Archive for March, 2008
Letter to a Young Turk
Thursday, March 27th, 2008I’ve been arguing for the last few weeks that what’s needed most for Vanuatu is to invest significant time and effort into the creation of a new crop of technically savvy individuals who can help Vanuatu bridge the growing gap between life in the information age and life as we’ve always known it in the [...]
Walk Like a Dinosaur
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008Michael Krigsman’s most recent entry in the IT Project Failures blog is an interesting, colourfully-illustrated and upside-down look at the relationship between IT and traditional business.
His question, based on numerous similar postulations, is whether IT is becoming extinct. His answer (you knew it was a rhetorical question, right?) goes like this:
Since the days of punch [...]
No Borders
Thursday, March 20th, 2008I made a mistake this week, or rather a misjudgement. I wrote about a new threat called Goolag, in which a malicious person could use Google to find servers on the Internet that are vulnerable to attack. The servers are infected with malicious code that causes anyone who visits them to be exposed to compromise. [...]
Gooooolag
Monday, March 17th, 2008UPDATE: How wrong could I be about the severity of this threat? Very wrong, apparently. I haven’t confirmed it yet, but it’s hard to imagine how this week’s mass server hack could have happened without tools like the one described below. I’ll write more about this in this week’s column….
Heh, cute:
Cult of the Dead [...]
Splash and Ripple
Thursday, March 13th, 2008Drop a stone in the middle of the pool. Watch its ripples spread wider and wider across the surface. Inevitably – sometimes sooner than later – the ripples mingle and apparently disappear among the others. Cause and effect: A simple action creates immeasurable, unpredictable and unforeseeable results.
Among development professionals, this provokes roughly equal amounts of [...]
Let the Left Hand Know
Thursday, March 6th, 2008We got some good news the other day. A Kenyan friend’s younger brother passed his university qualification exams with high marks, enough to allow him some freedom of choice of his future education. We were all happy for him, of course, but one detail of the story struck me as particularly interesting….