New and noteworthy for 3/26/09

By Ben Gross
in

Who Protects The Internet?: James Geary writes about the crews and equipment used to repair undersea fiber optic cables for Popular Science. They story is a good read. It describes what is like to maneuver the undersea robots to find the cables, bring them to the surface and repair them all under adverse weather conditions and considerable time constraints as cable operators loose substantial amounts of money during cable downtime.

Photo Stalker program lets world peek at your Facebook photos: Gillian Shaw at the Vancouver Sun describes a Facebook application called “Photo Stalker” takes advantage of the fact that photo albums in Facebook are set to be visible to everyone by default and many users never change this default. There are actually two problems Facebook should correct. First, the default settings to personal information, especially user uploaded content like pictures should be set to a more restrictive setting. Second, the default setting is labeled “everyone” which is confusing as users might easily believe it only applied to everyone who was a friend or in a network, which is a more restrictive setting.

Can Cellphones Help Fight Identity Theft?: Saul Hansell from the New York Times Bits Blog writes about the use of cellphones and SMS as two-factor for adding a layer of security to transactions on the web. In addition to the extra security, two-factor authentication there is one significant additional benefit that Hansell does not mention. Increasingly people have multiple two-factor tokens because each financial institution and many workplaces require them. A single cell phone can replace multiple two-factor tokens.

Published March 26, 2009