The Costs of Bad Security

Last month, Sony revealed the price tag associated with cleaning up the massive security breach that exposed personal information of more than 100 million users of its PlayStation Network and Qriocity streaming-media services: at least $171 million. It was the largest such breach any company had ever experienced, according to Sony's chairman, Sir Howard Stringer, and the staggering sum will cover security improvements, customer compensation, and investigative services. But the full toll will be harder to measure, because it will include the loss of customer confidence in the company.

The episode was a reminder of the stakes involved in data security?and an indicator that many organizations are not protecting themselves well enough. "When it comes to all of these security problems, companies aren't spending up front but have to spend a lot of money on the back end to fix things," says Thomas Ristenpart, a computer security researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

This month, Business Impact focuses on securing data against theft and loss. We will explore the security tactics that companies ought to be using, the investments they ought to be making, and the questions they ought to be asking. We'll examine smart practices for mobile devices, remote workers, and cloud computing, and we'll get insights from top thinkers in the field.

Threats to the security of information are multiplying in part because the world's storehouses of data are rapidly growing as the cost of storage plummets and the availability of computers and network access expands. As this mother lode of data grows, so does its attractiveness to criminals and hackers.

To protect themselves, businesses can impose access controls on confidential data, encrypt this data and appropriately manage encryption keys, audit user activities, and bring on consultants to make sure security practices are up to date. And since the weak link in the security chain is often people, one of the most important things businesses can do is simply to train employees on basic data security practices. This month's package of stories will argue that information security isn't just a matter for the IT department to worry about. It has to register throughout a company, starting at the highest levels, where decisions about capital investments are made.

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The Costs of Bad Security

Last month, Sony revealed the price tag associated with cleaning up the massive security breach that exposed personal information of more than 100 million users of its PlayStation Network and Qriocity streaming-media services: at least $171 million. It was the largest such breach any company had ever experienced, according to Sony's chairman, Sir Howard Stringer, and the staggering sum will cover security improvements, customer compensation, and investigative services. But the full toll will be harder to measure, because it will include the loss of customer confidence in the company.

The episode was a reminder of the stakes involved in data security?and an indicator that many organizations are not protecting themselves well enough. "When it comes to all of these security problems, companies aren't spending up front but have to spend a lot of money on the back end to fix things," says Thomas Ristenpart, a computer security researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

This month, Business Impact focuses on securing data against theft and loss. We will explore the security tactics that companies ought to be using, the investments they ought to be making, and the questions they ought to be asking. We'll examine smart practices for mobile devices, remote workers, and cloud computing, and we'll get insights from top thinkers in the field.

Threats to the security of information are multiplying in part because the world's storehouses of data are rapidly growing as the cost of storage plummets and the availability of computers and network access expands. As this mother lode of data grows, so does its attractiveness to criminals and hackers.

To protect themselves, businesses can impose access controls on confidential data, encrypt this data and appropriately manage encryption keys, audit user activities, and bring on consultants to make sure security practices are up to date. And since the weak link in the security chain is often people, one of the most important things businesses can do is simply to train employees on basic data security practices. This month's package of stories will argue that information security isn't just a matter for the IT department to worry about. It has to register throughout a company, starting at the highest levels, where decisions about capital investments are made.

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=30530c1732870a56fba6c153b5c85614

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The original DOOM ported to your browser with HTML5 & JavaScript

We?ve seen a whole bunch of games created in or ported to new browser technologies lately. But what about the original DOOM, one of the most ported games of all time?

DOOM has finally been ported to HTML5 and JavaScript, joining the growing club of games that showcase the incredible opportunities of new web technologies, each one putting another bullet in Flash?s dying chest.

Agent 8 Ball was the first of these new generation games we covered at The Next Web. It surprised more than a few friends when I told them that there was absolutely no Flash involved.

Head over to the Mozilla Developer Network to give the game a try. The controls are the standards of the early 90s shooters: the arrow keys for movement instead of the modern WASD configuration, Control to shoot and Space to open doors.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/dd/2011/06/01/the-original-doom-ported-to-your-browser-with-html5-javascript/

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The Costs of Bad Security

Last month, Sony revealed the price tag associated with cleaning up the massive security breach that exposed personal information of more than 100 million users of its PlayStation Network and Qriocity streaming-media services: at least $171 million. It was the largest such breach any company had ever experienced, according to Sony's chairman, Sir Howard Stringer, and the staggering sum will cover security improvements, customer compensation, and investigative services. But the full toll will be harder to measure, because it will include the loss of customer confidence in the company.

The episode was a reminder of the stakes involved in data security?and an indicator that many organizations are not protecting themselves well enough. "When it comes to all of these security problems, companies aren't spending up front but have to spend a lot of money on the back end to fix things," says Thomas Ristenpart, a computer security researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

This month, Business Impact focuses on securing data against theft and loss. We will explore the security tactics that companies ought to be using, the investments they ought to be making, and the questions they ought to be asking. We'll examine smart practices for mobile devices, remote workers, and cloud computing, and we'll get insights from top thinkers in the field.

Threats to the security of information are multiplying in part because the world's storehouses of data are rapidly growing as the cost of storage plummets and the availability of computers and network access expands. As this mother lode of data grows, so does its attractiveness to criminals and hackers.

To protect themselves, businesses can impose access controls on confidential data, encrypt this data and appropriately manage encryption keys, audit user activities, and bring on consultants to make sure security practices are up to date. And since the weak link in the security chain is often people, one of the most important things businesses can do is simply to train employees on basic data security practices. This month's package of stories will argue that information security isn't just a matter for the IT department to worry about. It has to register throughout a company, starting at the highest levels, where decisions about capital investments are made.

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=30530c1732870a56fba6c153b5c85614

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How Friends Influence Gadget Adoption

When your friend shows up with the latest "must-have" product, it's more likely you'll buy the same product. By exploiting this phenomenon?and harnessing the information available through online social networks?marketers hope to better target products to would-be buyers.

In work presented this week at the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks, researchers from the Norwegian telecom provider Telenor showed how important friend connections can be to the adoption of a product. Watching how adoption spreads within social networks could help predict whether a new product will become a viral smash, they say. The researchers looked at patterns of adoption for Apple's iPhone and iPad, as well as for the far-less-successful Doro mobile handset.

"Social networks matter when purchase decisions are made," says Pål Sundsøy</a>, a project manager in the advanced analytics and business intelligence group at Telenor. In particular, he says, people have a higher chance of adopting a product that their friends have bought. Likewise, when people abandon a product?for example, by switching between cell-phone networks?they are more likely to jump ship if their friends do so first.

To measure the social characteristics of product adoption, the researchers made use of anonymized data from Telenor's network. That data revealed how users communicate and what mobile devices they use.

Most strikingly, the researchers found what Sundsøy termed a "tribe of Apple." People who used Apple products tended to be connected to each other. After the launch of the iPhone, a heavily connected cluster of users formed relatively quickly. That central cluster grew larger over time. For the iPad, the researchers observed a similar structure forming even faster (their graphs tracked iPad adoption by the month, instead of the quarterly measures they used for the iPhone). They found that social connections predicted whether users were likely to own Apple products more than what would be expected by chance. For the iPhone, for example, users were had twice as many connections?having communicated by voice, text message, or email?to one another than to call owners of other devices. What's more, if a person had one friend who owned an iPad, he was 14 times more likely to own one himself than if he had no friends who owned an iPad.

The researchers also studied the much less successful Doro. The handset is marketed as a device designed primarily for phone calls rather than data-related activities. Doro users tended to be connected to few other Doro users, and there was no central cluster. Sundsøy argues that this structure suggests that the device will likely never gain momentum.

But social connections aren't everything. In another talk given at the same workshop, Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard University social scientist and expert on networks, said that the qualities of whatever is spreading through a network matters a great deal. For example, some germs are more contagious than others, and will spread faster through a network. Similarly, he said, some ideas are "stickier" than others, and take hold better. So product adoption will also spread according to the quality of the product, and not just the number of friends who already own it.

Even taking variations in product quality into account, however, it will still be useful to look at patterns of adoption in social networks, the Telenor researchers say.

"The social variables have high predictive power," says Sundsøy. "Those who communicate together tend to adopt together." According to his group's work, one key factor is the size of the connected cluster that forms around a product. If a large, heavily connected group begins to form, he says, there's a good chance that a product will take off.

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Source: http://feeds.technologyreview.com/click.phdo?i=db87adf072f14f25b4d2f5b177fbea97

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Usenet: Long Dead & Buried But Not Yet Replaced

If you?ve been online for long enough, you probably have used and even grew to love the wealth of discussion forums ? called ?newsgroups? ? that Usenet offered us.

Of course, in the last decade of Usenet?s life, it became increasingly emaciated and diseases, robbing many of us of those fond memories. Legitimate users flocked to newer mediums and all that was left was the infectious spam.

But before that, and before the rise of the browser forum, heck, before even the popularity of eGroups.com (which we?ve known for ten years now as Yahoo! Groups), Usenet newsgroups were home to the Internet?s most vibrant discussions.

We?ve all called Usenet dead many times over the last decade, but it wasn?t until May, 2010 that we could truly say that the death certificate had been signed and the corpse buried.

Duke University was the place where Usenet began over 30 years ago, created by graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis in 1979, forming one of the ?earliest pieces of Internet history? as Duke puts it.

On the 20th of May 2010 they pulled the plug on their Usenet server, something that one can only imagine was a far cry from the gargantuan machine that connected the world well before the Internet was a household utility.

With the birthplace of Usenet having taken their server down, one could finally say that Usenet is truly, not just figuratively, dead.

As with our own dead, we can still visit the headstone. Google Groups will continue to hold archives for a vast number of newsgroups.

In June 2010, Microsoft announced it was phasing out its own newsgroups.

I haven?t been to a newsgroup in nearly ten years, but I wonder if the solutions we?ve moved on to are really much better for facilitating discussions. Sure, we?ve got better social features than ever before, fancy location-based apps, and decentralization (it was a pain waiting for my ISP?s rather inadequate Usenet server to fetch updates from other servers), nothing quite matches the format for good old fashioned talk.

Twitter is, for this function, far too truncated. Facebook isn?t much better. Blog comment sections only provide a forum to discuss the topic the blogger has posted about. Web forums just aren?t as snappy and responsive as running Usenet in a client (mine was Outlook Express, during my long exodus from the Mac).

Maybe I?m just showing my nostalgia and I?ve never properly adapted to post-Usenet technology, but we need to see a big change in forum software before we?ll see a real replacement for this long-abandoned platform, at least in my mind.

Self-hosted forum software packages like phpBB and bbPress need to adopt a consistent API so that users can read and participate in multiple forums through a client, much like I did with Usenet in Outlook Express and we all do with Twitter using TweetDeck or HootSuite, would be a good start.

Replacing those old, clunky forum interfaces with something snappier ? something that takes advantage of real-time technology as Facebook and Twitter do ? is a next step.

Or is it the format of those threaded discussions themselves that?s no longer relevant? You tell me in the comments.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/06/01/usenet-officially-dead-buried/

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Sony Sets Its Sights on Augmented Reality

Sony has demonstrated a new augmented reality system called Smart AR that can be built into the company's future gaming devices.

Augmented reality involves mapping virtual objects onto a view of the real world, usually as seen through the screen of a smart phone. The technology has so far been used to create a handful of dazzling smart-phone apps, but has yet to take off in a big way. However, many believe that mobile gaming could prove to be an ideal platform for the technology. With Smart AR, certain real-world objects could become part of a game when viewed through a device such as the PlayStation Portable. This could allow game characters to appear on a tabletop, perhaps, or to respond to the movement of real objects.

Unlike many augmented reality systems, Smart AR does not use satellite tracking or special markers to figure out where to overlay a virtual object. Instead, it uses object recognition. This means it works where GPS signals are poor or nonexistent, for example, indoors. The markerless system is more difficult to pull off, but it allows many more everyday objects to be used.

"Prototypes of Sony Computer Entertainment's next-generation of portable entertainment systems will be integrated with this technology," says Takayuki Yoshigahara, deputy general manager of Sony's Intelligent Systems Research Laboratory in Tokyo. "SCE is also considering adopting this technology for its software development kit in the future." This would allow games developers to add augmented reality features in the games made for Sony consoles.

Sony has dabbled with the technology before, using two-dimensional barcodes known as CyberCodes as markers for tracking objects.

According to Yoshigahara, Smart AR identifies objects using an approach known as local feature extraction, which means it tries to identify salient parts of the object within the image. The system also tracks the object's movement, and works out its orientation. This is necessary in order to know how the virtual data should be positioned in relation to the object.

Smart AR also builds a rough 3-D map of a room. This is achieved by measuring disparities between different snapshots taken from slightly different perspectives as the camera moves. This allows virtual objects to interact with the environment.

Tobias Hollerer, an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says Sony's technology combines several areas of research. "If they do anything new, it is in tracking the entire room," he says.

Edward Rostens, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and cocreator of an augmented reality system for the iPhone, called Popcode, says getting several different techniques to work together using the limited processing power of a handheld device would be impressive.

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How to Deal with Internet Trolls, Your Shrink?s Way

?Don?t feed the trolls.? That has been the prevailing wisdom among more sensible Internet denizens for decades now.

But a LiveJournal user who guys by Shlomi Fish is suggesting that we use techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy to combat trolls on the web after he picked up a copy of the self-help book ?Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy.?

Fish suggests that we refrain from criticizing, ignoring, banning and rebuking the troll ? that is, by the way, the entirety of the troll management toolbox as we know it.

Instead, Fish?s approach has us asking the troll to explain the reasons behind his statements and agreeing with their contention with softer language. Then, says Fish, one should negotiate a common ground with the troll.

In his article, Fish uses the example of a troll who enters a Python IRC channel and says, ?Perl rocks my socks and Python sucks balls, LOL. Python programmers are incompetent imbecile losers, ROTFL?? Using the technique as outlined, he provides these example responses:

  • Ask: ?Why do you feel that Python is so bad? What do you find wrong with it??
  • Agree: ?Yes, Perl is a nice language, and I agree that Python has its downsides and/or trade-offs in comparison to Perl.?
  • Negotiate: ?Would you agree that some people like Perl better and some like Python better? (And some may like both equally.). Maybe you can still write Python code and be productive in it while still not in love with it. Who knows, maybe you?ll even grow to like it. Feel free to stick around and ask questions.?

Shlomi Fish goes on to provide more examples and further detail on dealing with trolls. If you?re sick of dealing with trolls the traditional way, go have a look and see what sort of responses you can get out of these techniques.

Now, I?m off to troll the author for using LiveJournal.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2011/06/01/how-to-deal-with-internet-trolls-your-shrinks-way/

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How to Deal with Internet Trolls, Your Shrink?s Way

?Don?t feed the trolls.? That has been the prevailing wisdom among more sensible Internet denizens for decades now.

But a LiveJournal user who guys by Shlomi Fish is suggesting that we use techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy to combat trolls on the web after he picked up a copy of the self-help book ?Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy.?

Fish suggests that we refrain from criticizing, ignoring, banning and rebuking the troll ? that is, by the way, the entirety of the troll management toolbox as we know it.

Instead, Fish?s approach has us asking the troll to explain the reasons behind his statements and agreeing with their contention with softer language. Then, says Fish, one should negotiate a common ground with the troll.

In his article, Fish uses the example of a troll who enters a Python IRC channel and says, ?Perl rocks my socks and Python sucks balls, LOL. Python programmers are incompetent imbecile losers, ROTFL?? Using the technique as outlined, he provides these example responses:

  • Ask: ?Why do you feel that Python is so bad? What do you find wrong with it??
  • Agree: ?Yes, Perl is a nice language, and I agree that Python has its downsides and/or trade-offs in comparison to Perl.?
  • Negotiate: ?Would you agree that some people like Perl better and some like Python better? (And some may like both equally.). Maybe you can still write Python code and be productive in it while still not in love with it. Who knows, maybe you?ll even grow to like it. Feel free to stick around and ask questions.?

Shlomi Fish goes on to provide more examples and further detail on dealing with trolls. If you?re sick of dealing with trolls the traditional way, go have a look and see what sort of responses you can get out of these techniques.

Now, I?m off to troll the author for using LiveJournal.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/lifehacks/2011/06/01/how-to-deal-with-internet-trolls-your-shrinks-way/

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On Our Desk - Mionix Propus 380

As you can imagine, we get lots of natty little bits and pieces sent into the bit-tech offices. Annoyingly, though, much of it is just a little too small or a little too silly to write about in a full page review. As a result, I?m trying to resurrect the On Our Desk series of articles that we used to cover all these little bits of gadgetry.

So without further ado I?ll tell you about the Mionix Propus 380 mouse mat, on which my CM Storm Inferno has been happily sitting for the last few days.

The first feature that grabbed me about the Propus 380 is that it looks good. It was actually its unusual shape and sleek, unfussy design that prompted me to pick it out from the pile of gaming mouse mats we?ve got sitting in the labs in the first place; it certainly looks like it means business.

On Our Desk - Mionix Propus 380

Once out of the packaging, I was pleasantly surprised by the build quality on show. The edges of the Propus 380 are very precisely cut, with no rough edges in sight. The upper tracking surface is also very firmly bonded to the rubber base of the mat; it certainly doesn't feel like the Propus 380 would suffer from the kind of delaminating or edge-peeling you may have seen on older mouse mats.

The surface of the mat is made from extremely fine-grained plastic, results in some very quick mouse movements. In fact, I was actually able to move my mouse almost too quickly compared to the cloth covered mat that the Propus 380 replaced, with very little drag or friction between the mouse and mat. Once I was used to it, though, the lack of friction meant that my mouse movement felt very precise, and that fatigue was less of a problem during long gaming sessions.

Measuring 380 x 260mm, the mat is wider than it is tall, but this means there?s plenty of room for large sweeping movements if you run your mouse with low sensitivity. If you don?t need all that width, though, then you can rotate the mat through 90 degrees. What's more, in this orientation, the indents in the upper and lower edge of the mat help it to butt up nearly with your keyboard.

On Our Desk - Mionix Propus 380

If you?re into your LAN gaming, then the fact that the Propus 380 doesn?t roll up could be an issue. It does have a degree of bend in it, but it'll crease if you push it too far. For most people, though, this is unlikely to be a problem, and it also means the edges of the mat won?t curl with time.

Of course, a gaming orientated mouse mat is a luxury; most decent mice these days will track quite happily without any mouse mat at all. The Propus 380 is a great piece of kit, though. It feels well made, and has a surface that provides very smooth and quick tracking for a laser mouse. At £17 it couldn?t be called cheap, but at least you feel like you?re getting £17 worth of kit; it?ll definitely be staying on my desk for the foreseeable future.

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