Every Friday here on In The Personal Cloud we’ll be presenting a roundup of links highlighting popular and rising news stories from the world of the cloud and online security. Everything from news regarding hacking and how to be secure to advancements in the field of cloud computing. Stay tuned to In The Personal Cloud each Friday to remain up to date on everything you need to know.
Make strong passwords the easy way – According to a recent study conducted by Carnegie Mellon, the most secure password you can come up with is actually just the longest one. Sure, special characters, varying capitalization, and the use of numbers are a plus, but in reality, the time it would take a standard computer or one with an aggressive hacking program to crack your password boils down very simply to how many characters you use. [USAToday]
Keith Alexander, NSA Chief, Asks for Hackers’ Help In Making Internet More Secure – What happens when the head of the government’s secretive National Security Agency goes before a crowd of hackers at an annual convention in Las Vegas? “Polite applause”. General Keith Alexander – the aforementioned head of the NSA – gave a speech at the convention that asked for U.S. officials and hackers to find a common ground, and to collaborate on the building of tools to help secure the Internet as we know it. [HuffingtonPost]
Has Trust Really Moved to the Cloud? – Now that the word “acquaintance” has been replaced by Twitter followers, Facebook friends, and LinkedIn connections, have we also redefined the word trust? Here’s a very intriguing article that talks about the evolution of “trust” and how we measure it in today’s digital world. [ComputerWorld]
Dropbox data breach proves the “One Site, One Password” rule – In case you missed it, DropBox recently found itself the next on a long list of companies whose customer database was (indirectly) compromised. One of the most interesting things about it was that DropBox itself wasn’t hacked. It was a completely unrelated site where the same user email addresses and passwords that were used on DropBox were compromised. This once again proves readers that that having only one password for multiple sites can be a dangerous proposition. [NakedSecurity]
Olympics 2012: From birds to broadband – Turns out “tweeting” might not be as original as we thought…sort of. A recent investigation spearheaded by a network solutions company discovered that before social media, television, and the radio, there were pigeons. Yes, pigeons. If you wanted to know the outcome of an Olympic event dating as far back as the 775 B.C. games, you most likely founded out via homing pigeon. [TheWashingtonPost]
Cloud computing: 10 ways it will change by 2012 – It’s probably safe to say that cloud computing as a storage solution is here to stay, but what about as a software, cost, or generational solution (there are in fact young people alive today who have never experienced life without the cloud)? Here are 10 ways the cloud could change the way we view technology by the year 2020. [ZDNet]
