Alice Hill
C.S. Magor
Cat Miller
David Brumbaugh
David Chie
Dawn Kawamoto
Don Willmott
Elisabeth Greenbaum Kasson
Gayle Laakmann McDowell
Lekan Oguntoyinbo
Leslie Stevens-Huffman
M Noivad
Mark Feffer
nick kolakowski
Stephen Lahanas
Susan Hall
Vincent Chow
Programming Languages That Aren’t Worth Your Time
As we all know, it seems like new programming languages are created every week. But which ones aren’t worth wasting your time on? I looked at actual listings on Dice to try to spot some trends. In late April, I searched both the entire set of job listings as well as specific job titles to see what skills companies were actually looking for. Here’s what I found. First, it’s safe to say that the Web is the primary focus of… continue…
Ways AP Could Have Avoided Its Twitter Hack
A single tweet with a phony bit of news sent the stock market into a brief dive Tuesday, pushing the Dow Jones Industrial Average down more than 140 points in the three minutes from 1:07 to 1:10 p.m. ET. When the “news” — that two bombs had exploded in the White House, injuring the president — was debunked, the market regained its footing. Of course, phony information blasts out through Twitter all the time. The difference here is that… continue…
The Security Implications of Fake Twitter Followers
A recent New York Times story about the fake Twitter follower community got me thinking. The newspaper claims that this is a $1 million industry, with followers being purchased in bulk for about a penny a head. Why does Twitter tolerate this? Certainly, the company could easily fix this problem with some clever software engineering. Instead, they’re turning a blind eye. But on further reflection, it’s not something that’s easy to fix. I have a Twitter account that I set… continue…
What Are Your 5 Biggest Online Privacy Worries?
Let’s talk about this. An article posted on ITWorld earlier this month got me thinking about how small businesses have to deal with online privacy issues. According to ITWorld, their top five concerns include: The proliferation of cookies. Theft of cloud-based data through weak password controls. Being betrayed by the stored location data on cell phones and other mobile devices. Photo tags on social networks. Federal and police agencies scanning online services. Notice: None of these items include the words… continue…
Is Bitcoin the New Napster of Digital Money?
This isn’t a rhetorical question. Last month, the total value of all Bitcoins passed $1 billion. That isn’t a typo. Bitcoin has been trading up compared to traditional currencies, north of $100 lately, and poised to go higher. That’s 10 times what it was trading just a few months ago. If you’re looking for a good overview of Bitcoin, try this piece in GigaOm by David Mayer. He covers the underlying peer-to-peer technology, and why it isn’t all that important… continue…
What Employers Look for in Product Managers
A blog post last month by veteran product manager Rich Mironov examined what hiring managers actually look for in product managers. The anecdotal results aren’t pretty. Mironov’s research concludes that hiring managers think about the openings very narrowly, which means most are looking for candidates in the wrong places. They’re putting too much emphasis on technical market knowledge and not enough on what makes for a great product manager. Mironov and his researcher examined 41 job postings at American tech… continue…
Elderwood’s Watering Hole Attacks are ‘Astonishing’
The extent to which a group of hackers dubbed “the Elderwood Project” has left digital traces is astonishing, according to Symantec researchers. In a blog post, they’ve documented efforts by the group, named for a source code variable they use to quickly deploy zero-day exploits through spear phishing e-mails and, increasingly, through Web injections in watering-hole attacks. What is this exploit? Think about a thirsty zebra on the Serengeti. Predators wait at the oasis, knowing that eventually the zebras will show… continue…
What Recruiters Look For in a 6-Second Resume Scan
Six seconds. That’s how much time recruiters usually take to look at your resume. Your stellar academic record and long list of professional accomplishments, all in six seconds. In a 2012 study, researchers recorded their subjects’ eyeball movements, what they zeroed in on, and for how long. The study examined specific behaviors of recruiters as they screened resumes and interviewed candidates over a 10-week period, looking for what caught their attention and what was overlooked. Recruiters looked at both paper… continue…
Is Anti-Virus Passe?
When security firm Imperva checked more than 80 unreported viruses against several anti-virus solutions, it found that none of the tested programs were able to detect previously unreported viruses and that 75 percent of solutions took a month or more to update their signatures. That isn’t good news, and while Imperva obviously has some self-interest here, their November Hacker Intelligence report, Assessing the Effectiveness of Anti-Virus Solutions, is worthy of a closer read nonetheless. What it means is that we have to depend on a… continue…
For Riot Games, Big Data is Serious Business
For Riot Games, Big Data Is Serious Business (via slashdot) When we think of firms that leverage Big Data analytics, we tend to think of large retailers, stuffy insurance companies, and maybe the occasional dot-com business such as Netflix or eBay. Chances are, few of these places explicitly encourage their Hadoop developers to actually play video games during… continue…
