A Twin Career Story
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Protection in the post-privacy world
Author: Cian Sullivan (website: GoMo News)
Date: 28 April 2011
Mostly everyone I know is in the same boat. A lot of my friends have Sony PlayStation Network accounts. And all of us have had to take the same precautions – the essential data that keeps our digital identities and finances secure may have been acquired by malicious entities. Sony has finally admitted that the problems with PSN were caused by “an intruder” who stole personal information about the service’s users between the 17th and 19th of this month.
My PS3 has been collecting dust in a cupboard for quite some time now (I’m a mouse-and-keyboard man, consoles just aren’t my thing). I haven’t powered it up in 12 months, I would estimate. But during the time that I did use it, I set up a PSN account. My personal details are attached to it. I had an associated credit card, to buy digital goods. I had a password. All of these are now potentially catastrophic security breaches.
So today, after canceling my credit card and ordering a new one, I went about doing something I feel I should have done quite some time ago. I visited LastPass, and went about nuking all of my existing passwords for the various digital services I use – which turned out to be a lot more than I suspected. This isn’t an advertisement for LastPass, so I won’t get into details. Suffice to say it generates ludicrously random, unique passwords for your on-line accounts, and provides a very smart way for you to manage them all.
My credit card is no longer at risk, because I killed it. My passwords are no longer at risk, because they are now all random gibberish. The only thing that’s left are my personal details – but frankly I don’t feel much like changing my name and address and falsifying a new birth date for myself. And even then, it would take someone with the right skills a matter of moments to rediscover them.
And that’s largely the point of this blog. “Privacy” doesn’t really exist anymore. It never really did. The Internet didn’t kill it, because it was never really there. All the Internet did was kill our illusion of privacy. A co-worker asked me “what’s safe anymore?”. And the answer is “nothing has ever been safe.” Honestly, given a persistent and resourceful enough criminal, you probably can’t keep your personal details safe; not in the silicon era, where every foray on-line leaves digital trails that data warehouses can use to build reliable models of your behavior. Unless you’re a hawk-eyed security adherent who keeps relentless track of every detail, you will leave bread-crumbs out there for those who are interested to follow.
But as I’ve discovered today, there ARE a number of pretty easy ways to minimize the risks to yourself. Unfortunately, the biggest limiting factor for all of them is TIME. If you think you’ve suffered a security breach, you need to act quickly to fix it. And that is the greatest mistake that Sony made. I am not even slightly angry with Sony for losing control of my personal details. There is no such thing as a perfect system, and no matter how tight the security is there will always be someone with enough time and resources to work their way around it. However I am FURIOUS that Sony took a week to tell me that someone may have acquired my personal details. That’s a week I would not be able to afford if someone was using my credit card.
Social computing at Budapest’s Future Internet Week
Author: Kieran Sullivan (Twitter: @techspeakieran)
Date: 28 April 2011
As part of its hosting of the EU Presidency, Hungary is organising a Future Internet Week in Budapest on 16-19 May. A number of different conferences and workshops will take place over four days, but all will have a common underlying theme: to investigate the policy, technological, and socio-economic aspects of the Future Internet.
The link above will bring you to the full programme for Future Internet Week, but the SOCIETIES session may be of particular interest to those working on the social computing side of the Future Internet. This session will try to assess future developments in social computing. Specifically, it will aim to identify the technical and social challenges—and the subsequent support required from Future Internet infrastructure—which are likely to arise as social computing evolves.
"The venue for Future Internet Week is the InterContinental Hotel, less than 50m from Budapest's iconic Chain Bridge"
TSSG at WIT Research Day
Author: Kieran Sullivan
Date: 14th April 2011
The TSSG was well represented at Waterford Institute of Technology’s annual Research Day, which took place on Wednesday, 13th April.
Both Dr. Willie Donnelly and Dr. Mícheál Ó Foghlú delivered keynote addresses to open the event. Dr. Donnelly outlined the process for developing a “Common Strategic Framework for EU Research and Innovation Funding”, while Dr. Ó Foghlú spoke “Research Funding Policy” and the models used in Ireland between 1995 and 2008. Later in the day, Dr. Jaime Martin Serrano-Orozco described “Application Management Systems in the Cloud”.
The TSSG had an information stand at the event also and a number of TSSG research posters were on display around the venue. Poster presenters included: Julien Mineraud, Stepan Ivanov, Leigh Griffin, Ray Carroll, Ahmed Elmesiry, with Bernard Butler winning the best PhD poster for the Computing Maths and Physics school. Well Done to all that participated!
WIT’s Research Day is a celebration of Research, Innovation, Scholarship and Creativity.
This annual event has three main aims:
- to celebrate the quality of research across all schools within the Institute;
- to enable academic staff and postgraduate students to meet and learn about the research carried out across the Institute; and,
- to enable networking between researchers from different academic disciplines.
Who’s doing what in Europes Future Internet?
Author : Kieran Sullivan, TSSG.
Date: Wednesday13th April 2011
Our current Internet is creaking under the strain of capacity, security and management limitations. Huge capital investments are being made across Europe (and the USA and Asia), to create a Future Internet that will meet the unprecedented demands of our knowledge society.
In each of the European Union’s 27 Member States numerous initiatives are attempting to create a more secure, better managed Future Internet – which will also deal with the current Internet’s capacity issues (E.g. new fibre optic cables for greater data transmission, automatic data routing techniques, more advanced encryption). Then, there are other projects across Europe that are trying to offer services on the Internet that have never previously been available on-line – these also constitute a Future Internet (E.g. semantic search facilities, real-time road traffic monitoring, etc.)
These two categories of the Future Internet are interlinked in many ways. It is in the interest of vendors who offer advanced on-line services that investments are made to make the current Internet more robust and reliable. For engineers who attempt to increase the capacity of the current Internet and to make it more secure, and better managed, it is financially important for them that vendors purchase their advanced Internet infrastructures.
With all this Future Internet work going on across Europe, there’s huge potential for duplication of effort for the various parties involved. In addition, there is possibly a number of different initiatives whose work could compliment each other.
This is where the ceFIMS project (www.cefims.eu) steps in. ceFIMS stands for the “Coordination of the European Future Internet Forum of Member States”, and it is currently gathering information on the different Future Internet initiatives across Europe. Six months into its work, ceFIMS now has a database in place on its website (http://cefims.eu/?page_id=69) which can be searched by Member State or by topic (via the website’s Tag Cloud).
ceFIMS will conclude its work in early 2013 with a detailed report on how different Future Internet initiatives—and indeed, how EU Member States—can work together to create a truly European Internet of the Future.
