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Clay Shirky writes on Foreign Affairs this week Arguing for the right of people to use the Internet freely is an appropriate policy for the United States, both because it aligns with the strategic goal of strengthening civil society worldwide and because it resonates with American beliefs about freedom of expression By switching from an …

Is marketing age segmentation dead? My sister-in-law Ella and husband Moshe came over last night for coffee. Moshe and I sat outside on our porch, so he could smoke his cigars and we rambled over a bunch of topics, private networking,  online banking and the Israeli stock market.  Moshe grumbled about his stock broker not …

I have commented in the past on the generally low security level of Microsoft ASP.Net web applications which stems from the closed Microsoft monoculture and a product strategy that prioritizes ease of use over security and privacy by hiding features and functionality from the user. In the course of a security audit/penetration test of a …

There are some good reasons why cloud computing is growing so rapidly. First of all there are  the technology enablers: Bandwidth and computing power is cheap. Software development is more accessible than ever. Small software teams can develop great products and distribute it world wide instantly. But cloud computing goes beyond supply-side economics and directly …

I have over 2,300 contacts on my iPhone and like any reasonable person, I wanted to backup  my contacts. I figure my iPhone wont last forever. Like a fool, I thought it might be a good idea to test the restore process also. The Ubunutu One service based on Funambol doesn’t really work so that …

I think we’re rapidly approaching a  point in time where people will pay for privacy.  I know that after a super-hot month of August with the house full of kids chain-watching Ratatouille, I would pay someone for some privacy. The privacy controls that governments are attempting to impose on social media and the technical safeguards that …

I saw a post recently on Controlled social networking for student collaboration. One of the comments lamented not having the head count to install technology to control Facebook access by students. Frankly – as a data security and compliance consultant who does a lot of work with corporates in social networking (both on the application side …

One of the biggest challenges in global multi-center clinical trials (after enrollment of patients) is collaboration between multi-center clinical trial teams: CRAs, investigators, regulatory, marketing, manufacturing, market research, data managers, statisticians and site administrators. In a complex global environment, pharma do not have control of computer platforms that local sites use – yet there is …

After a discussion with a client today about privacy and data security in social networking, I started looking at physician portals and came across a fascinating post from Dr. Scott Shreve – Knowledge Prostitution enabling Aggregated Voyeurism: Is this a Business Model? Voyeurism (voi-yûr’ ĭz‘əm) n. 1. The practice in which an individual derives pleasure from …

My research article on “Social software – Reconstructing the market boundaries of pharmaceutical sales” was published on the rapidly growing UK healthcare site PharmaPhorum yesterday -  one of my first forays outside the data security space in a long time but a direction with a potential to make a big change in the way pharmas …