A very bad and at times dangerous trend:
Hackers for hire; very lucrative new consulting business for out of work tech specialists.
As hackers switch to malware-as-a-service model to make their malicious tools and services available to general public, security firms struggle to find a way to catch the bad guys.
Google Fiber is heading close to home for its next location: San Francisco. Google announced this morning that it intends to bring its fast gigabit internet to “a portion of San Francisco,” specifically to apartments, condos, and affordable housing units. Details on exactly where and when are nonexistent for now, and Google suggests that we may be waiting a while to hear more.
What Google Fiber does say is that it won’t be building out its own network in San Francisco, as it’s done in many other cities. Instead, it’ll rely on existing fiber networks to provide its service. That may limit what Google can do and where it can go, but it also means a much faster path to launch. “To date, we’ve focused mostly on building fiber-optic networks from scratch,” Michael Slinger, Google Fiber’s business operations director, writes in a blog post. “Now, as Google Fiber grows, we’re looking for more ways to serve cities of different shapes and sizes.” Google Fiber is already taking this approach in a couple other markets, including Huntsville, Alabama, where earlier this week it announced plans to launch using the city’s municipal network.
As it’s done elsewhere, Google Fiber plans to provide free gigabit internet service to “some public and affordable housing properties” in San Francisco. It’s also working with a nonprofit to teach people basic internet skills, like setting up an email account and applying for jobs.
Ireland has real opportunity to benefit from increased global investment and establish itself as a world-class hub for cyber security practices, solutions and investment, according to a new report from Deloitte. Conducted in association with the International Sustainability and Investment Centre, the report found that Ireland has proven itself to be an innovative centre for technology and has the potential to become a world leader in cyber security.
Respondents to a survey for this report identified increased regulation on data privacy (73%), more sophisticated scamming and phishing (59%), and growth in identity theft (53%) as the major trends in the cyber area over the next five years. This will force businesses to change how they organise and manage their data security.
More than one third (36%) of respondents believe there will a trend towards outsourcing cyber management to third party organisations, and 27 percent think that businesses will establish global/regional centres of excellence for managing this function. The implication of this will be that a small number of locations will be preferred for basing these centres of excellence.
I wish the CA AG a lot of luck; however, her approach is very questionable when you think about downstream access and feed type scenarios. Example, Business in Boston MA has an agreement with a cloud host company in CA, and Boston also has data that it pulls in from Italy, DE, etc. plus has a service that it offers to all of users and partners in the US and Europe that is hosted in CA.
How is the CA AG going to impose a policy on Boston? It can’t; in fact the business in Boston will change providers and choose to use someone in another state that will not impact their costs and business.
BTW — I didn’t even mention the whole recent announcement from China on deploying out a fully Quantum “secured” infrastructure. If this is true; everyone is exposed and this means there is no way companies can be held accountable because US didn’t have access to the more advance Quantum infrastructure technology.
Feb. 17 — California Attorney General Kamala Harris (D) has released the state’s data breach report, laying out the legal and ethical responsibilities of businesses to keep information safe and perhaps most importantly outlining what the state believes is “reasonable security” that companies must employ to avoid possible enforcement actions.
Under the state’s information security statute, businesses must use “reasonable security procedures and practices” that “protect personal information from unauthorized access, destruction, use, modification, or disclosure,” the report said.
Under the guidelines in the report released Feb. 16, failing to implement all 20 of the Center for Internet Security’s Critical Security Controls that apply to an organization’s environment constitutes a lack of reasonable security. The controls define a minimum level of information security all organizations that collect or maintain personal information should meet.
TAQNIA and KACST signed an agreement on February 21, 2016, to form a joint venture that will be responsible for developing six or more sub-meter resolution imaging satellites.
KACST will construct, integrate, and launch the satellites, and it will own 50% of the satellites’ imaging capacity inside of KACST’s communication cone, which includes Saudi Arabia and the surrounding region. And, DigitalGlobe will have rights to the other 50% of the capacity inside this region and 100% of the satellites’ capacity outside of the region.
WESTMINSTER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– DigitalGlobe, Inc. (NYSE: DGI), the global leader in earth imagery and information about our changing planet, today announced the formation of a joint venture with TAQNIA, a firm dedicated to accelerating technology development for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in partnership with KACST to develop a constellation of highly capable small imaging satellites to support the needs of customers around the world.
DigitalGlobe and TAQNIA and KACST signed an agreement on February 21, 2016, to form a joint venture that will be responsible for developing six or more sub-meter resolution imaging satellites. The small satellites are expected to be capable of collecting imagery with anticipated 80 cm resolution and will leverage DigitalGlobe’s industry-leading ground infrastructure. TAQNIA and KACST will benefit from DigitalGlobe’s imagery production platform and expertise and massive catalog of high-resolution, high-accuracy imagery, which will improve the native accuracy of the small satellite imagery. TAQNIA and KACST will also benefit from DigitalGlobe’s global distribution capability and existing customer relationships with the world’s largest buyers of commercial satellite imagery and geospatial information.
Does the connected self driving car, mean a connected work car as well?
SAN FRANCISCO — In the balancing act between business and pleasure, the modern connected car is mostly about pleasure. Drivers can easily stream music from the Internet and dictate text messages to friends, but staying connected to the office is still cumbersome, as anyone who has tried to join a teleconference while driving can attest.
People tired of checking corporate email around the clock may prefer it that way. After all, a request from the boss can still be reasonably deflected with a simple: “Sorry, I’m driving.”
Yet for Microsoft Corp., which dominates the workplace software market with its Office 365 suite, in-car productivity is a huge, untapped opportunity. Many people use cars as mobile offices, and as cars become more automated, putting together a slide deck behind the wheel may go from unsafe to commonplace.
Posted in business, geopolitics, life extension, transhumanism | 1 Comment on Now this is an “outsider candidate”: Zoltan Istvan, a Transhumanist running for president, wants to make you immortal
A story from Salon on transhumanism:
While we have a rare combination of candidates with a real chance of taking the White House — a woman, a Jewish socialist and a real estate magnate — there’s another you probably haven’t heard about: a Transhumanist.
Zoltan Istvan, 43, the leader and founder of the Transhumanist party, has entered the race as a third-party candidate promising the “facilitation of immortality.” Istvan, who lives in California, first made headlines when he set out on a cross-country campaign tour in a bus shaped like a hearse last September. His main philosophy: enliven America’s technological advancement by combining humans with machines, to improve and prolong life.
In U.S politics, the two traditional parties have consistently dominated the electorate. In fact, Sen. Bernie Sanders is the only Independent in Congress, every other House member belongs to either the Democratic or Republican Party. But historically the country has had a history of fringe candidates, which typically get a few thousand votes in presidential elections. In 1992, billionaire businessman Ross Perot, who ran on the Reform Party, won 18.9% of the vote, the best finish by a non-major party candidate in a presidential election since Teddy Roosevelt won 27.5% of the vote in 1912. While Perot’s Reform Party, like practically all third parties, has failed to emerge as a contender since then, candidates like him have had a significant impact on electoral outcomes.
Zoltan Istvan is still an ambiguity for most of the political world, and the Transhumanist party in its early stages of development, but there is something to be said about how his policies could predict the way the political landscape might change in the decades to come.
VR experience with SCM, CRM, etc. Imagine the improved connected customer experiences with VR.
Envelop VR, a software company that is leading businesses to immersive computing, announced today that it has hired Jeff Hansen as Vice President of Business Development. Jeff’s primary role will be to engage with enterprise customers wanting to solve for real business challenges by utilizing a virtual reality environment, including improving their work flow processes and efficiencies, visualizing data, or collaborating on engineering or product development. Envelop VR solutions enable enterprise customers to unlock the tremendous benefits and advantages of working and collaborating in a three-dimensional virtual environment.
This Smart News Release features multimedia. View the full release here: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160218005289/en/
I will admit; AR is more practical than VR in areas of SCM, etc. However, it is interesting to see how both play and evolve in the enterprise/ corporate models and connected customer experience areas of business. Also, overtime some of the small AR shops could be buying opportunities for mid-tier enterprise software companies.
Here’s where small tech companies can challenge the big guys in the world of virtual and augmented reality.
This is a good baseline around common known issues — the real problem is cyber terrorists (as I call them) learns from each attack they instigate and like an artist, they constantly are fine tuning their own skill. So, the attacker’s approach and execution may be done one way, and by the next attack they can easily have changed their whole attack model completely which makes it very cumbersome for experts to trace at times. If we believe this is bad now; wait until AI is more widely available and adopted. Or, Quantum ends up in the hands of these guys.
Cybercrimes in today’s technologically advanced society have become much more sophisticated and progressive. We can thank mobility for the ease of extended access to our personal data, as with every use of our mobile phones, laptops or tablets in public areas we further increase our risk and vulnerability. As business owners, online shoppers, students, employees and even house wives, we remain at high risk for intrusion of our virtual systems. In this digital day in age, our personal data is used everywhere from when we make an online banking transaction to buying a new shirt at the mall, and even working on a project at the local coffee shop. It is hardly responsible to think that your information is safe anywhere.
Protecting Yourself
Lucky for us, there are many effective and efficient opportunities for protecting ourselves virtually. When it comes to building a good defense against malicious cyber attackers the best mode of attack is a good offense. This means, educating yourself and setting up parameters that protect your system and therefore your personal data from all angles. In the grand scheme of things, knowledge is power and the more power you have, the more you can leverage such as a way to build a good defense against cybercrime. Here are five facts about cybercrimes that you might not be aware of: