The RISKS Digest or Forum On Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems is an online periodical published since 1985 by the Committee on Computers and Public Policy of the Association for Computing Machinery. The editor is Peter G. Neumann. This article is about the magazine as a published medium. ... 1985 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Association for Computing Machinery, or ACM, was founded in 1947 as the worlds first scientific and educational computing society. ... Peter G. Neumann is a researcher who has worked on the Multics operating system. ...

It is a moderated forum concerned with the security and safety of computers, software, and technological systems. Security, and risk, here are taken broadly; RISKS is concerned not merely with so-called security holes in software, but with unintended consequences and hazards stemming from the design (or lack thereof) of automated systems. Other recurring subjects include cryptography and the effects of technically ill-considered public policies. A computer is a device or machine for processing information according to a program — a compiled list of instructions. ... Computer software (or simply software) refers to one or more computer programs and data held in the storage of a computer for some purpose. ... In computer software a security vulnerability is a software bug that can be used deliberately to violate security. ... Unintended consequences can be either positive, in which case we get serendipity or windfalls source of problems, according to the Murphys law definitively negative: perverse effect, which is the opposite result to the one intended The Law of Unintended Consequences holds that almost all human actions have at least... Cryptography has had a long and colourful history. ...

Although RISKS is a forum of a computer science association, most contributions are readable and informative to anyone with an interest in the subject. It is heavily read by system administrators, and computer security managers, as well as computer scientists and engineers. Wikibooks Wikiversity has more about this subject: School of Computer Science Open Directory Project: Computer Science Downloadable Science and Computer Science books Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies Belief that title science in computer science is inappropriate nacho Categories: Computer science ... The term system administrator (abbreviation: sysadmin) designates a job position of engineers involved in computer systems. ... Computer security is a field of computer science concerned with the control of risks related to computer use. ... ...

The RISKS Digest is published on a frequent but irregular schedule through the moderated Usenet newsgroup comp.risks, which exists solely to carry the Digest. Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ... A newsgroup is a repository, usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users at different locations. ...

Summaries of the forum appear as columns edited by Neumann in the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (SEN) and the Communications of the ACM (CACM). SIGSOFT is the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Software Engineering. ... The ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes (SEN) is published bu the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for the Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT). ... Communications of the ACM (CACM) is the flagship monthly magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery. ...

External links

• RISKS Digest (Usenet newsgroup comp.risks)
• Google groups interface to comp.risks
• RISKS Digest web archive