Monday, October 12, 2009
Training to Climb an Everest of Digital Data
It is a rare criticism of elite American university students that they do not think big enough.
Monday, September 14, 2009
What Information Is “Personally Identifiable”?
Sounds like Mr. X is pretty anonymous, right? Not if you’re Latanya Sweeney, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor who showed in 1997 that this information was enough to pin down Mr. X’s more familiar identity–William Weld, the governor of Massachusetts throughout the 1990s.
Friday, August 28, 2009
A Data Deluge Swamps Science Historians
In a vault beneath the British Library here, Jeremy Leighton John grapples with a formidable challenge in digital life. Dr. John, the library’s first curator of eManuscripts, is working on ways to archive the deluge of computer data swamping scientists so that future generations can authenticate today’s discoveries and better understand the people who made them.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Seeking
Seeking. You can’t stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde and Privacy on the Web
Ever since Netscape started storing cookies in its browsers, there has been a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature to the web. The Jekyll web promised a more personalized experience, with sites serving ads for products and services that you would actually be interested in–ads that are more like useful information and less like glaring interruptions.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Dell’s Dedupe Play
Until three weeks ago, few people outside corporate data centers knew much about deduplication technology, which makes data storage more efficient by culling repetitive documents. That changed when data storage companies NetApp and EMC got into a bidding war last month for a leading provider of the heretofore obscure software.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Sending large datasets to Amazon? Use the Post Office
Amazon has unveiled a new service called AWS Import/Export that is designed to “accelerate moving large amounts of data” to and from Amazon’s S3 cloud-based storage solution.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
For Wired, a Revival Lacks Ads
Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired, believes in logic the way Tina Brown believes in buzz.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
One Third of Workers Open to Bribes for Data Theft
A somewhat self-serving survey ahead of an information security trade show in London next week reveals a third of workers can potentially be bribed into handing over company data.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Conficker and What Really Confounded Silicon Valley
There are computer hacks, and then there are REAL hacks, like of the saw variety. Silicon Valley got a wake-up call in the latter variety Thursday, when vandals hacked into fiber-optic cables beneath the ground, knocking parts of three California counties offline.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Mobile Broadband Growth Hits an Air Pocket
The number of consumers signing up to access the Internet via PC data cards has come nearly to a screeching halt, according to new data from comScore.
The research firm reports today that the number of U.S. subscribers signing up for mobile broadband services using data cards grew just five percent sequentially in the fourth quarter, after a long string of double-digit gains.
Monday, March 23, 2009
What Google Should Learn From Apple
It was touching to see that Douglas Bowman, Google’s visual design leader, chose, in announcing his resignation, to stroll down Steve Wozniak Honesty Avenue.
In a blog post, he summed up his feelings, as all the best designers should, in one simple statement: “I won’t miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data.”
He talked of how data was being collected (and one can only wonder what fine, laborious methods are used in the process) to judge the acceptability of a shade of blue, the width of a pixel, or the hair bang length of a brand manager.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Playing Videogames Linked to Breast-Feeding, Not Crime
The media, hungry for stories, is way too quick to link gaming with violent crimes. But the data indicate that, if anything, the opposite is true: Crime has gone down during the recent explosion in videogames. Of course, none of this stops the press from piling on, and the gaming press from piling on the pile-on.
Friday, January 23, 2009
Obama’s Black-Ops BlackBerry
It appears that President Barack Obama gets to keep his BlackBerry after all, but some experts are questioning whether the Research In Motion device will provide enough security for the president.
At a press conference Thursday, a White House spokesman said the president will keep his BlackBerry “to stay in touch with senior staff and a small group of personal friends in a way that use will be limited and that the security is enhanced.”
Friday, November 14, 2008
Getting Sloppy With Data/Passwords
For all the talk about privacy and security, it seems that a lot of people are downright sloppy when it comes to who they provide personal information.
A couple of prime examples this week where large numbers of unsuspecting or naive [people] happily handed over their usernames and passwords to a third party simply because the service looked cool.
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