FAIRFIELD COUNTY
BUSINESS JOURNAL January 4, 2016 | VOL. 52, No. 1
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Call of the wild, 2016 BUSHCRAFT AS BUSINESS MODEL IN RIVERSIDE
BY BILL FALLON bfallon@westfairinc.com
S
teve Lancia has since 2008 run NorthCamp Outdoor Survival Skills, based in Riverside and with a camp in Columbia County, N.Y. In that time he has educated hundreds in what it takes to survive, either in the wild or in an urban environment in collapse. Most of his clients are women. “People are surprised to hear that,” he said. “They think it’s all about being macho. It’s not. Women learn better, too. They are the ones who get the fire going first.” The art of survival in the wild is predicated upon getting found, which makes it different from sur-
vival when practiced in an urban environment, “where,” he said, “the purpose may be that you don’t want to be found.” NorthCamp teaches both urban and wild survival, plus a combat-infused version that is gaining in popularity and, accordingly, in frequency of offerings in 2016. Lancia, whose undergraduate degree is in forestry from West Virginia University, is also an Eagle Scout and a member of the Order of the Arrow, a fraternity of shared accomplishment within Scouting. His enthusiasm for camping and all it entails never left him. He has professionally taught kayaking and skiing and said that, given a knife, he could » WILD, page 9
Steve Lancia, founder and principal, NorthCamp Outdoor Survival Skills in Riverside. Photo by Bill Fallon
Industry pros defend data encryption BY REECE ALVAREZ ralvarez@westfairinc.com A NATIONAL DEBATE ON DATA encryption has followed the recent terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., and Paris, with some lawmakers calling for legislation to mandate access for law enforcement and government agencies to “back doors”
that will allow them to decipher encrypted data. “Criminals in the U.S. have been using this (encryption) technology for years to cover their tracks,” wrote Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. “The time has come for Congress and technology companies to discuss how
encryption — encoding messages to protect their content — is enabling murderers, pedophiles, drug dealers and, increasingly, terrorists.” Yet here in Connecticut some industry professionals see the targeting of encryption as a scapegoat — Neil Weicher, founder and chief technology officer of the Stamford-based data encryption and database security firm NetLib — is among them. “Politicians and security officials are ignoring the well-known rule of unintended consequences,” he said. “It will have minimal or no effects on terrorist communications, which we have seen, often tend toward the low tech.
On the other hand, it will create a devastating financial and regulatory burden on American businesses, who can never be sure that their data and intellectual property — and that of their customers — is secure.” With a master’s degree in computer science from Columbia University, Weicher founded NetLib after observing massive security lapses in companies over the decades he has worked in the tech industry. “They were completely unprotected,” he said. He now makes his living protecting databases from security breaches, which are increasingly becoming the norm, he said.
The global computer magazine PC World reports that in 2015, not a week went by without a major data breach, significant attack campaign or serious vulnerability report. Weicher refers to the service his company provides as the “red dye in the money bags” that destroys currency once stolen from a bank. His proprietary software works in a similar way by making data unusable once it has been compromised. But despite the increase in attacks on data, Weicher said handing over the keys to decipher encrypted data to government » DATA, page 6