rob zand

Hackers are targeting the ATM system’s infrastructure, which is increasingly built on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system and allows machines to be remotely diagnosed and repaired over the Internet. And despite industry standards that call for protecting PINs with strong encryption — which means encoding them to cloak them to outsiders — some ATM operators apparently aren’t properly doing that. The PINs seem to be leaking while in transit between the automated teller machines and the computers that process the transactions.

email faces increasing competition. Chat, text messages, Twitter, social networks and even lifestreaming tools are chipping away at email usage. In this post we take a look at what’s happening and assess if email is in danger.

The primary service that Gnip offers at launch today is to capture user data updates from any web application and then serve up the very latest information to anyone else who requests it. Your application doesn’t have to ping Flickr, YouTube, etc. etc. every few minutes and ask “have any of our users done anything on your individual service?” Now with Gnip, Flickr (a launch partner in fact) can report user data updates to Gnip, which can then pass that data along to consuming parties, along with data from all the other social media services of interest.

The real core of his financial support is something else, the rising class of information age analysts. Once, the wealthy were solidly Republican. But the information age rewards education with money. There are many smart high achievers who grew up in liberal suburbs around San Francisco, L.A. and New York, went to left-leaning universities like Harvard and Berkeley and took their values with them when they became investment bankers, doctors and litigators. … Over the past several years, the highly educated coastal rich have been engaged in a little culture war with the inland corporate rich. This is a war over values, leadership styles and social networks.

But in the 2008 race, the first in which campaigns are feeling the full force of the changes wrought by the Web, the most attention-grabbing attacks are increasingly coming from people outside the political world. In some cases they are amateurs operating with nothing but passion, a computer and a YouTube account, in other cases sophisticated media types with more elaborate resources but no campaign experience.

am I saying that e-mail is dead? No, I am NOT saying that! In fact, if you have been reading on this experiment from the very beginning you would remember how I have never mentioned that e-mail is dead!

I am just saying that it needs to be re-purposed and used for what it was meant to be in the first place: A communication tool for one on one conversations of a sensitive, private or confidential nature. The rest should be going out there, in the open, in the public space(s), transparent and with an opportunity for everyone to contribute! Notice that I am differentiating quite clearly between communication and collaboration, because they are not the same, no matter what people say about it!

Adobe announced today that it is teaming up with major search engines - notably Google and Yahoo - to “dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs).” In a press statement, Adobe said that it is “providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.”

Ah, yes. The late afternoon reply-to-all/remove-me-from-the-list cluster fuck. Do we need e-mail classes, people? Really?

the idea that a guy working in his den at night while his wife watches TV downstairs can so easily allow people to block most ads reminds some of how fragile Web profits may be

No, it was more like the primal instinct that makes people shout “First!” on online forums, a recognition of the improbable act of stumbling across a special place at just the right time. After I had done my duty, dozens of others piled on, tweaking, retweaking, fixing and updating until my work was moot. But I got to that particular page first, and that left me ever-so-slightly chuffed.