Discover how mastering email communication can boost business efficiency, avoid common pitfalls, and ensure secure, respectful online interactions.
Turkey Revenge
The turkeys are pissed this Thanksgiving they are seeking revenge.
Germs Infest 60% of Americas Phones
60% of Americans sleep with their phones, harboring germs. Cleaning regularly with UV sanitizer or alcohol wipes can help keep your phone and bed germ-free.
Smartphone Sanitizing: A Practical Guide
Securely erase personal data from your old smartphone before recycling. Protect your identity from hackers—easy steps to follow.
Why Soft Skills Matter in Today’s Job Market
Boost your career with essential soft skills like communication, teamwork, and emotional intelligence. Learn why they’re crucial for workplace success.
Social Media – It’s All About Me
Social media sites such as Facebook (FB) and Twitter are a narcissist magnet, according to recent study from the University of Michigan. The U-M researchers published their results online in Computers in Human Behavior.
TechEye says the Michigan researchers found that college students and their adult counterparts use social media in differing ways to bolster their egos and control perceptions of others, the report suggests. Elliot Panek, a University of Michigan researcher said that social networking is about making your image, how you are seen, and also checking on how others respond to this image.
College-age students love using Twitter to make their opinions and views seem important. He told CBC News that college students social media tool of choice is the megaphone of Twitter. “Young people may over evaluate the importance of their own opinions,” Professor Panek said. “Through Twitter, they’re trying to broaden their social circles and broadcast their views about a wide range of topics and issues.”
Adults who show narcissism tend to prefer Facebook, which works in the same way. Middle-aged adults usually have already formed their social selves and they use social media to gain approval from those who are already in their social circles. According to Mr. Panek, Facebook serves narcissistic adults as a mirror. “It’s about curating your own image, how you are seen, and also checking on how others respond to this image,” he said.
So what’s wrong with being a little narcissistic? Plenty. The traits associated with the disorder can stunt the development of close, long-term relationships. What’s more, highly narcissistic people are more likely to react aggressively to criticism and to carry out actions that promote themselves at the expense of others. On the upside, narcissism also correlates with higher self-esteem and low anxiety
Those findings confirm the conventional wisdom that Twitter is the more youthful, millennial, me-centric social network. Facebook is the province of older people who like to showcase pictures of pasta dishes or post status updates about their kids. We’d hazard to say it’s a crutch for people who can’t get out of the house much, but still, seek validation from their peers. Incidentally, the median age of Facebook users has risen from 38 to 41 over the last few years, according to various social media studies. A recent spate of alarmist headlines suggested that teenagers may, in fact, be ditching Facebook.
rb-
Do you like me now?
Related articles
- Do Narcissists Use Twitter and Facebook More Than Other People? (news.health.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Social Networking |
Tags: 2013, Facebook, FB, Narcissism, Social media, Twitter, TWTR, University of Michigan
Energy Harvesting Displays
Over 90 percent of the displays sold will use liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology. However, LCDs are tremendously energy inefficient, converting only about 5 percent of the light produced by a backlight into a viewable image. The LCD in a notebook computer consumes one-third of its power. MIT’s Technology Review reported on efforts at the University of Michigan to improve the efficiency of LCD panels and boost the battery life of phones and laptops.
The LCD screen remains dominant because manufacturers can make LCDs inexpensively on a vast scale. More energy-efficient displays are either too expensive to manufacture or cannot produce high-quality images. “The LCD is very inefficient, but it works,” Jennifer Colegrove at Display Search, a market research and consulting firm, told TR.
At Michigan, they are tackling one of the biggest culprits of wasted light in LCDs: color filters. The group, led by Jay Guo, is developing energy-harvesting color filters. Color filters are used in many displays, but the ones by Professor Guo’s team are appropriate for use in reflective “electronic paper” screens. These contain sub-pixel arrays that absorb ambient light and reflect red, green, or blue light.
Energy efficiency at Michigan
Dr. Guo and his U of M colleagues combined a common polymer solar cell material with a color filter that his group invented last year. The photovoltaic color filter converts about two percent of the light that would otherwise be wasted into electricity.
U of M’s Guo estimates that full displays incorporating this photovoltaic filter could generate tens of milliwatts of power, enough to extend the life of a cell phone battery. The photovoltaic color filter is described in a paper published online in the journal ACS Nano.
“It’s an intriguing idea,” says Gary Gibson, a scientist developing reflective color displays at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California. Low brightness is a recurring problem for color electronic paper. If the color filter proves practical, says Gibson, energy harvested from ambient light could power a backlight and make the display brighter.
rb-
Harvesting energy from the environment with the device is a trick that could boost the battery life of phones and laptops. Oh yeah, the article also talked about similar work at UCLA. Go Blue!
Related articles
- French startup develops solar-charging displays (thedroidguy.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2013, Display device, Energy, Green, Harvesting, HP Labs, LCD, Michigan, University of Michigan
Box Beefs Up Backbone for Business
The evolution of Box from an idea to let its customers share and manage and access their content from anywhere to a cloud file-sharing and storage start-up to a business serving over 150,000 businesses, including 92 percent of the Fortune 500 continues. DataCenter Knowledge reports that half of Box’s activity comes from outside of the U.S. and 40% comes from mobile devices.
In order to support the growth, DCK says Box is touting Accelerator, its global data transfer network, as well as adding several key certifications in a bid to make its global enterprise customer base happy. Further infrastructure expansion lies ahead. “We really think we’re solving a problem for an end-user,” said Jeff Quesser, VP of Technical Operations for Box. “But we’re also solving an IT concern; they can get all the auditing, compliance they need. This can be run in a very safe way.”
With over 150 percent growth last year the company has had to tailor its service in the best ways possible to serve the enterprise crowd. The blog says 50 percent of Box activity is happening outside of the US, either from international firms or U.S. enterprises with a global presence. Mr. Queisser told DCK. “Speed is absolutely critical. If you have sites all around the world, you need blazing fast download speeds.”
This enterprise customer need was the impetus behind Box Accelerator. The company has established upload endpoints in key global data center hubs featuring end-to-end encryption. The company has built patent-pending intelligent routing and optimization technology that delivers uploads 2.5 times faster on average. It has built a network that helps you get data into Box as fast as possible.
Box Accelerator tweaks the TCP stack to get better performance. Mr. Queisser explained to DCK.
“(With) most consumer operating systems, networking stacks are not optimized … There’s the bandwidth delay problem. TCP is an amazing protocol, but wasn’t made for these types of distances and this kind of bandwidth. It’s a testament to how amazing the protocol is that it’s done what it’s done.”
The article says the biggest problem for Box is how to handle inbound traffic.
“What we’ve done is unique in that it’s optimizing inbound data … How do you ingest 100MB rather than send it out? The other piece is that we built these nodes, and a routing feedback loop technology. It determines the fastest way to get to Box. Sometimes it’s an accelerator node, but there are times when direct is the fastest path.”
Accelerator started off small but has added nine new points of infrastructure. It’s a small footprint that provides a big performance boost. The goal is to have cloud-based endpoints in all regions. The article claims that Neustar conducted a performance analysis test and found that “Box had the lowest average upload time across all locations, about 66% faster than the closest competitor.”
The company is also planning to apply this technology to file downloads. Accelerator has added speed to enterprise uploads, but the company told DCK it is looking to speed up downloads in a similar fashion. “We need to do that in a way where it’s encrypted and it isn’t cached,” said Mr. Quiesser.
It in terms of certifications, Box has recently added ISO 27001 and support for HIPAA. ISO 27001 is the international standard for information security management systems (ISMS) and demonstrates how the policies and controls put in place at Box protect user data.
rb-
Better performance and security are great things from a cloud vendor. But what impact does the NSA spying scandal is going to do on the cloud storage business model. There could be repercussions if vendors don’t cooperate.
What do you think? is the Box network ready for the enterprise?
Related articles
- Taking a reality check on Cloud security (intechnology.co.uk)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2013, 27001, Cloud computing, HIPAA, Information security management system, ISO/IEC, NSA, Security, TCP
POTUS Declares War on Patent Trolls
President Barack Obama has declared that it is time to get tough on “patent trolling.” Paul Marks at New Scientist writes that when ordinary activities like using Wi-Fi in a coffee shop or updating smartphone apps provoke lawsuits you know something is seriously amiss with the legal system. Firms that buy up obvious patents that the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) should never have granted in the first place are called patent trolls according to the author.
The troll then “asserts” these patents by threatening to sue businesses that infringe them. Many will then settle out of court and pay an often business-crippling license fee.
As followers of Bach Seat know, there are a number of patent troll lawsuits related to wireless. In 2011, Boston University’s law school estimated that dealing with patent trolling cost businesses in the US $29 billion (rb- which I originally covered here).
President Obama says the cash should have been spent on generating products, services, and jobs. So the White House is asking Congress to force the USPTO to narrow the scope of patents within the next six months so that whole fields cannot be trolled. Mr. Obama also wants to prevent patents from being asserted against the users of technologies, like coffee shops, rather than manufacturers. The White House says trolls will have to come clean about their identity, and not hide their “abusive litigation and settlement extraction” behind a thicket of shell companies.
“This is a bold step forward by President Obama, and if these legislative proposals are enacted the playing field will be leveled,” Alan Schoenbaum, general counsel for the troll-fighting web hosting firm Rackspace told New Scientist. What’s crucial, Mr. Schoenbaum says, is that the President’s changes make sure trolls have something to lose when they fail in court. In essence, the U.S. legal system is unbalanced. In the UK, for instance, the loser pays. “That keeps frivolous lawsuits down to a minimum,” he says. “But ‘loser pays’ is rare in the U.S.“
The author asks how can patent trolls be identified? Rackspace’s Schoenbaum says there are plenty of ways, “Trolls don’t invent, make or develop anything. Between 70 and 90% of their patents are software or business-method patents, and in virtually all cases the patent is invalid.“
But San Francisco-based, “patent buster” Gregory Aharonian, who invalidates patents by finding previous inventions using the same ideas, told New Scientist he thinks it will be trickier to identify patent trolls. He told the author, “It is going to be hard for Obama to deal with the troll definition problem … Anyone who asserts an invalid patent, under any conditions, is a troll.” Mr. Aharonian says that some large technology firms behave like trolls when they assert overly broad or obvious patents they never exploit.
The only move that will crush the troll phenomenon is vastly improved patent quality, Mr. Aharonian says. “What upsets people 
more is not the assertion tactics, but the crap being asserted.”
rb-
This story barely had a full news cycle. The opportunity is dead and lost as the White House spin machine deals with the PRISM spying scandal.
Related articles
- Stop Patent Trolls (sweenylegal.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2013, Barack Obama, Patent, Patent troll, Politics, POTUS, USPTO, White House
Quantum Encryption for Grid Security
Vulnerabilities in the national grids and the potential for wide-scale outages have raised concerns over the past few years as high-profile companies have gone public with highly advanced hacking attempts. MIT‘s Technology Review reported on GridCOM Technologies, a startup that recently secured seed funding from Ellis Energy Investment which says quantum cryptography can make the electricity grid control systems secure.
Quantum cryptography
Dr. Duncan Earl the chief technology officer of GridCOM Technologies told TR he plans to use the start-up money to build a prototype quantum encryption system designed specifically for the electricity grid. The company’s hope is to show a working system working next year near its home base in San Diego. Utilities would pay about $50 a month for access to a software service and hardware that encrypt critical communications in an area.
With GridCOM Technologies, Dr. Earl is trying to make critical infrastructure more secure by encrypting data sent to grid control systems. The article explains that traditional encryption techniques can’t work at the low latency speeds—measured in milliseconds–required for SCADA systems, which leaves them vulnerable to attack. CTO Earl is an expert in optical technologies who worked for the Cyberspace Sciences and Information Intelligence Research group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and helped spin out an optical lighting company in 2006.
Quantum entanglement
GridCOM Technology’s system works by generating two photons using a laser and storing them in optical fiber cables. These twin photons each have an opposition polarization—either a wave oscillating up and down or left and right, Dr. Duncan explained to the author, Martin LaMonica. According to quantum mechanics, if one tries to measure these photons, it will change the state of the other and the photons are no longer “entangled.” This phenomenon allows a communications system to detect if a message has been intercepted.
According to the article, the firm’s service would create an encryption key based on the arrangement of the photon pair. A hardware receiver posts that information on the Internet and the company’s hosted software will poll those devices. A subscriber to the service will be able to confirm that communications haven’t been tampered with and encrypt messages, Mr. Duncan says. “You’ve got physics that is ultimately securing the device, not mathematics. Mathematical complexity has been a great tool for encryption but it’s not future proof,” he told TR.
GridCOM’s Duncan says a key advantage of the system, is that it works quickly, a necessity for SCADA systems. “You’ve eliminated the possibility of somebody eavesdropping to hack the key. There’s no data latency and you’ve leveraged a random bit stream … That’s really all the grid needs.”
Limitations
One of the main limitations is that the cryptography is only point-to-point over a fiber cable and can’t work across switching equipment over the Internet. In GridCOM Technology’s case, the system is limited to 20 kilometers in distance. GridCOM’s CTO envisions that utilities will put a series of hardware receivers in secured buildings to encrypt communications for a whole region. There are already a number of efforts to build commercial quantum encryption systems GigaOm reported on the success that the scientists at Los Alamos have had running a quantum network for over two years and ID Quantique in Switzerland.
TR concludes that quantum encryption offers one promising route to securing the grid, but it shouldn’t be seen as a silver bullet. If it works, it would address one very specific application but securing something as complex as the power grid requires a full suite of options and above all good security practices.
Smart Grid Today provides (PDF) some background. Quantum physics was first described in a 1935 paper that included Albert Einstein as an author. Erwin Schrödinger coined the quantum term “entanglement” and that was the basis for his famous thought experiment of a cat that exists simultaneously in a state of being alive and dead.
CERN to prove quantum entanglement, utterly confounding Einstein’s theory of relativity because now information can be transmitted not at or below the speed of light, but literally instantaneously.
Related articles
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2013, Einstein, Electrical grid, Encryption, GridCom Technologies, Quantum computing, Quantum key distribution, SCADA, Security