climate and comms

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...

DropBox is flying as a company.  More and more of us are entrusting our data to their servers in the Cloud.    I am one of those.  The service is great, it works and it works from multiple devices.  However there is just one thing.  It is not secure.  Read about their latest breach here. ( http://www.zdnet.com/dropbox-gets-hacked-again-7000001928/ )  and also here ( http://gigaom.com/cloud/dropbox-yes-we-were-hacked/ ) I have been going on about passwords and their manifest weakness for months here and in other media.   DropBox have come back to their customers saying that they promise to do more – better passwords – better security …..blah blah blah. So what kind of solution should they use? Well first of all they have millions of customers.  So whatever they go for is going to have to be easy to deploy and should not require the distribution of some kind of hard token OTP generator a la all of...

Trust /trəst/   :   Firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something. The foundations of the working of human society are built on trust.  This has been so since the beginning of recorded history.   As our communities evolved from hunter gatherer groups into agricultural chiefdoms, and ultimately modern states their operation, increasing complexity and success relied not only upon our cultural evolution as posited by Robert Wright in Non-Zero ( Non Zero )  but also upon trust.   Trust is integral to our ‘culture.’  The birth of capitalism and the rapid economic and technological growth of the last five centuries began with the pooling of capital used by investors to underwrite a ships trading expedition called the ‘ contratto di commenda ’ .  Such ventures could not have happened without the inherent trust that the investors had - that the expedition’s captain would return the profits to the investors....