This box was built with off the shelf components and runs on an open source plaform. Your passwords are not effective. I don't care how much thought and obfusction you think you've injected into them, how long they are or how often you change them. It no longer matters. What we need to do now is change the game. We need to remove the human element. We need to automate. And by that I mean much more than scripting changes. We need to automate compliance. Devices have stipulated software and configuration based on the service they provide, and a system exists which enforces that stance. Just because you know the administrator or root password, doesn't mean you can load software onto the server. Just because you know the enable password doesn't mean you can change the router configuration. You may be able to cause a change to occur, but the system will roll it back or unload that software if it violates the policies that govern that device. If your PC sundennly starts blasting out traffic to all sorts of Internet addresses, your switch port gets turned off, or your wireless session gets dropped.

The idea is that humans, engineers and administrators tell the supervisory system how the services, and devices should behave; what components and configuration details they should exhibit and on what schedule changes can be performed. But a human NEVER makes a change. If they do, it's undone, removed, uninstalled or otherwise mitigated to return the device to its prescribed state. A very simple clustering/voting kind of setup could keep the supervisory system itself in its prescribed state.

This has the added benefit that the new slave labor situation present in nearly every IT department comes to an end. No longer are junior engineers relegated to performing endless mindnumbingly simplistic operations that are of litle actual value to the organization, add nothing to the engineers resume and are mostly done poorly. Humans are allowed to do what they do best. Think. Plan. Design. And computer systems take on the job that THEY do best. Execute.

The final line of the paragraph scares me to death - I haven't met a programmer whom I'd turn loose on a DNA construction. It would be like handing a loaded, fully-automatic weapon, with the safety ground off, to a three-year-old; or asking them to complete a fully distributed ERP system written in assembler.
Just because we CAN do something doesn't mean we SHOULD. Perhaps if we constructed a complete corpus of biological effects, and dependencies of all currently known sequences (yeah right, like we're going to sequence every living organism on the planet) we could at least reasonably predict what the effect of NEW sequences might be. Until then the human race is the three-year-old. The gun is loaded. (waiting for the bang...)

Dennis Dumont