climate and comms

New life has started to bloom across this drought-ridden continent.     These green shoots are the fruit of the last decade and a half of increasingly feverish activity.     Democracy and mining spring to mind, but what about retail?   What about banking?   And of course mobile – the great enabler ! Chinese colonization proceeds with alacrity while their Global counterparts dawdle.    But is Sino capital and labour what Africa really needs?   Yes – but only if there is no alternative.    The rest of the World, suffering from post 2008 crisis lethargy, is slowly starting to realize that Africa should form part of their longer term plans.   The UK chugs along barely in positive territory while Osborn pats himself on the back for having squeezed the life out of the UK which he now kicks down the road and calls it growth !    The Tea Party almost dragged the USA (and the World) to the brink of an economic moras...

This was the week that Oscar Pistorius went on trial by media.   Forget about the lawyers -  this was ‘crowd sourced’  litigation at its finest;   fed by a torrent of tweets,  Tumblr images,  TV clips and banks of cameras that overwhelmed the tiny South African courtroom.   Opinions,  some informed, but mostly not,  spewed forth on social media proffering words of support and damnation in equal volume.     The tragic story of the horrific death of a beautiful young woman in her prime, the horror of an overcrowded courtroom and the legal sparring  (and this just the bail hearing!)  reveals the extent of modern society’s  collective voyeurism and pornographic  fascination with courtroom - celebrity mash up.     Oscar was a global icon after stepping off the Olympic podium last August in London.  This tragedy of death and fall from grace is one which has captivated the world.   The harsh ex...

  Live Ensure ® the SAAS  multi-factor authentication solution has spent the last year and a half field trialing the mobile version of the product with a few select customers who have collectively made millions of authentications without a single breach or failure.  Feedback provided valuable input which allowed the product to be further refined and streamlined making the user experience even better while making the solution stronger.   Live Ensure ® is easily integrated into an existing log-in form including SSO solutions like Twitter and Facebook.   This means that sites which allow users to log in e.g. with Twitter can now include a strong authentication layer thereby thwarting ID theft hacks which have become ubiquitous.   Examples are too numerous to mention but the weakness of password log-ins to emails ( Bush Hack )  and social media products (Twitter and Facebook) and their consequent failure are well documented. ...

FIDO or Fast Identity Online was launched last week by a couple of Internet big hitters most notably PayPal.   They clearly have a vested interest in ensuring that their transactions are secure.     FIDO aims to provide specifications or standards to the industry that embody  an approach to authentication which starts to move away from the ‘security by obscurity ‘  or user name/password paradigm prevalent today.   The main reason why the incidence of hacking is sky-rocketing.   [ Twitter Hacked ] FIDO aims to leverage hardware devices such as phones and tablets as well as fingerprint readers, webcams, TPM ( Trusted Platform Module)  chips and tokens into an open-standard whereby there will be inter-operability between different systems but which comply to the standard.   A client/server architecture in combination with some hardware fingerprint starts to approach a much more secure approach th...

I was asked today by a board member to respond to a question from a prospective investor who wanted to know how Live Ensure (our service) differed from two other – lets call them ….the more traditional solutions.  For the sake of this blog we will call them the Old and the New solutions.   Let me describe the Old Co solutions to you briefly.  They both embody technologies which are over a decade old ( think RSA ) such as tokens and servers ( both physical and virtual).  Their solutions rely on the user entering a PIN into a browser and thereby satisfying the ‘something you know ‘ part of strong authentication.   Here it is slightly edited. The biggest weakness of both Old Co solutions are the vulnerability to MITM and MITB attacks. Both require the user to enter a PIN ( something you know ) ie a second factor over and above the user name and password ( the single factor or weak authentication ). The user enters this PIN back into the browser which is...