climate and comms

So Lulz have ( supposedly ) fallen out of love with us after only 50 days !!   WOW -  that was a short and sharp,  whirlwind romance.    One hell'uve steamy affair.    One day SONY,  the next day the IMF,  the next CIA – no one - was safe from her charms. This little slut(z) came into our lives for a bit of fun and has left us breathless and embarrassed with no-where to hide .  Why ?  Because she wanted to show that with a little bit of seduction –by showing a little cleavage /  a bit of leg – she was able to conquer all before her.   Like Helen of Troy – no one could resist her charms. She made us realize that we don’t actually know what protection is all about.   The protection we are  supposed to use  – was either damaged / wrongly spec’d or else we just could not get it 'on' quick enough.   Sure -  she may have laid some of our secrets bare – and many were left red-faced with no-where to...

Google have just announced with some fanfare that they have created a mobile money eco-system.   Android users can now use their devices fitted with NFC chips to make payments at selected Points of Sale in the US.   This will only be launched on a limited scale some time in the Summer.  It is not actually ready yet. ( http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/coming-soon-make-your-phone-your-wallet.html ) There is no doubt that those of us in the ‘advanced’ West will value the utility of being able to swipe our phones (which have become extensions of our very beings) when we buy coffee  - the Starbucks app has been out for a while – ( http://www.starbucks.com/coffeehouse/mobile-apps ) or when we make our day to day purchases.   It will be  ‘cool’ just as it is cool today to flash an NFC enabled credit card at an NFC enabled POS when making small value purchases. However I would argue that the utility,  of the full functionality of mobile money transa...

The recent attack (it seems by Anonymous) on SONY which compromised the personal details of almost 100m of their gaming customers has caused massive damage to the SONY brand.   According to Interbrand in 2009 SONY’s brand value was $12bn.   You can safely assume that it will have taken a hit in the order of billions of dollars.  ( This excludes any legal action and the resultant loss.)  The same could be said of Epsilon and RSA who like SONY did not have a major financial breach but their good names have been severely compromised.   The loss to brand value as well as enterprise value could be massive due to the loss of future business.    (There is a report circulating citing research done on RSA’s customers of whom more than half stated that they would not be renewing their contracts. )    If not obvious before,  then now,  executives charged with the stewardship of large valuable corporations must r...

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...

Cloud security is a big challenge because the big vendors have made us believe it is so. In reality it is not a big challenge.  There are solutions out there that solve the problem. Remember that cloud security is really about securing the access points – the doors (and windows if applicable) to your house (of data). The walls are obviously secure and impenetrable but if your front (or back door for that matter) is secured with nothing more than a ‘standard’ lock then any thief can quickly pick the lock and get in. For "standard lock" read – "user name and password."  And the reality is that most applications that are accessed via a standard user name and password ‘lock’ are hosted in the Cloud.     So what is needed is something much stronger but which is easy to implement and easy to scale. It helps not to use a  two-factor authentication  (2FA)  solution that requires you to carry around a dongle – because it just cannot scale ec...

The breach at RSA just goes to show that security by obscurity never works. And you are probably wondering just what is ‘security by obscurity’ ? Lets use a simple metaphor that is familiar to us all to help explain the concept. We have all at one time or another left a spare key under the doormat, just in case we are locked out of the house, or we leave it for someone else to use to get in.   Well,  simply put, that is - security through obscurity. The theoretical security vulnerability is that anybody could break into the house by unlocking the door using the spare key from under the mat.    Add to that scenario the reality that any burglar worth his salt will check out the most obvious hiding places, and so we, the house owner, run a  greater risk of a burglary by hiding the key in this way, since the effort of finding the key is likely to be less effort to the burglar than breaking in by another means. We have in effect added a vulnerability  (...

So how do you value your privacy in the Facebook age ?  I was reviewing some of my old blogs from last year and found this one I did in July last year.  It is even more relevant now than it was then.  So if you did not read it before then please check it out.    Next blog will be on gaming - watch this space. Does it matter to you that the calls you make, the emails you send, your credit card transactions, the Internet sites you visit, the images of you travelling to work, your social networking posts are now stored at data centres in the Cloud and retrievable by myriad marketers, Government agencies and companies ?    None of whom you ever entrusted with your information in the first place. Your digital footprint is a permanent record of your every move. Data is the pollution of the Information age. Everything we do generates data, and a secondary spin-off of Moores law is that every year it gets cheaper to store and process this data. So rather ...