Triggered by Dave Kearn’s article today, “What is Privacy, Really,” I spent a few minutes this afternoon with my good friend dictionary.com.  It is amazing what one can learn about word meanings by (virtually) flipping through the pages of a dictionary.

Privacy: the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one’s private life or affairs: the right to privacy.

This was a bit circular in its reasoning, so I looked up “private”:

Private: confined to or intended only for the persons immediately concerned; confidential: a private meeting.

These meanings match well Dave’s desire to exercise control over when he divulges personal information:

I can see no reason to cough up details of my business, number of employees, target date for purchase, types of computers, operating systems, applications, etc., simply to read a high-class marketing document

A related term is confidential – again related to the ability to keep information private:

Confidential: spoken, written, acted on, etc., in strict privacy or secrecy; secret: a confidential remark.

For example, I can assure you that there are details of my personal life that nobody but my wife knows.  We intend to keep it that way, even if powers like Facebook and Google would have it otherwise.

Has the focus of malware attacks shifted from Windows to Android?  Not completely, I’m sure.  But as the Wall Street Journal reported this morning,

A major software attack on mobile phones has put pressure on Google Inc. to do more to secure its online store for smartphone applications.

The company behind the now ubiquitous Android operating system came under fire after computer-security experts last week uncovered more than 50 malicious applications that were uploaded to and distributed from Google’s Android Market. …

Google has said 58 malicious apps were uploaded to Android Market and then downloaded to around 260,000 devices before Google removed the affected apps last Tuesday evening. It isn’t clear how many users activated the applications, a Google spokesman said.

Google doesn’t employee people to evaluate and approve applications before they are posted to the Android store, but rather depends on consumers to report bad behavior.  Unfortunately, that practices can allow attacks like this latest wave to compromise the integrity of downloaded apps.

The apps involved in the latest incident were corrupted versions of legitimate products from three different developers. The apps, which included Super Guitar Solo, Advanced Barcode Scanner, Bubble Shoot and dozens of others, were adulterated with a malicious code called "DroidDream" that could compromise sensitive personal data, including the IMSI number of the user’s phone, a unique identifier that carriers try to protect.

I’ll bet Google will quickly change its practices in this area.  There’s nothing like a bunch of infected apps to play havoc with brand loyalty.

Have you ever clicked on “Reply All” and then realize you have sent your reply to all 500 people (or 5,000) on an email distribution list?  Arrrrrgggggh! 

The Wall Street Journal published an interesting story today about this all-to-frequent mishap in the email world.  I hadn’t realized how extensive the “email storms” can be as people reply again and again to such events.

Some email storms have lasted so long—overloading servers with hundreds of thousands of emails—that at least one company, TV-ratings provider Nielsen Co., has disconnected the "Reply to All" button from its system.

In 1997, Microsoft weathered a storm involving an estimated 15 million emails. A 2007 email storm at the U.S Department of Homeland Security clogged the system with millions of emails.

Here is an interesting diagram illustrating how one “reply to all” can cascade into a large storm:

So, next time you are temped to click on “Reply All”, please think twice, or thrice.

The Washington Examiner reported yesterday that:

The U.S. Naval Academy is changing its core curriculum for the first time in about 10 years by adding two cybersecurity courses …

The two new requirements come as the school is ramping up training in a field of growing importance to national security. …

"All along, our role has been to develop one or two courses that would give every academy graduate a solid foundation in cybersecurity," said Andrew Phillips, the school’s academic dean. "We spent over a year now collecting advice and feedback from the Navy and the Marine Corps and shopping our ideas around with anyone who might have an opinion and some expertise in this area."

It was interesting to read that the Navy is trailing the U.S. Military Academy and U.S. Air Force Academy, which have had cybersecurity as part of information technology requirements for more than a decade.

Maybe Leroy Jethro Gibbs and the crew over at NCSI convinced the Navy they should step into the modern era!

What happens when you want to scan everything in the world and streets are too narrow for cars? Invent a scanning tricycle!  That’s what Google did.

A recent PCWorld article describes the Google Trike:

In 2009, Google introduced the Google Trike, a 250-pound, 9-foot-long, 7-foot-high bicycle equipped with the same terrain-charting cameras that deck out its Street View cars. The idea behind the Google Trike is to scope out locations where cars can’t go, such as parks, trails, university campuses, pedestrian malls, zoos, and other landmarks.

Now Google has released loads of new images taken from the Trike, such as the Château de Chenonceaux in Civray-de-Touraine, France and the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin. The pictures are accessible through Google Street View.

This short video shows how it works. Just think what a great workout you would get if this was your job.