Changes expected in 2010     Dec-14-09
What's the first thing that goes through your mind when someone says the word "data"?

For many of us, the first image is line graphs, pie charts and spreadsheets with columns and rows full of numbers that leave you bleary-eyed and a bit dazed. But what if someone were to say data can also mean what you post on Facebook and Twitter, the ratings you gave a restaurant, the photos you uploaded to Flickr or even, perhaps, what you feel. A bit of a reach? Not anymore. An emerging set of tools is making it easier than ever to track and compile all sorts of "data" and display it in a way that's relatively easy to understand.

You can now point your mobile phone at a street and instantly get ratings for restaurants. Or type in your address and find reports of crimes that may have occurred in your neighborhood. It's even possible to track emotions on a national and global scale. There are several reasons why we're seeing more data visualization in popular culture and why it's becoming simpler and more innovative.

Computers and software have gotten cheaper during the past few decades, and the technology needed to build applications is now in the hands of more people. Meanwhile, more data are becoming digital, making it easier to parse and catalog."You have stuff available on government sites that would have only been available on paper a decade ago. Finally, through the advent of social media applications like Facebook and Twitter, coupled with the rise of increasingly sophisticated mobile phones, a cultural shift is seemingly under way.

Technology in 2010     Dec-07-09
Look back at how far computers and other personal technologies have come in the last 10 years, and it's easy to see why it's so difficult to predict where they'll go over the next decade. Best guess: Look for more data to be available at any time, more information accessible through speedier devices, a greater reliance on the cloud, and technologies that work away quietly in the background.

Ten years ago, we would have been blown away by a cellphone with far more computing power and memory than the average PC had in 1999, along with a built-in camera and programs to manage every aspect of our lives. Ten years from now, the iPhone and its ilk will be antiques.

Over the next decade, the evolution of computing and the Internet will produce faster, increasingly intelligent devices. More of our possessions will contain sensors and computers that log our activities, building digital dossiers that augment our memories, help us make decisions and tame information overload.

Such ideas may sound futuristic and excessive today, and technological predictions are notoriously off-base. Short-term forecasts tend to assume too much change, and long-term forecasts underestimate the possibility of sudden, major shifts.

Even so, this vision of interconnected devices that produce and filter massive amounts of data in the 2010s is a logical progression of the Web, computers and gadgetry that emerged in the 2000s. Moore's Law, the principle that computing power doubles every two years without increasing in cost, still rules.

Global Accessibility     Nov-23-09
Web designers and software and hardware developers are working on ways to make it easier for people with disabilities to navigate the Internet. Audio options help blind users find their way around, captions make Web video accessible to the deaf, and new devices help people with mobility impairments move cursors.

The number of people with disabilities grows and more of everything is done online, companies are finding it makes good business sense to make their sites more accessible and are hiring consultants and training programmers to make it happen.

The World Wide Web Consortium, which develops standards for the Web, has issued guidelines for designers to help them create more accessible sites. They include providing text labels for images, captions on audio and video and making keyboard shortcuts for people who can't use a mouse.

Knowing how disabled people use the Web is the first step to making the Web accessible. Accessibility features make a better Internet for all. For example, the ability to zoom in on a map or magnify font was conceived for people with low vision but it's helpful for anyone. It's like sidewalks. You build a wheelchair ramp and not only is it a better sidewalk for those users, but for strollers, luggage, delivery people.

Is our government doing enough to protect our national cyber-infrastructure?     Nov-16-09
The conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan, to name the most prominent, are taking their toll on human life and limb. However, the escalating cyberconflict among nations is far more dangerous

There are many approaches to this problem that are mainly based on software, but software is vulnerable. Online banking was a novelty 20 years ago. Now, everything happens on the Internet. People pay their bills, they do business, they do their work with customers. People don't fax documents any more if they don't have to -- they do webinars and briefings.

All of this exposes the opportunity for mischief. You don't know the source of the mischief. You don't know whether it's individuals trying to solve a difficult technical challenge on their own or if they're connected to governments, or if they're cells attached to governments -- and it's very difficult to pin down ... incoming probes to a source.

While it's generally agreed that the next war may be a cyberwar, much of our infrastructure is either hooked up to the Internet or in the process of being hooked up to the Internet. Electricity companies, for example, are agitating for the use of smart meters. That being the case, and with hackers increasing the frequency and sophistication of their attacks, increasing pace of hooking everything up to the Internet could pose a real security threat. There's no telling just what could be done. You can't conceive of the threats from the point of view of a traditional war. Cyber-efforts are ongoing today; we're in a cyber-struggle today. We don't know who the adversaries are in many cases, but we know what the stakes are.

That's not the only threat, and you shouldn't overstate the ease with which people can do this. An ordinary person can't go in and wreck a financial system, but when you have skilled professionals with malign intent, with the right funding and the right technology -- and, maybe, inside information -- we don't know what damage is possible. We suspect it could be significant and we have to expend a lot of effort to safeguard the system.

Security of personal data in Web 2.0 World     Nov-09-09
Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace rely on the trusted nature of the relationship between friends, colleagues, associates and followers. Unfortunately, the level of trust that end-users invest in each other is also being applied to the makers of applications and is perhaps a little over-optimistic. Increasingly, cybercriminals are being drawn by the possibilities opened up by application development on popular Web 2.0 Web sites with the promise of more money, which results in more infections and more potential for something to go horribly wrong with computers being used both at home and in a corporate environment.

Facebook is probably the most well-known site as far Web 2.0 applications are concerned. These applications are typically games, add-ons, and time-saving devices that require access to elements of your profile data in order to function correctly. The risks of doing this should be obvious; it requires sharing profile data that could be compromised, including your username and password.

Today, we've moved from near hysteria over a harmless pop-up to grim acceptance that the applications themselves can indeed perform harmful acts, from directing users to phishing pages to promoting dubious ties to rogue antispyware programs. Worse still, smart Internet marketers have identified that they can piggyback legitimate applications by running advertisements above the installers designed to look like part of the install routine.

Not worried enough yet? Some individuals don't even waste time on coding a rogue application. They simply set up an application page that seemingly has nothing on it other than a fake "customer dispute" page, harvesting the login data of anybody foolish enough to enter their account information. In a number of cases, neither the application nor the application pages exist.

These data-stealing perpetrators rely on our acceptance of applications on Facebook pages in general; an attacker knows a reasonably convincing screenshot of a fake program pasted onto a comments wall will attract victims (the hook here being the supposed exploitation of a legitimate app).

My advice: Be extremely careful with data you release to add-on utilities and games. Most if not all these add-ons have a dubious track record.