Twitter has quickly become the must-have channel for conference back-chat. Reading what other people tweet during a speech provides an extra dimension as you get a sense of what the audience is thinking. And just like passing notes in class, it’s also a lot more fun than simply sitting and listening.
The insider threat, the bane of computer security and a topic of worried conversation among CSOs, is undergoing significant change. Over the years, the majority of insider threats have carried out attacks in order to line their pockets, punish their colleagues, spy for the enemy or wreak havoc from within. Today’s insider threats may have something much less insidious in mind—multitasking and social networking to get their jobs done.
With all the hoopla over the FCC’s new net neutrality proposals, the question of whether the agency has the legal authority to act on this issue still looms.
When you are in security long enough, people in your daily life seem to seek you out when they have a problem that may be security related. This morning was one of those times, when a friend showed me her most recent ATM receipt in a panic. She had gone to the bank to confirm that $1,000 transfer she had expected had hit the account. Her savings balance: -$887,180.48.
A group working to produce an open and transparent voting system to replace current proprietary systems has published its first batches of code for public review.
Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, plans to propose a new so-called net neutrality rule Monday that could prevent telecommunications, cable and wireless companies from blocking Internet applications, according to sources at the agency.
So here’s the deal with Wave: If you deal in technology, and you get this one wrong, you’ll miss the boat. And it’s a big boat. If, on the other hand, you get this one right, you have the potential to do some incredible innovation. In a nutshell, this is the next revolutionary leap in Internet application architecture. Maybe the first truly revolutionary leap since HTTP itself. I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while, but first I wanted to read fully thru and digest the specs and available code. I haven’t done any posts about XMPP for quite a while, but you’re going to start hearing a whole lot about it, and not just from me.
Not “No, thanks.” Not “nope.” Just “no.” clear, unambiguous, empowering “no.” But not in a mean way.
Students starting school this year may be part of the last generation for which “going to college” means packing up, getting a dorm room, and listening to tenured professors. Undergraduate education is on the verge of a radical reordering. Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet. The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges can’t survive.
A recent anti-cloud computing rant in the Guardian raises a good point, but the author’s vision of what the cloud is and where it’s going is a bit, er, cloudy. If you get your cloud information from enterprise IT vendors and not Web 2.0 hustlers, then the picture gets a lot clearer.
As the Kindle takes off in popularity, losses and thefts will as well. After hearing one reader’s tale of woe after losing his Kindle, we discovered that there are not that many options for recovery, though there could be if Amazon really wanted to offer them.
One of the biggest changes we made with the launch of the new NPR.org was offering free transcripts on the site. Ever since NPR started transcribing its radio programs in 1990, we have been selling transcripts to help defray the costs of producing them. In the old days, we used to mail out copies of the transcripts, a time-consuming and expensive process for all involved. In 2002 we added e-commerce to the transcript operation and were able to drop the prices and deliver the transcripts via email.
Though machines with 4GB are not yet the typical purchase for home or business use, they are readily available from major manufacturers and it won’t be long before they are the typical purchase. But there are problems. You don’t have to stand for long in a computer shop to hear a sales assistant talk of 4GB as some sort of limit for 32-bit operating systems, and it won’t be long before this sales patter develops into outright promotion of 64-bit Windows as the only way to get past this limit.
A new lawsuit from the EFF seeks to shed light on the mysterious “Other Intelligence Activities” that the NSA was engaged in after 9/11, and that the DoJ eventually found to be illegal. Based Ars’ reporting of the government’s datamining efforts, we suggest that it probably looks a lot like social network crawling.
Although It has taken homo sapiens several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the rate of biological evolution in humans, Stephen Hawking points out in his Life in the Universe lecture, is about a bit a year.
