Monthly Archives: May 2015

“Rise of The Hackers”: PBS’s “Nova” Reveals Digital Security Wars Among Teens, Criminals & Nations

Photo Source & Complete Documentary: PBS – “Rise Of The Hackers”

“Rise of the Hackers” appeared in November 2014, but the digital security challenges explored in this exceptional documentary merit full mention here. Click Rise for the full piece, and rewind to explore concepts such as “ultra-paranoid” computing; the Stuxnet worm that hacked Iranian nuclear plants, and was launched by the United States and Israel in 2010, according to the piece; quantum machines cracking code in temperatures colder than deep space; and subconscious passwords, through muscle memory, specific to each user. Remember prime and subprime numbers? They are so yesterday, but still so today: Prime and subprime numbers, or RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) encryption, still represent the foundation of our current Internet and our exponential faith in it. According to the computer scientists in this documentary, RSA is at risk of being cracked, which could bring down the Internet as we know it if we do not enlist more powerful systems like quantum computing and smarter passwording.

Digital Wars Are The New Landscape
Except for the threats of nuclear war, which have hung darkly over humankind since the 1940s through today, the never-ending battles to secure and steal information represent the very present and future of sustained warfare — more precisely, digital information for power grids, water plants and other vital societal systems — that is begged, borrowed or most likely stolen.

The revealing and frightening “Rise of The Hackers”, PBS’s Nova documentary from 2014 and re-broadcast in May 2015, informs us that keyboards, not bombs, are what should keep us awake at night. The well-known Target and Bank of America cyber-hacks represent proverbial tips of digital glaciers. Hacking: Teens do it; terrorists and criminals do it; banks, financial lenders and borrowers do it; large nonprofits, international causes and charities do it; and nations, governments of all kinds, good ones and bad ones, do it. Many say the worldwide Anonymous “hacktivist” group is good, but others argue it is bad. Hackers are used for good purposes, for example to fight terrorism, crime and underworld activity, although one must think most hackers are criminals bent on theft, harassment or even simple DOS (Denial of Service) attacks on individuals, companies and countries.

Being Ever-Social Nourishes Us, But Can Harm Us
Our quests to be social and reach out to people and institutions next door and around the globe, combined with our perceived and (created?) demands for the conveniences of living digital lives, put us in peril. But great minds are working to heighten security through ever-strengthened encryption, subliminal passwords, ultra-paranoid computing and quantum computers, according to “Rise”.

So we all hope. Read “The Rise of the Ethical Hacktivist”, from Linux Insider Reporter Katherine Noyes, who quotes cybercrime analyst and author Pierluigi Paganini:

“Just one tweet, a picture, can blow the wind into a revolution.”

Greg Goaley, President of WinCommunications in Des Moines, Iowa, is a former copywriter and creative editor, and a 25-year digital content strategist and provider. Kathryn Towner is President of WinM@il USA, a former 15-year sales rep for Random House/McGraw-Hill, and a 20-year permission-based email publications consultant and provider.

Verizon Purchase Of AOL Shows That Mobile Marches On — And On, And On


Photo Credit: The New York Times

“…the switch from the web to our phones is happening even faster than the transition away from physical media, and in many ways it is more profound.”
–Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times, “For Verizon and AOL, Mobile Is a Magic Word”, May 14, 2015

In a twist from the past, 2015 cellphone giant Verizon is buying 1990s “World Wide Web” America Online for $4.4 billion, in an additional sign that big telecoms don’t want to be known simply as “dumb pipes” to customers.

Who knew that “You’ve Got Mail!” and a nearly 30-year-old dialup provider would still appeal? (Amazingly, AOL once purchased AOL-Time Warner for $162 billion during clownish times at the peak of the dotcom bubble in 2000, so the new $4.4 billion figure is trump change, but perhaps a more accurate figure.)

The reasons for acquiring AOL are all too clear: As Facebook and Google claims more than half of the $42 billion online ad marketplace, Verizon wants more mobile content and advertising, along with video ads tailored to users through demographics and data mining of cellphone customers.

AOL owns all brands of media, including the Huffington Post and game applications that produce mountains of personal data for advertising and message construction.

Our smartphone consumption, at its peak right now in terms of sales and usage, is more than three times higher than that our use of personal computers during its heyday.

“Mobile, mobile, mobile,” is what the market is saying. As when television merged the technology of moving images and radio sound into relatively small boxes — called TVs — all things media are in constant states of flux. Continual digital media mergers, both of companies and of technologies, surely represent our constant, collective paths.

Singularity, anyone?

Greg Goaley, President of WinCommunications in Des Moines, Iowa, is a former copywriter and creative editor, and a 25-year digital content strategist and provider. Kathryn Towner is President of WinM@il USA, a former 15-year sales rep for Random House/McGraw-Hill, and a 20-year permission-based email publications consultant and provider.

“Cord Cutting”: Web Telecom Bundles Are Killing the Cable Store

While it’s hard to tell the difference anymore with media evolving all over the place, giant telecoms — with likely all of them jumping into the Internet bundle market to compete with the digital programming successes of HBO and Netflix — are beating up dinosaur cable companies so badly that many of the latter will do practically anything any more to stop customers from jumping ship.

Cable originally came to most of us during the mid-1980s and later. Cable broke the four- or five-channel model that most Americans watched practically since the early 1950s. We welcomed cable, which instead offered us 24-7 content with a lot of good and bad channels: the sports we liked (ESPN); the news machine we really liked and really hated (Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News); the news we scoffed at and now feel sorry for (Ted Turner’s CNN); at-times revolutionary but largely inane music videos (MTV); and specialty raunchy but wry content (David Chappelle and Comedy Central).

But over time, bad cable channels have greatly outnumbered the bad. Bruce Springsteen’s 1992 dirge, “57 Channels And Nothing On”, dates me — but well illustrates the point.

Most of the country’s viewers are still comprised of people too lazy, too scared of change, too fearful that something will go wrong and waste time, or just plain too damn busy to switch away from a model that grants cable companies nearly regional monopoly status. These cable companies still earn astronomical profits as practical “cable annuities.”

Count me among the sheeple still paying into the cable annuity monster. But I — along with millions of us, blessedly — am increasingly converting to the Internet bundle world of watch-as-you-want, when-you-want, at monthly rates sometimes considerably less than 10 percent of standard cable. Tens of millions now pull up “Game of Thrones” on HBO, along with “House of Cards” and the enchanting “Peaky Blinders” BBC series on Netflix, whenever they want.

Many have labeled the shift away from cable to Internet program bundles as “cord cutting.” Some lament the dizzying array of program offerings, among them the great Tim Wu in “The Dreaded Bundle Comes to Internet TV”, from the May 3, 2015, New Yorker.

Also comes The Wall Street Journal’s Eric Pfanner, who writes “Sony Joins Crowd of Online TV Providers,” about Sony PlayStation’s Vue service, and many other Internet services taking shape.

Greg Goaley, President of WinCommunications in Des Moines, Iowa, is a former copywriter and creative editor, and a 25-year digital content strategist and provider. Kathryn Towner is President of WinM@il USA, a former 15-year sales rep for Random House/McGraw-Hill, and a 20-year permission-based email publications consultant and provider.