These are my links for May 7th through May 8th:
- Prosper CEO says P2P lending could reboot economy – Further proof that Barnum was right.
- Finovate: Privacy is dead, long live the PIN – New entrants in the strong authentication / transaction authentication space. Nothing here that makes me think, "Oooh, I gotta get me one o' dem!". You?
- Panda introduces cloud-based free antivirus – More on Panda Cloud Antivirus
- Log toggling speeds up Cloud Antivirus – I'm giving Panda Cloud Antivirus a try on a couple of my machines starting today. AVG was good for a while, but has been increasingly buggy about getting updates downloaded automatically. I used Panda a long time ago before deciding to not pay for AV anymore. It did a good job then, hopefully this new approach will also work well.
- Inventor: SSL not to blame for security woes – Contains a good explanation of how SSL isn't broken, but the browsers that use it are… oh, and the end-users, they're broken too.
- Yet Another *New York Times* Cyberwar Article – Glad to see others already responded to Schneier's ludicrously blanket statement about nuclear war not being a suitable response to a cyberattack. I suspect he wouldn't ever advocate a nuclear launch under any circumstances. Regardless, nuclear weapons are and should remain a sword we wield not just a a threat, but as a promise toward our enemies.
- Goodbye Angelsoft, Hello world – Note to self… you are right on the Reputation angle and there is a business model there. You just… oh wait, better to put this in business plan doc.
- Myst now in the App Store, 730Mb Download (Cleve Nettles/9 to 5 Mac) – Holy cats! I remember when this game drove purchases of new PCs and upgraded video cards just to play this. Now you can play it on a portable.
- Why text messages are limited to 160 characters (Mark Milian/L.A. Times Tech Blog) – I haven't fact-checked this, but it sounds just strange enough to be true. If true, an interesting legacy story of the internet.
- Researchers hijack botnet, score 56,000 passwords in an hour (Jacqui Cheng/Ars Technica) – Interesting data point. The problem remains that too much of PC and internet security is forced into users hands when their main interest in using it is for simplicity and productivity vs. spending a bunch of time setting up and tracking unique and strong passwords everywhere. Interesting note in the article about how many of the passwords were gleaned from "password managers" indicating that even someone who did go the trouble of setting up unique passwords were still vulnerable. Would be interesting to note if these were browser based password savers or more commercial products like Roboform, Passpack, etc.
- Rest in Peace, RSS (Steve Gillmor/TechCrunchIT) – I wonder if some of the comments on this are accurate in that Gilmor is just trolling for flame. Twitter to track news items? Unless you are using some other tools on top of Twitter, reducing it to a protocol mechanic, I can't see this. I'm using Google Reader right now to read and post to my own blog and having my blog then post those blog posts to Twitter for those that follow me. The last hop to Twitter is purely a geek experiment, I can't imagine anyone but a few friends being able to follow the crush of news that would ensue in my Twitter data stream if I ran all my RSS news feeds into it.
- Sorry Apple, Biz Stone says Twitter's not for sale (Sharon Gaudin/Computerworld) – Hmmm… twitter is a bubble that will burst shortly unless heads off in a new content direction. Should sell now while hot.
- Kindle Books Now A Shocking 35% Of Sales When Kindle Version Available (Henry Blodget/Silicon Alley Insider) – Wow! They drop the price and when the economy turns around, I'll be seriously considering one of these. I've just begun to see these regularly in my traversal of airports.
