climate and comms

My last blog touched on the DropBox hack.   It seems that they have now decided to rectify the situation.  ( DropBox Fix security )  But many clients have been left wondering.  How at risk was I and now am I ?   I wonder how much it has impacted their reputation ?    Do you entrust your personal and/or corporate data to them or to any of the other Cloud services out there.  The better known ones are Google Drive,  Evernote, Box,  YouSendit, Sugarsync,  MS SkyDrive and Egnyte.   If so then you should be concerned.   Why?  Because all of these services rely on you proving who you are merely through the provision of a user name and password.    Why is that so bad?   Because nowadays you can get password breakers off the Internet that will crack most passwords in seconds. ( Password cracker ) .   New sites are being hacked every day with serious consequences for the them and their users (i....

We in the southern part of the UK have started to see our Indian summer start to slowly fade as we get into this first week of October.    It has been a wonderful but disorientating week with temperatures in the high 20’s (80’s F) – and clear blue skies - I could have sworn this was Jo’burg in Summer.   All that was missing was the swimming pools ! Well I know that parts of the mid-West have also had some great weather.  Indeed in the good ol’  US of A October has become known as  National Cyber Security Awareness month.    Who would have thought ten years ago that a whole month would be ‘honoured’ with such a strange moniker.     Well I guess 10 years ago no one would have predicted that we would have become so utterly dependent on the Web – our every waking and in some instances sleeping moments have some Web connection.    E-mail, social-media,  telephony,  shopping, business, entertainment, gaming  – ju...

I am increasingly struck by the broad range  of reactions to the  continuous flow of technology that never seems to stop bombarding us from all sides - sometimes seeming to overwhelm.    There are those who embrace it as though it is a new source of strength echoing Kevin Kellys view that we “evolve’ with technology and that it is a source of good. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/what_technology_wants_kevin_kelly_theory_of_evolution.php There are others who believe that it is an insidious negative fog that is slowly strangling the creativity out of our youth as they while away their lives in front of TV’s ,  online playing interactive games or Tweeting and ‘connecting’ via social networks.    Jaron Lanier says that ‘ technology reduces our humanity’  - promoting the hive mentality over individual expression. ( http://www.jaronlanier.com/ )  I have to say that, whenever I find my daughter watching a mindless sitcom (aim...