Saturday, March 26, 2011

Freehaven papers on Anonymity

I have not looked at the Freehaven site for some time, but just a reminder that there is a huge collection of research papers sourced, tracing the history of anonymity systems, MIXES and other PETs. The collection was well-attended to up till the end of last year but is missing updates for 2011 so far. I am sure that they will come. BibTeX references for the papers as well.

Trust and security in the cloud

The Register has published a new 16-page whitepaper on trust and security in cloud computing, with the key findings being

  • Many companies could do much better when it comes to in-house security
  • SaaS adoption is limited currently, but there is increasing interest from the business
  • The biggest impediment to SaaS adoption is a perception of security issues
  • Companies with experience of SaaS are positive about provider security
  • SaaS is likely to help with shortcomings of on-premise security capabilities

The whitepaper was written from data gathered in an online survey with over 500 participants. Amongst the many tabulated responses to the survey there is an interesting list of the ways data can exit from corporate boundaries.

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Saturday, March 12, 2011

iPad Competition is Toast

Business Insider recently reported that the iPad is outselling the competition about 4-to-1. So as security professionals the iPad is the platform to focus on for risk assessments.

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An example of redundancy in English

After I apologized too often for my bad typing, my sister-in-law sent me the following text to demonstrate that our brain can understand words even if only the first and last letters are correct
Yet aoccdrnig to a sudty at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a ttoal mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
Apparently this text is well-known to language people!