Category: Cybersecurity
Censorship is Not Cybersecurity
There was a recent article in the Bangkok Post where a couple of guys I know were basically saying that Thailand needs more “cybersecurity” to control the flow of information in the Kingdom. They basically said that a new government “cybersecurity organization” needs to be set up to insure that when Thai citizens protest about [...]
Read moreFrankenstein’s Monster
Colin Barr has covered finance for Fortune.com since November 2007. Colin was a writer and editor for TheStreet.com, winning a 2006 Society of American Business Editors and the Writers award for “The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street,” and for Dow Jones Newswires. Colin pinned an excellent article on May 7th, High frequency trading: Why [...]
Read moreDisadvantages of Rule-Based Systems (Part 1)
In Orwellian Event Processing the discussion moved away from my original intent, which was primarily to discuss the vendor-state-of-denial regarding the prior art for processing complex events, and gravitated toward a discussion on the “inefficiencies” of rule-based systems. I was surprised learn that there are professionals who believe that there is no basis in fact [...]
Read moreOrwellian Event Processing
Recently we completed the installation and training of an open source Bayesian classifier to replace a rule-based approach to manage forum spam. In a nutshell, we found the rule-based approach was highly prone to both false positives and false negatives; however, a statistical approach using a Bayesian approach has turned out to be far superior. [...]
Read moreWeb Cams: The Dark Side of the Net
No doubt everyone has read the story where the Lower Merion Township School District remotely enabled webcams on laptops to, in their words, “locate missing laptops”. What on Earth were they thinking? Imagine your daughter has her laptop set up in her room because she did her homework last night. She goes to the shower, [...]
Read moreGoogle v. China: Google Deserves Our Respect
In case you have not seen this, David Drummond, Google’s SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer has written one of the best blog posts I have even read, A New Approach to China. Google is boldly going where few have ventured to go before, including the US government. China operates as if they can [...]
Read moreA US Constitutional Failure Regarding Our Protection
Like most of you, I am still in complete shock over Northwest Flight 253 and how our government still cannot connect-the-dots in simple intelligence matters to protect us from harm. In this case, the well-respected father of a radical-Islamic Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab reached out to the US Embassy and other organizations in an [...]
Read moreCybersecurity: The Problem with Czars
On December 21st, 2009, the White House announced that friend and colleague Howard Schmidt had been appointed to the Executive Office of the President of the United States to serve as the “Cybersecurity Czar” for the Obama administration. I find this personally interesting because a few people (only a few, not many) contacted me earlier [...]
Read moreComplex Event Processing in the Belly of the Beast
Around 10 years ago I worked as Technical Director for SAIC as a member of an elite group of Internet security experts. I was responsible for a number of very large global financial corporations (well, actually two). The leader of our division, called The Center of Information Protection (The CIP), was a very intelligent [...]
Read moreGeoIP and Geo-Targeting
Lately I have been busy with a web-based geo-targeting project. For those of you not familiar with geo-targeting, the deeper you get into geo-targeting, the more you realize how important and interesting it is. Geo-targeting is used for fraud detection, personalization, ad-targeting, content-delivery, and more. In addition, the same basic concept is used [...]
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