This article provides good perspective on where VC money fits (and does not fit) into the continuum of funding options for companies!
Monthly Archives: July 2012
It’s the Data, (Senator) Dummy!
If only there was more enlightenment and less money-driven politics in Washington! Facts are, however, far too (to quote the inventor of the internet)… inconvenient. :p
With the advent of open data and new, powerful methods for analyzing it, we’re learning a lot that could challenge longstanding beliefs on public policy. Politicians, social workers and other civil servants have always had data, of course; they just never had as much and could never do with it what they can today. They should listen to what the computers tell them.
What’s possible
Recent HIV research from Brown University is a great example of what’s possible. Researchers formulated a computer model based on numerous factors relating to drug use, sexual activity and the medical aspects of HIV infection. To ensure it was accurate, they calibrated the model until it could accurately reproduce known HIV infection rates in New York City from 1992 until 2002. They ran the model thousands of times on a supercomputer.
They found that the rate of of HIV infection among New York City injection drug…
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At Defcon, Hackers Show How to Bypass Android Encryption – Ina Fried – Mobile – AllThingsD
At Defcon, Hackers Show How to Bypass Android Encryption – Ina Fried – Mobile – AllThingsD.
More apparent insecurity in the Android platform: apparently the Android operating system from version 3.0 though the present use the same password for unlocking the device that it uses for encrypting the data on the phone. This opens up data on the phone to a relatively simple brute force attack, as few people use complex passwords to unlock their phones.
In light of this revelation, it is clear that Android continues to be a questionable choice in platforms for businesses / enterprise use.
Interesting stuff, but the price is steep!
GPS Weakness Could Enable Mass Smartphone Hacking – Technology Review
GPS Weakness Could Enable Mass Smartphone Hacking – Technology Review.
A researcher at the University of Luxembourg has discovered that a weakness in the A-GPS location process used by smartphone can permit malicious wi-fi sites to re-route the phone’s A-GPS location queries to the malicious site even after the smartphone has disconnected from the malicious site, permitting hackers to track the phone from that point on.
Furthermore, on smartphones where A-GPS signals are processed on the phone’s main CPU, hackers can use this exploit to crash the phoe and possibly make use of other bugs to compromise the phone.
This exploit was demonstrated on a umber of different Android phones by several manufacturers.
Patent Troll Claims it Owns Patent on GPS – Sues FourSquare
Sigh!
A Nevada-based shell company has filed a lawsuit against Foursquare, claiming the popular app is violating two patents that cover familiar navigation features.
In a complaint filed Wednesday in Las Vegas, Silver State Intellectual Technologies Inc asked for an injunction and damages related to U.S .Patent 7475057 (“System and method for user navigation”) and U.S. Patent 7343165 (“GPS Publication Application Server”).
Both patents describe the process of pushing information from a remote server to a user based on the location of that user and show diagrams like this one:
Silver State’s short legal filing (embedded below) doesn’t describe how exactly Foursquare infringed on the patent. The popular app relies on location tracking technology to offer a service that lets users and their friends “check in” to restaurants, merchants and other physical locations.
The lawsuit comes at a time when so-called patent trolls like Silver State have become aggressive about suing promising young…
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Data Breach costly to Global Payments, to the tune of $84M | ajc.com
Breach costly to Global Payments | ajc.com.
Another costly reminder of the liability that can stem from data breaches: Atlanta-based Global Payments suffered a breach in which 1.5 million account records were exposed i a hack attack.
Global Payments now reports that just the cost to fix the data breach has reached $85 Million, so far, resulting in a 91% drop in quarterly net income when compared to last year. This does not account for the damage to Global Payments’ reputation. Both Visa and Mastercard dropped Global Paymeents from their compliance lists after the revaluation of the data loss.
According to the Atlanta Jounral Constitution, last month, Global also warned that hackers also might have accessed the personal information of an unknown number of merchants who’d applied with Global for payment processing services.
Interviewedby the AJC, Adam Levin, an identity theft expert and chairman of Credit.com, said the Global breach is another wakeup call that governments and companies may not be doing enough and that consumers must protect themselves. His conclusion: “Companies have got to be more proactive,” he said. “Even the ones that are really good [at security] are finding that the bad guys still find a way to beat them.”
How Apple’s phantom taxes hide billions in profit | ajc.com
How Apple’s phantom taxes hide billions in profit | ajc.com.
“On Tuesday, Apple is set to report financial results for the second quarter. Analysts are expecting net income of $9.8 billion. But whatever figure Apple reports won’t reflect its true profit, because the company hides some of it with an unusual tax maneuver.
Apple Inc., already the world’s most valuable company, understates its profits compared with other multinationals. It’s building up an overlooked asset in the form of billions of dollars, tucked away for tax bills it may never pay.
Tax experts say the company could easily eliminate these phantom tax obligations. That would boost Apple’s profits for the past three years by as much $10.5 billion, according to calculations by The Associated Press.”
Again the age-old line between making clever use of existing tax laws and tax evasions, at least on the surface, appears vanishingly thin. Of course, it’s generally easier to avoid millions in taxes than it is thousands. Regardless of the somewhat distasteful appearance of such maneuvering, it points up the fact that competent counsel on the tax front can be a tremendous asset to business, as legitimate opportunities for real savings exist. The lesson being, having (and regularly consulting with) a good accountant is one of the most important things a business can do.
First they came for Wikileaks, then the NY Times…
This puts be in mind of the quote from the German author Heinrich Heine: “Das war Vorspiel nur. Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” This translates, loosely to: “That was only a prelude. Where one burns books, one will eventually burn men as as well.”
I first saw this quote in the museum at the Dachau concentration camp and it has stuck with me ever since. While we are not talking about literally burning books, the point is: censorship is a dangerous thing, as our founding fathers well knew.
I certainly don’t advocate the wholesale looting and publishing of sensitive materials, whether governmental or private. That having been said, just because someone slaps a “secret” label on something does not make it sacrosanct. Freedom of the press was interpreted to be a logical extension of freedom of speech for a reason.
When WikiLeaks made its first big media appearance by publishing tens of thousands of top-secret diplomatic cables in 2010, we argued the group headed by controversial front man Julian Assange was a media entity, albeit an unusual one. The broader implications of this status extend far beyond the question of whether we support the organization or its motives: As a blog post at the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, threats aimed at WikiLeaks are by implication also threats to any other media outlet that dares to publish government information. And some members of Congress say they want to make this connection explicit by changing laws so that journalists can also be sanctioned.
In his post Trevor Timm notes that signs have been accumulating for some time now that members of the government are looking for ways to go after journalists who publish official secrets. During a recent hearing of…
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Cybercrime disclosures rare despite new SEC rule…. But lawmakers plan to change this!| law.com
Cybercrime disclosures rare despite new SEC rule.
In October of 2011, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a non-mandatory guidance statement on cybersecurity and the reporting of security requirements. Despite this guidance, which was intended to clarify existing reporting requirements for publicly traded companies under Sarbanes-Oxley and other federal privacy laws and regulations, many companies are either not reporting cybersecurity breaches or are skirting the reporting requirements by making very general disclosures which appear designed to minimize or disguise the nature and severity such breaches.
In response to this dearth of meaningful reporting, the Chairman of the Senate Commerce, Scientce and Transportation Committee, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, is seeking to add provisions to cybersecutiy laws that would strengthen and clarify breach-reporting obligations. Among the results of these changes would be a requirement that the SEC clarify when companies must disclose cyber breached and requiring companies to spell out the steps they are taking to protect their computer systems from intrusions.
In the wake of such spectacular hacks as the breach of LinkedIn’s site and the repeated intrusions into Wyndam Hotel’s systems (for which the FTC is actively pursuing punitive enforcement against the company), it has become increasingly clear that cyber-crime is a real risk to businesses. In response to the damage that such intrusions does to both investors and end-customers, the government is clearly placing increased pressure on companies to step up and combat this economic threat through implementation of better preventative measures and by disclosing the existence of breaches after the fact, to ensure that system issues within companies’ security are not simply swept under the proverbial rug. Increasingly businesses must make protection of critical infrastructure and its data storage, handling, and destruction key elements in their business planning and implementation, rather than the afterthought if often seems to be.
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