Two pieces of legislation before the United States Congress are intended, according to its supporters, to prevent Internet piracy and protect freedom and American jobs. The Protect IP Act (PIPA) and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) are legislative responses to these threats. Unfortunately, rather than protecting intellectual property and jobs, they would in fact impose bad regulations on American businesses and censor the Internet as we know it.
The stated goal of these bills is to stop copyright infringement by foreign web sites. According to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and other groups representing the music and film industries, piracy is rampant and is negatively affecting their businesses. They claim the only way to protect American jobs and businesses is with these measures.
Read the rest of this entry »
Here is a great video explaining why SOPA and PIPA may harm the open and free Internet and why it will ultimate hurt business. It also won’t stop those people actually stealing intellectual property and your valuable content.
Last March I wrote about locking your computer so people don’t steal your data. In the post there’s a great video about one way to do that. It’s a bit severe, but funny.
A lot of us don’t take the time to lock our computers, because we forget or maybe we don’t think anyone will try to steal anything. That’s a false hope, because there are too many people who will steal a laptop, phone or tablet computer, whether they want the data or not.
If you aren’t good about locking your computer, you should lock your files. There are simple ways, like putting a password on a Microsoft Word document or a PDF. Password protecting a file will stop the casual person from getting your data, but it won’t stop anyone with a little sophistication or a criminal. There are too many file cracking tools on the internet to break into password protected files. Most of them are billed as password recovery tools, since this is a legitimate action for people to take.
Read the rest of this entry »
Leaking information is nothing new and in many cases some organizations do it as part of a strategy. How many times have you heard the line “According to a high-level source …” Sometimes organizations want to leak information to see the reaction before making a real decision.
Unfortunately when information leaks cause major problems, you need to clamp down on them before things get out of hand. The leak could be benign, but it could be catastrophic.
In recent weeks and months, AT&T, Best Buy, Sprint and HP have suffered in varying degrees over leaked memos.
AT&T is currently trying to purchase T-Mobile for $39 billion. AT&T said that this acquisition would create jobs and provide much needed infrastructure improvements so that customers would get better service. They claim that T-Mobile needs to increase coverage of its LTE network and that would improve cellular services. They claim the deal is a win-win for everyone.
Read the rest of this entry »
This past week an incident occurred at HP that was both embarrassing and very costly. Just prior to announcing its quarterly earnings on May 17, 2011, three memos were leaked from CEO Leo Apotheker that painted a very bleak picture for the company. The memos warned of upcoming cost-cutting measures for the company that pointed to a rough few quarters ahead. Apotheker told executives to “watch every penny and minimize all hiring” and said the firm’s current workforce plans were “unaffordable given the pressures on our business.”
The memos were leaked to news organizations that promptly reported the stories. As a result of the information, HP’s stock price dropped 5%. Given their market cap of around $80 billion, that’s a $4 billion oops. Apotheker told CNBC that he would find out how the memos made their way to the media. “It is very unfortunate that these things happen and we will try to get to the bottom of this,” Apotheker said. “But I have full confidence in the team that I am working with and we’ll continue to execute.”
Read the rest of this entry »
