Hackers are scary: Time for two-factor Authentication?

This post is an excerpt from Is it Time for Two-Factor Authentication?.

The recent security breach at Citibank, coupled with even RSA hiring what may be its first Chief Security Officer Edward Schwartz, point out that you can never be too paranoid about your personal and corporate data security. RSA was in the news earlier this year for an attach on its SecurID two-factor tokens, something that had been considered the ultimate in enterprise security.

It might be time to take another look at two-factor authentication, and see if it makes sense to implement this in your organization. Here are three basic steps to get started:

First, take a look at what Google and Facebook have done with adding two-factor authentication to their accounts. Both use somewhat similar systems, tying your account to your cell phone and sending you a text message that you have to enter as part of your login process. Google adopted two-factor authentication last fall and Facebook added two-factor to their accounts in May. And eBay/PayPal have had two-factor authentication for several years on its accounts, too. While these are all personal solutions, they help gain experience in using these two-factor solutions and give you some perspective before you want to implement these corporate-wide.

Google software structure obsolete?

This post is an excerpt from Ex-Google Engineer Says the Company's Software Infrastructure is Obsolete - ReadWriteCloud.

Yesterday former Google Wave engineer Dhanji R. Prasanna wrote on his blog about why he is leaving the company. It's an interesting look at Google's company culture, but there's also an interesting technical nugget in there. "Google's vaunted scalable software infrastructure is obsolete," Prasanna wrote. He emphasizes that the hardware infrastructure is still state of the art, "But the software stack on top of it is 10 years old, aging and designed for building search engines and crawlers."

Prasanna says software like BigTable and MapReduce are "ancient, creaking dinosaurs" compared to open source alternatives like Apache Hadoop.

Is this okay? Anonymous taking on countries?

This post is an excerpt from ReadWriteWeb.

Once Anonymous, the hacking collective, got the taste of blood on the world stage, credit card companies seemed to be less tantalizing. Some of these country operations have been more successful than others. Although the success may be more in focusing attention on the issues the citizens themselves are fighting for than any real damage against the repressive infrastructure.

So far we've seen Operation Tunisia, Operation Zimbabwe, Operation Egypt and Operation Iran. Now, Anonymous has turned its attention to the subcontinent in Operation India.

UN: Internet Access a Human Right

This post is an excerpt from United Nations Proclaims Internet Access a Human Right.

The Arab Spring has seemed to have inspired a death bed confession in favor of free speech on the part of the United Nations. After introducing and passing a resolution condemning blasphemous speech, the U.N. recently reversed that decision.

Now, the United Nations has proclaimed that Internet access itself is a human right.

UN seal photo by Julian Rotela Rosow

un building.jpgLast Friday, the United Nations released a report entitled "Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression."

Its author, Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue, wrote:

"Given that the Internet has become an indispensable tool for realizing a range of human rights, combating inequality, and accelerating development and human progress, ensuring universal access to the Internet should be a priority for all states. Each State should thus develop a concrete and effective policy...to make the Internet widely available, accessible and affordable to all segments of population."

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Computer Science Challenges

Want a list of questions that will help you solve Computer Science related problems?

Check out Project Euler's Problems Page.

UK: Cyber Soldier Recruitment

This post is an excerpt from U.K. to Recruit "Cyber-Soldiers".

At the same time as the U.S. military is preparing to release a policy qualifying cyberattacks as acts of war, the military of the United Kingdom is engaging in a large-scale recruitment drive. Called "Operation Cupcake"

Following from last year's "National Cyber Security Programme," this recruiting initiative will attempt to attract hundreds of computer experts to the British armed forces. Part of a £650,000 cyber-security budget will be devoted to the program.