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Items I found interesting on September 25th

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Sep 252009

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment September 25th:

Sony Scrapping UMD Transfer Program – Sony continues to struggle with their mobile platform. A crying shame really as the PSP is a fabulous, multipurpose device that Sony, also a content company, just can't figure out how to make as powerful as it should be. With at least one decent example of how to do an online store tied into a content playing device, how do these guys continue to flounder so terribly?

Consumers Accept Device Fingerprinting, Study Finds — InformationWeek

General, Identity, Security No Responses »

Sep 232009

Consumers Accept Device Fingerprinting, Study Finds — InformationWeek.

Much as I’d like to say that consumers aren’t so much against “working for” strong authentication as they are at recognizing that KBA isn’t actually providing any security, at least the results are the same. KBA is being rejected. KBA doesn’t protect against even phishing and is just another set of hard to remember and manage passwords.

I still contend that users will definitely work for and even pay for strong authentication if they believe it is effective and if they believe what they are protecting has value to them. Why should I worry about my credit card being compromised when I know my liability is limited to $50 or some such manageable number. Heck, my credit card has been stolen a couple times via physical POS situations and it has never cost me any out of pocket money and at worst a couple minutes on the phone with my credit card company. Of course, it does cost me something as the losses to merchants and banks end up reflected back to me in increased fees, rates, etc., but all that disappears into the great “cost of doing business” economic effect.

Which then brings up the question as to why financial institutions, merchants, etc. aren’t looking to reduce their costs and increase their margins by offering strong authentication to:

Give themselves a competitive edge over their competitors on margin
Give themselves a competitive edge in customer loyalty by taking better care of their customers
Offer price breaks and other incentives for customers that use offered strong authentication mechanisms

One of the online communities I spend time in has actually begun to self-regulate itself along the lines of those that use strong authentication and those that don’t. Want to participate with a group in that community? You have to use strong authentication offered in the context of that community. You don’t have to, but if you don’t you are precluded from interactions with the “better elements” of that community.

Just something to consider.

Items I found interesting on September 16th

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Sep 172009

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment September 16th:

Jedi Knight Collection Now Available On Steam –

Items I found interesting on September 15th

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Sep 152009

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment September 15th:

Why Apple’s Tablet Will Eat Kindle’s Lunch – Agree. I'm all agog with the thought of an iPhone device that has a large screen and can replace my laptop and serve as an eReader. Put in Google Voice and I'm all over it.
Issues with Mobile Authenticator get it pulled from the App Store – Ouch. Definite issue to avoid when issuing software authentication method. Guess I'll stick with my irritating, but non-updatable "OTP dongle".

Items I found interesting on September 11th

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Sep 112009

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment September 11th:

ACORN Undercover Video Scandal Rocks Internets – Hail the Community Organizer in Chief. Welcome to the Obamanation!

Items I found interesting on September 6th

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Sep 062009

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment September 6th:

The Guild – Do You Wanna Date My Avatar – LOL. MMO geek out! Check out "the Guild" video series for some context if you aren't an MMO player.
Sony Planning 3D Televisions For Late 2010 – Funny to see this when both Sony and MS announce they aren't going to even include HDMI cables in their console packages anymore as a majority of their consoles don't even get hooked up to HD sets. Now going to try to push to the next "wave" of video tech? Seems like a misguided waste of Sony's limited funds as they continue to bleed at the bottom line.
God of War 3 Demo "Unlikely" with GoW Collection – Cool. This is a PS3 game I'll definitely be picking up as I missed all of the GOW rage having moved to the 360 and selling my PS2 prior to GOW1's release.
Google Chrome Turns One: Has It Been a Success? – Viable browsing alternative? I pretty much live in Chrome now only doing work related items such as OWA in IE and nothing in FireFox.
RSS Is Dead, So Is The RSS Fund (Dan Primack/PE Hub Blog) – Read this article via RSS feed. Screw Twitter.
Google Wave Arrives This Month: Are You Ready? – I'm hoping that this will serve as a more "open" social-networking platform with some actual power improvements / innovations seriously missing in current platforms. I participate in various communities and would like a place to bring them together and make them usable for me. We'll see. I hope to get an invite, but given I'm a "nobody" in the social network, blogosphere world, probably won't get in immediately. If you get in and can send invites, think of poor ol' me, eh?
PS3' Platform-level Support For Online Functionality Was 'Late,' Sony Says. – Just using this article to advise that I finally bit the bullet and picked up a PS3 Slim. The $299 price point is the right price point and I've been enjoying some beautiful BluRay goodness, particularly Watchmen Director's Cut. Picked up a used copy of Resistance and it is a decent game, though I find the mismatched use of the trigger buttons on the PS3 controller a serious pain after years of Xbox 360 controller usage. Controller also feels flimsy, but not going to harp on it much as it certainly could just be "different", not "worse". Doesn't really matter as my Xbox will still be the gaming platform of choice except for platform exclusives of which there aren't many for the PS3.
No Fun League Has Chad Ochocinco Poised to Delete Twitter Account – No idea what this article is about, but just realized that if you want to ensure I don't read your article, put "Twitter" or "Tweet" in the title. I'm Soooo over caring about this over-hyped, under-interesting site / topic.
I don't feel safe with WordPress, hackers broke in and took things (Robert Scoble/Scobleizer) – I updated upon reading. Not a problem as I think I may have all of 5 readers, so not worth anyone's time to hack me

Items I found interesting on September 4th

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Sep 042009

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment September 4th:

Play safe because a trojan can get you banned – ah, the magic you can accomplish when you provide a service of value enough that users will give you a thick client footprint on their computers.

Items I found interesting on August 27th

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Aug 272009

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment August 27th:

Sony’s New eBook Software Takes Aim at Kindle – Answer to last question: Yes.

Items I found interesting on August 18th

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Aug 182009

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment August 18th:

PlayStation 3 Slim is Real, Coming in September for $299 – Need to check the specs on the Slim vs. what's on store shelves now. If can get more storage on the existing, then I'll get that as the actual size and weight of the device matters to me not at all.

Items I found interesting on August 17th

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Aug 172009

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment August 17th:

Layar Augmented Reality Now World Wide on Android, iPhone is Next – Hmmm, I'll have to give this type of thing more thought. At first my reaction is the reverse-engineering function of this type of application in that it builds a great database of where you are and what you're interested in. Not that such data isn't available to be aggregated into a scary situation by Google and others today, but this raises the bar even one more level. However, like most technology today, there's a trade-off of what you give up for what you get. The mention of using augmented reality in conjunction with Wikipedia, made me think of the uses I could have put such technology to use while wandering the streets of Venice or Rome. Not using Wikipedia of course as I take everything on that site with a grain of salt, but this seems like a natural progression for the tourist book folks and even some history publishers to build something very interesting.
I'd used something like that for limited functionality, but increasingly, I'm turning off all but the most basic phone functions of my Blackberry to retain as much privacy as I can in an increasinly overly-connected-n-tracked world.