be work. For me, this happened several years ago when I was a product manager. I had to do a series of press conferences announcing the release of our 4.0 product, and to do this I had to make a rather long trip. I left San Francisco, flew to Tokyo, then to Singapore, then to London, then to Washington, and then back to San Francisco. I was actually sitting in airplane seats for over 40 hours that week. When I got back, I realized that I'd had enough travel for one lifetime.

That's also when I realized that the words "travel" and "travail" are cognates, or that they both share the same history. If you trace these words back a few hundred years, you'll find that they both come from the word "travaillier," which is Old French for "to torment." If you've traveled recently, you'll probably understand why these two words are related. Apparently travel was just as bad in the Middle Ages as it is today.

The word "security" also has a history that's interesting. It comes from the Latin word "securus," which means "free from care." So although we often think of security as preventing bad things from happening, the origin of the word tells us that it might be useful to think of security as letting you not worry about things.

In the case of encrypted e-mail, for example, we often think of encrypted e-mail as something that prevents hackers from seeing the contents of sensitive e-mails. It might be more appropriate to think of encrypted e-mail as something that lets you take advantage of the ease and convenience of e-mail without worrying about what might happen if a hacker were to intercept your e-mail.