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Chris Anderson, the founder of TED, describes his battles with email and strategies for minimizing its impact on yourself and those to whom you send email.  

""All of these businesses can shift strategy," Colony said. "Every 10 years in tech, there's a big vendor who we think is dying who makes a big comeback. In 1980, it was Intel, moving from DRAM to microprocessors. In 1990, it was IBM [from hardware to services]. In 2000, it's Apple." In 2010, Microsoft is a candidate for reinvention, Colony said. And if history is any lesson, it will require a change of leadership."

"In our "Social Knows" series, we sniff out and compile statistics and research regarding workplace / workforce management, human resources and employee engagement. The goal is to provide you with the background knowledge necessary to support your own recommendations, findings and strategies. Submissions always welcomed."

A 'Spooks And Suits' Red Team Game Social media apps meet national security Jul 20, 2011 | 12:40 PM | 0 Comments By Kelly Jackson Higgins Dark Reading What if a former Navy SEAL petty officer were a member of Anonymous? Senior members of the U.S. intelligence agency, including Michael Chertoff, the former Secretary of Homeland Security, and a former SEAL officer, will participate in a red-team exercise in September where they'll play the role of Anonymous/LulzSec and APT attackers, as well as the defenders trying to fend off these adversaries. Sure, simulated cyberattack games are nothing new these days. But this one is part and parcel of the upcoming Spooks and Suits summit in Silicon Valley on Sept. 23 and 24, and it throws together intell officials and attendees. It's the brainchild of cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr, who wanted to bring together three-letter agencies, like the CIA, NSA, and DoD, with social media and Web 2.0 developers and start-ups to actually communicate one-on-one with each another and with general attendees. It works like this: Attendees will be randomly assigned to one of four teams of 25 to 30 people: Anarchist hackers (a la Anonymous and LulzSec), APT attackers, or one of two defending organizations. The teams then must observe all of the panel discussions -- which will cover threats against the intell community, as well as demonstrations of new and existing social media applications -- from the perspective of either adversary or defender, depending on which team they are assigned. "If one of the apps presented has to do with a game, the objective for the attendee is to say, 'How can I use that game as an adversary? Or how can I use it to uncover or defend against an adversary?'" says Carr, who is the founder and CEO of Taia Global, an executive cybersecurity firm, and author of "Inside Cyber Warfare." "During breaks, they can play with the apps with an eye to their mission." The teams will have a working lunch period for buildi

While some organizations are still considering a basic social media facelift for their intranet, perhaps incorporating some blogs for corporate communication or a wiki area for some shared content authoring, it's almost certain that this is too little and too late for many companies. Over the last three years, the world has undergone a social media revolution that has changed the behaviors of most of the developed world that have gone on to be validated as beneficial for the workplace.

Spammers don't fit the life patterns of regular users.  "[Microsoft researchers]  are using studies of legitimate and malicious social networks to spot bogus email accounts that are used to push spam, malware, and otherwise malicious links."

We have a multi-year process to re-license based on advice from multiple sources that Creative Commons is not applicable to data. We wish it were, and it probably will be in the future but it wasn't clear when we began. Until that happens we have a process to move to the Open Database License, which explicitly covers data and not just creative works like photographs or text. The ODbL was in fact started as a result of investigations around the needs of Science Commons and we just helped it to its conclusion. At some point down the line I personally expect the ODbL and CC to be compatible and we will be able to cross-pollinate once more.

"Paradoxically, 'document-orientation' is both the main reason why Wikis are rare in the corporate world and the main reason why Wikis are great for the corporate world."

Here Shirky started talking about the importance of managing collaboration effectively. Large collaborative projects aren't, in fact, large collaborative projects according to Shirky. They're small collaborative projects with tight groups, that integrate very large amounts of small participatory effort. To put it another way, projects like Wikipedia and the Linux kernel may have thousands of contributors - but it's a small core of contributors who do the bulk of the work and integrate the work from others who only contribute a small amount. It's also important, says Shirky, that people cannot join the project too easily. Even given the presumption that all the participants have goodwill towards the project, he says that it shouldn't be too easy to change every aspect of a project. Some parts of the system should be easy to change, some parts should be hard.

So many cloud pundits are piling on to the misfortunes of Amazon Web Services this week as a response to the massive failures in the AWS Virginia region. If you think this week exposed weakness in the cloud, you don't get it: it was the cloud's shining moment, exposing the strength of cloud computing. In short, if your systems failed in the Amazon cloud this week, it wasn't Amazon's fault. You either deemed an outage of this nature an acceptable risk or you failed to design for Amazon's cloud computing model.