Nefarious tricksters have started to use self-adhesive QR codes to scam unsuspecting smart phone users according to a news reporting comments from a not-necessarily independent Symantec spokesperson. In theory, though, this is social engineering genius. Whack a QR code onto a bit of sticky paper, in turn whack that onto a popular advert (The Hobbit, say...) … Continue reading People readable
Category: Themes
It's that season when we start to get all retrospective, and so I thought I'd take a look back on the year that was 2012 over the next few weeks by looking at what the top viewed articles on this blog were over the course of the 12 months. So here we go with a … Continue reading Top 20 posts of 2012 – 20 to 16
My dad is currently in the process of preparing a module for a course he's running at UCL next year, and asked me a specific question this morning: When looking at the benefits and disadvantages of moving from in-house to cloud computing, security issues aren't prominent yet surveys show that security is the biggest single … Continue reading Risk perception and Cloud security
Kleiner Perkins' Mary Meeker has just published another presentation, with reflections on the state of the Internet and technology world in 2012 and beyond. As usual, lots of data points, and some thoughts on how many industries have been "re-imagined" (a phrase I'm now stopping using as I've realised it means little more than "changed"). … Continue reading Value of advertising
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking with a substantial number of the people who work for the WPP agency The Partners. The gist of the talk was about the power of analogy in designing systems, and how fun analogies could in turn deliver experiences that would solve otherwise thorny issues through … Continue reading Small victories
The recent announcements by Barclays Bank about their bulk purchase of iPads has got me thinking about the way in which it seems the consumerisation of technology is having an interesting effect - we are becoming more besotted with the software and devices than ever before. The "news" was the purchase of the devices, yet … Continue reading Business change in a consumerised world
About 13 years ago, I found myself trying to get people to understand why it would be beneficial to use a services-oriented architecture in the work we were doing to build business systems at BBC Worldwide. It was a tricky task, because whilst it all felt right from a technical purist perspective, actually adding in … Continue reading The joy of hindsight
If you read these pages with any frequency, you'll probably be aware that I have two toddler boys. For the past few months they've had a few toy obsessions mostly revolving around emergency vehicles, firemen and postmen (well, one in particular, who's called Pat). It's got me wondering - and also a little worried - … Continue reading ActionGeek!
There are a few key things that stand out from my memories of my University academic studies, and one of them is the ideas behind a book written in 1958 by Michael Young (father, I found out this morning, of journalist Toby) called The Rise of Meritocracy. In Young's satire, he paints a picture of … Continue reading Data enslavement
Human beings, I believe, are losing a skill. It's not a particularly important skill, but it is one that we developed as result of an old technology, and one that we are losing as a result of a new technology. We are losing the ability to remember telephone numbers. Nearly 40 years on, my parents' … Continue reading Machine-unreadable
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