Perry

Hewitt

Tag: security

  • Friday 5 – 06.07.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. Despite the oft-declared demise of RSS, many recoiled at the announcement of a Google Reader shutdown in July. Feedly, Pulse, and others have picked up migrating users, but Digg has an upcoming launch of a social news site / RSS reader said to be uncluttered and functional. Here’s an interesting interview with the team.
    2. In case Mary Meeker hasn’t convinced you, mobile behaviors continue to indicate that there’s a lot more upside ready to be monetized. YouTube announced that its mobile ad revenue has tripled, and revealed that 40% of U.S. video views are on mobile.
    3. HBR offers an elegant envisioning of the state of email — which is not dead, but evolving. Each year workers spend the equivalent of 111 workdays dealing with the frustrations of email, and its clunky utility is not going away anytime soon.
    4. Similarly, calendar functionality feels like it could get a lot better. Sunrise launched back in early 2013 to reimagine calendar via lush design and smarter data sources —  here’s hoping its new 2.2M round will continue to advance the product.
    5. Personal security is a headache. The system of requiring human brains to come up and remember ever more human-unreadable passwords is unsustainable. Looking for a better way? David Pogue offers a comprehensive review of Dashlane as one solution.

  • Friday 5 – 05.31.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. If you click one link this week, let it be the Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends slides. It’s a terrific state of the internet summary, with insights into mobile upside (still!), wearables, and the hockeystick rise of digital, tagged content like photos, video, sound, and data.
    2. Security’s not sexy, but it’s essential as we store more and more info online. Kudos to Evernote for their recent adds of two-step verification, authorized apps, and access history.
    3. Speaking of verification, Facebook finally offers verified pages for brands so users know the pages are legitimate. It’s a gradual rollout — more info here.
    4. If you manage a content management system as an admin, work as a content strategist, or just post information to the internet, check out Karen McGrane’s terrific DrupalCon keynote. It’s a great balance of evangelism and understanding the messy content world we live in.
    5. Do women and men use social media differently? RWW reports on some Microsoft-sponsored research with some interesting observations about gender. Women report more social media use for collaboration on work products, and men report more use for professional networking.

  • The inevitability of big data hacks

    Geeks often talk about “layer 8.” When an IT operator sighs resignedly that it’s a layer 8 problem, she means it’s a human’s fault. It’s where humanity’s rubber meets technology’s road. And big data is interesting precisely because it’s the layer 8 protocol. It’s got great power, demands great responsibility, and portends great risk unless we do it right. And just like the layers beneath it, it’s going to get good, then bad, then stable.

     

    Other layers of the protocol stack have come under assault by spammers, hackers, and activists. There’s no reason to think layer 8 won’t as well. And just as hackers find a clever exploit to intercept and spike an SSL session, or trick an app server into running arbitrary code, so they’ll find an exploit for big data.

    — Alistair Croll in Stacks get hacked: The inevitable rise of data warfare. Croll points out that with each new technology, there’s an evolution from good to bad to stable — and we should expect that same trajectory with big data.

    Interesting to think about how large-scale exploits to corrupt the data about everything from public opinion on an issue to real estate attributes could have massive effects on decisions and markets.