Security Still Not on Broadway

I was at a OWASP meetup yesterday, as usual a pretty successful event as it's always interesting to hear about current threats and trends on the Internet from real people in the flesh. It was the usual high level talks, with some new "in the cloud" angles, but the fun talk was Arian Evans' from WhiteHat Security. He talked about the "super hacker" profile and mentioned a bunch of real-world incidents. Very refreshing to get a grounding view, and if nothing else the audience got an idea of how hard it's to carry around $833 million in cash. What was not so refreshing was to hear that security is still low on corporations' budgets, and that the general consensus is that showing that you have taken steps to secure your organization, is more important that actually doing it. Not even with the current organized crime/governmental/extremists hacking levels is security taking the stage it deserves.

Rainforest Hack

Google G-Drive Coming?

Today started well, as I came across an article that indicated that Google's GDrive was closer to becoming a reality. A while back, I looked at a number of online backup solutions and although Amazon S3 was a close favorite, I decided to increase my data space at Google since I use Picasa extensively. To my dismay, it turned out that uploading my photos via Picasa would automatically convert RAW into JPEG. However, today I read that the new Google Docs file uploader will allow unconverted upload of any file, and I felt like a king. Especially since through the Google Docs API, I will be able to upload any file I want to the Google cloud storage service. A few companies have already added support for Google in their file sync programs, and I didn't feel too stupid about paying for 200GB of space at Google. That feeling didn't last long though, as the new functionality will start rolling out to Google Apps enterprise customers, and I purchased my space for my private account, and not my corporate account. It does make me think though, now that I am actively using Google Voice for all my calls in and out, and just ordered a Nexus for my mobile needs, did I just become the newest Google whore?

http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-10432746-248.html

Who's watching you?

CES is underway, pretty cool stuff coming out too. I hear tablets is the rave, and TVs are getting smarter and sexier. Seems authentication and authorization on the net is not such a bad place to be. Now that in addition to you watching your TV, your TV will be watching you. Needless to say security on the net is going to get a different focus in the mind of main stream this year. Just hearing about this year's new gadgets, I concocted a handful of great business plans for surfing this tsunami like a swede on a thruster in an October storm. With the job market full of cheap labor, and VC pockets bursting in the seams, it seems like the perfect storm is brewing for a technology revolution. Surf's up!

Purple Plastic Barbi Saab

On my drive today I saw a black pickup truck with large purple flames painted on the hood and sides, that was as retro as Kurt Russel in "Escape from LA". That reminded me that today is the last deadline for saving Saab from certain death, a little sad. I miss my good old 900 from 1981, that was a great car. It way ahead of it's time in cockpit design, just a shame I never got around to changing the shocks. There was a reason I called it my boat, as I was floating around on the highways. It was almost as cool as my sisters "purple plastic Barbie" 900. Needless to say, it helps to be dating a dude that works in a car paint shop. I wonder how many layers of clear paint and glitter was on her poor old car. It definitely looked different, the coolest thing around at the time.

Right now, the coolest thing around is "a dark matter halo surrounds us like a deflated beach ball around a dinner plate". That's the chatter today, as astronomers are analyzing and theorizing about data of the stuff that surrounds our milky way. I am starting to wonder if I shouldn't change fields and abandon the software industry. But then again, perhaps that gets old after a while too. No matter what, I can't help to wonder what life would look like if I had worked at CERN on the LHC. Would I then have been trying to convince people that a man-made singularity won't swallow the earth, instead of convincing people that the millennium bug won't cause the planet to go back to the black ages? Same same I guess...

Year twenty-ten, or is it two-thousand-ten?

Having a long commute has it's perks. I heard on the radio this morning that this Australian company is once in a while announces a "FedEx day". All staff of this software company gets a day to do whatever they want, as long as they tell the other employees the next day what they did. Turned out to be very productive. Made me think about the old days of "flex time", counting hours while getting paid for overtime. Was it not better then? I sure had more spare time than today, with 10 hour work and 3 hour commuting each day.

Thinking of the good old days, is it now "twenty-ten" or "two-thousand-ten"? I still can't seem to get it right, and it brings memories back to the millennium shift. Thinking back on it, I remember some good times. Living the high-life, travelling all over, for a few days to a week at a time. Back then a whole bunch of IT decision makers living in unwarranted fear for the millennium bug would gladly throw money at anyone that could comfort them. A little ironic, back then you couldn't convince people their corporation would survive the imminent catastrophe. Today, you can't convince the most savvy IT manager to tell their staff not to re-use passwords or write them or post-it notes. Seems like todays corporate world is ripe for a new Armageddon of stolen passwords, and no-one cares. The tools exist, I wonder when they will start being used? Is 2010 the year for myOneLogin? One could only hope for the sake of man-kind...