Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • Apple’s security challenge

    Apple’s security challenge

    This week’s news about celebrities’ personal photos being stolen from their iCloud accounts would be irritating Apple ahead of their September 9 media event.

    Unfortunately for Apple they seemed to have walked into this by making things convenient for users rather than enforcing strong security measures.

    As Arik Hesseldahl in Re/Code describes, this breach was probably due to Apple not encouraging two factor authentication and not limiting the number of password guesses.

    The latter is particularly irritating as it shouldn’t be hard for a system to pick when a brute force attack — a computer guessing a password millions of times a second — is being staged against a user.

    It’s also trivial to limit the number of guesses as most other services do.

    For users, the best protection is to have complex passwords which reduces the effectiveness of brute force attacks. It’s also worthwhile being careful with your personal nudie photos.

    The consequences of having your iCloud account compromised are more than just losing your embarrassing photos, Wired’s Mat Honan had his entire digital life hijacked through this method two years ago.

    With Apple aspiring to control the smarthome and smartcar markets, the consequences of accounts being breached becomes exponentially greater. These are issues Apple and the rest of the internet of things industry need to take seriously.

    Hopefully at Apple’s big media event next week, some brave journalist will stand out of the assembled masses of sycophant hacks and ask CEO Tim Cook some hard questions about security on the shiny new iDevices.

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  • When disruption is more than a buzzword

    When disruption is more than a buzzword

    A briefcase sized device could wreak havoc in today’s networked world warns William Radasky in the IEEE Journal.

    Fans of the  wave of nuclear war movies like The War Game or The Day After will remember the first bomb detonated in the attacks was a high level explosion designed to knock out electronic equipment.

    The resultant Electro Magnetic Pulse leaves everything from military radar to civilian communications systems unusable.

    In both The Day After and The War Game the high altitude detonations over Rochester and Kansas City destroyed motor cars’ ignitions leaving a key part of the nation’s infrastructure paralysed.

    Unlike a zombie TV series, the unlucky survivors of a nuclear strike weren’t going to leap into the nearest abandoned Camaro and speed away from the heaving hungry masses.

    What should be considered is The War Game was filmed in 1965 when electronics were not ubiquitous. Even then the scale of the damage from an EMP was substantial.

    In today’s world, an wide scale EMP would bring down a region’s entire economy.

    I’m writing this post on the 28th Floor of San Francisco’s St Francis hotel and were such a blast to happen now I’m not sure I’d be able to find the fire escapes as the emergency lighting would be fried — it’s not even worth considering the lifts.

    What a first world city like San Francisco would like after all its technology, including electrical and communications systems, were knocked out doesn’t bear thinking out.

    On the bright side, this means a devastating nuclear war killing millions may not be useful military strategy any more. To bomb a first world nation ‘back to the stone age’ just needs a handful of well targeted high altitude nukes.

    The IEEE article is a timely reminder of both the fragility of our systems and the society that depends upon them.

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  • Collaboration and the cloud

    Collaboration and the cloud

    This post is one in a series of four sponsored stories brought to you by Nuffnang.

    A few months after the iPad was launched in 2010 I was at an event that showed how quickly cloud computing was changing the workplace.

    The event was a demonstration on cloud computing services to a room full of company directors and the organisers had assumed they would be scarcely capable of using a web browser.

    It turned out the organisers were wrong, one of the older directors waved his iPad around and declared the device had changed his life.

    “We used to get a fat parcel of papers a week before a board meeting,” he said. “We’d be ringing each other up to discuss things and no-one knew if they were Arthur or Martha.”

    “Now all the documents are uploaded and we can all work on them, take notes and see what each other has to say. It saves us a heap of work.”

    This gentlemen was, to be polite, a pre-baby boomer and a director of a medium sized insurance company. This was not a business full of hipster Gen-Ys at a funky startup.

    We should also keep in mind this conversation was four years ago when the online tools were far more basic, smartphones were not as refined as today and mobile internet wasn’t as affordable or accessible.

    Today almost every employee has access to the web and collaboration tools through their smartphone, tablet computer or laptop and this gives every business the opportunity to be doing what that insurance company had in place for its directors in 2010.

    Shortly after that conversation I was speaking at a technology conference in country New South Wales about this and during one of the sessions one of the attendees described how her timber yard had improved productivity through using online spreadsheets.

    In the past the timberyard had used paper based systems to give customers quotes. From the salesman’s visit it could take up to two weeks for the business to get prices back to prospective clients.

    Once on the cloud the sales team could access shared documents, price lists and brochures which allowed them to write up quotes on the spot, get them immediately approved by their managers and into the clients’ hands while still on the site.

    “We were winning jobs simply because we were so fast,” the lady told me.

    It’s tempting to think all of the airy talk about collaboration is just for sexy startup companies but as an old school insurance company in Melbourne and a timberyard in New South Wales shows, cloud services are delivering real productivity and sales improvements to all sorts of industries.

    For all businesses, the greatest challenge is getting staff working together effectively, there’s now no reason for any company not to be using cloud services to give the workplace a boost.

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  • Managing the job shock

    Managing the job shock

    One of the mantras of technologists like myself when challenged about where jobs will come from after existing industries are automated or become redundant is “we don’t know where they will come from, but they will.”

    Assuming that is true and the jobs will come in industries we’ve barely begun to contemplate there remains the question of what happens to the families and communities that depended upon the displaced industries.

    Two stories this week from opposite sides of the world show how how poorly we’re answering that question; in Tasmania the Idiot Tax describes what happens to a region with no economic value while in the UK the ongoing Rotherham sex abuse scandal portrays a community debilitated by unemployment.

    In both regions local industries collapsed through the 1970s and 80s and the local working classes became the welfare classes, stuck on benefits with at best poorly paid casual work available.

    As the Idiot Tax describes in Tasmania’s Burnie, retired older workers reaped the benefits of a life of full time employment that town’s youngsters will never know.

    History has no shortage of examples of cities that disintegrated when their economic reason for existing became no more — a process we’re seeing in Detroit today.

    Now we’re seeing almost every industry being changed with far greater potential for job losses and fractured communities.

    That we’ve dealt so poorly with the process over the last fifty years means we have to start thinking about how we as a society manage this adjustment.

    Jobs will come to replace the ones lost, just as through the Twentieth Century new roles developed to replace those displaced from as nations like the US, France and Australia evolved from largely agricultural economies into industrial and then service industries.

    But the human cost is real and there are no shortage of shrunken or abandoned towns that were once thriving market or railway hubs at the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

    For technologists, this is an issue that has to be faced as we enter a period of economic and technological change far greater than the one we saw in the 1970s and 80s.

    Car wreck photo courtesy of CBR1000 through sxc.hu

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  • Rise and fall

    Rise and fall

    Twenty years ago UK supermarket chain Tesco was an also ran.

    A decade ago it was the market leader.

    Today Tesco is in trouble again as low cost European competitors like Aldi and Lidl have chipped away the British majors’ market share.

    A few weeks later, Tesco shares plummeted on revelations the company’s profit guidance had been overtstated by 250 million pounds with the company’s chief executive Dave Lewis announcing several executives have been stood down as auditors investigate the descrepencies.

    Tesco is a very good example of how quickly how competitors can come from behind in today’s marketplaces; first Tesco itself during its 1990s rise and then its crash in recent years.

    We live in rapidly changing times. Incumbents and market leaders shouldn’t assume their positions are safe.

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