Security in a Qube?

Growing up in the 90s rocked! In the days when owning a Nintendo Game Boy, a Starter jacket, slap bracelet, a pair of Nike Air Jordan sneakers while pegging your jeans made you part of the in-crowd, many of us also remember what is was like to mess with Rubrick's Cube. If you could best the cube that was a serious accomplishment to those of use who road the school bus to Perry Middle School.

Well, the 90s youth, now business professionals in their early 30s, have matured to tackle a new challenge equally as complex as the Cube - cyber security. One of our peers, Joanna Rutowska and her team of security professionals at the Invisible Thing Lab has stepped up to that challenge.

Joanna has developed a new desktop OS poised to rival Microsoft Windows 7, Apple OS Lion, and Ubuntu. With security as one of the primary focuses of the software, Joanna has managed to fuse the concepts of Google+ (organizing your life into groups to ensure privacy) with that of virtualization in order to create a secure platform for personal computing called "Qubes OS."

Check out the Invisible Things Lab blog at: http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/

Jet Pack + Skis = Most Execellent Sports Innovation

Okay folks, so I'm not gonna lie. This week's radical blogging event is a little off-centered in regards to  my usual posts. Cyber security, analytics, and smart cars will have to take a rain check because jet packs is where its at! That's right. I said it. Jet packs. Watch out Perkins, this one will knock your socks off, literally!

So, there is a young male out there by the name of Troy Hartman who is taking one giant step for adrenaline junkies. In an effort to engineer and test a personal jet pack that he can pilot at 8,000 AGL, Troy decided to test it terrestrial style before taking the leap (left foot first of course) off the back of a C-130, as us military folk like to put it.



Achieving 47 mph - uphill - Troy tested his new innovation in personal transportation near Lake Tahoe. Forget about going green by riding your bike to the office. Strap on the personal jetpack, a pair of roller blades or your skateboard and blaze a new trail to work. Better yet, once Troy gets a handle on noise pollution and the small amount of charred clothing, you may be able to leave the comfort of your own driveway without ever having set foot on another piece of earth before landing on the office helipad.

Fred, can you help me patent the term, iJet?

In the words of my friend Bill S. Preston, "this innovation is most excellent!"
-Wild Stallions rule!





Forget Facebook... Meet Gattica Gone Wild!

Would you ever think of putting your most personal information on the Web? Sure you would. You probably do it everyday. Especially is you are using the Facebook mobile application for iPhone or Android. Most people don't think twice about uploading personal pictures to the web to share with friends and family despite the fact that once uploaded all that information belongs to the owners of the social networking software. However, while less than glamorous pictures of you doing a keg stand at your best friend's house last week may not concern you, what if you had the ability to receive medical services via web-based applications? Would you be willing to upload your personal genome data.... ?

Genome Data

Folks, I'm not talking about simple Web 1.0 medical functions like doing a search for your symptoms on WebMD. I'm talking about uploading your most personal information to the Internet. In my mind nothing gets more personal than your own genetic code.  While the advantage of availability may be appealing to some, the challenges associated with a lack of confidentiality and integrity are enough to make me hesitate for a minute. Well, maybe more than a minute. Check out the "Biomedicine" tab at MIT's Technology Review to read more.

Shattering Taboo: Wedlock Child Next Evolutionary Step In Human Behavior

Watson and Apple have been busy. That's right, people, busy making babies... and guess what? They're not even married. As a matter of fact, until now, many of their closest friends would have considered them enemies of some sort. Well I guess this proves the old adage true, opposites still do attract and often with very profound results. So, who is this baby everyone is clamoring about? Her name is Siri, and doctors are hailing her birth is the next evolutionary step in human behavioral change.

That's right the Natural Language Processing (NLP) phenomenon known as IBM's Watson and Apple's iPhone have plugged in to produce a truly affordable and effective wireless man-machine interface - a phone that can interpret plain language, search for an answer, and return that answer in real-time to the user.

Imagine this kid's possibilities? Siri may grow up to leave the nest (e.g. the confines of the iPhone) and choose to live inside the Mac Book Pro, iPad, or iMac, fall in love with Web 2.0, and have a child of her own known as Web 3.0, whose greatest contribution to man-kind could be the invention of a new profession: the Personal Digital Assistant.

I envision a world where, before going to bed on a Thursday evening, I tell my digital assistant to find the most current news headlines for tomorrow morning, leave my brother a message about our camping trip this weekend, and ensure the electric car gets charged for my daily commute. See what a couple of cocktails, a great night out in Silicon Valley, and a little confidence still yield... one awesome night and a kid named Siri that will make you millions.

Smart Cars: Motivated by Safety or Efficiency?

The engineers at IBM are pairing up with major automotive manufacturers to produce cars that increase communication between three entities that come into contact with each other every time you go for a ride: cars, roads, and drivers (http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/19017/?mod=related).

The mathematicians and engineers behind IBM's "Smarter Planet" initiative are always looking for ways to make data useful. As people continually instrument the world, more and more data is becoming available in almost all aspects of our lives. From health care to business intelligence, in many ways we have become inundated by data. The trick is to make sense of that data and turn it into information that people can uses in ways that positively change the way we live. In this instance IBMers are crunching the data to help the driver get the right information at the right time, and they are not the only ones.

Imagine your car driving you safely to work Monday morning while you catch a few more Zs before the kick-off meeting.

IBM's smarter driving initiative could be a game changer in the everyday life of the average American businessman or woman who is results and productivity driven, but sometimes lacks the safety awareness on the road caused by the gross popularity of smart devices like the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry handheld systems. While I am sure the IBM employees are motivated to increase safety awareness and reduce the millions of people affected by car accidents every year (including myself as a victim of drunk driving), if IBM perfects an "auto-pilot" function for terrestrial vehicular travel, many American workers may get their wish to extend the workday a couple of hours, while paying for their own electronic chauffeur to afford themselves the ability to be constantly connected to the mobile, digital work environment.

It is worth while to mention that there may be serious negative side effects of a safer, more work efficient commute. As with all rules-based technology, those that know how to bend the rules and have access to your system can take control of it. Cyber threat actors may eventually look to exploit these new devices and could introduce mayhem and terror on the highways by taking control of peoples vehicles. Think about it...

Homomorphic Encryption... A Game Changer?

In his book titled, Does IT Matter, Nicholas Carr argues "information technology has increasingly become [...] a simple factor of production - a commodity input that is necessary for competitiveness but insufficient for advantage." While his argument is elegant in its simplicity and curiously attractive in it's citing of major technological advances as a "commodity" required to gain competitive advantage in the marketplace, I believe his perspective on IT as the "cost of doing business" also identifies the direct enabler of the modern day business advantage - data. 

In today's markets, the ability to generate meaning from consumer and business critical data has become the centerpiece of Fortune 500 companies because it supports rational decision making. It has almost become a requirement for companies to have a data collection and analysis capability in regards to its consumers and internal business functions in order to maintain a competitive advantage, and thus turn a profit. Companies like IBM who develop and sell business intelligence tools to search for meaning in data, Amazon and Salesforce that providing data storage, and Google that provides data collection and aggregation have become giants in their respective markets because of the ability to recognize the value of data. 

Interestingly enough, what may be just as important as the data itself is its availability and confidentiality. In order to make rational decisions in real-time, corporate executives require immediate access to that data in order to address time critical issues that may have immense impact on their business model and subsequently provide them a competitive advantage over the competition. Cloud computing has provided the corporate executive availability. However, while most executives realize that implementing cloud-computing solutions may ultimately give them access to the data when they need it, executives are also reluctant to place their data in the cloud because of security issues. In an article titled, "Homomorphic Encryption: Making Cloud Computing More Secure  (http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37197/) the writers of Technology Review at MIT have exposed what seems to be the emerging technology that will remove executives' reluctance to accept cloud computing as a holistic IT solution to information exchange - homomorphic encryption. 

IBM's Craig Gentry has come close to perfecting the ability to run mathematical calculations on encrypted data without exposing the content of the data to anyone but the data owner. This break through in data confidentiality will definitely change the level of comfortability that businesses and consumers have with placing their data in the cloud and could have massive impacts on the way executive decision makers lead their organizations and develop SaaS products. Imagine the ability for patients to place their medical data in the cloud in a secure, wireless, real-time fashion where a health provider could use it make life saving decisions remotely or dispatch first responders faster to provide medical services. I see homomorphic encryption as a technology that will quickly become a game changer for service provision in the very near future.