Business Intelligence

70 million cell phones are lost per year, many with critically sensitive corporate data on them. How honest are the people who find them? Symantec "lost" 50 phones with fake private data on them. Almost everyone snooped a little, half snooped a lot and a lot tried to use apps and information to get a look at the smartphone "owner's" social network and financial records.

Researchers from MIT have found a way to persuade electrons to put out twice as much light as the electricity used by the LED they live in. They do it using good vibrations from the cooling matter around them.

A day after the revelation that a leader of Anonymous' most-aggressive, most obnoxious spinoff had been working with the FBI to build cases against trusted companions, anger among the faceless horde was great enough to make a second attack on the Vatican succeed.

The Dept. of Justice has completely given up the idea of jurisdiction in prosecuting web sites and services. Any site visible to or usable by Americans is apparently a target for prosecutors even if the site has no U.S. presence and is perfectly legal in its own country.

Despite years of holdups in tests to make UAVs useful for local police agencies, including programs cancelled for maintenance issues and costs, the White House ordered the FAA to be more aggressive in approving UAVs for police and civilian uses

Google has promised again to delete apps from Android Market that are able to steal all a user's photos or contacts without notice. The problem isn't the apps, though; it's the holes in Android security so big apps can't help but fall through. Time to stop blaming insecure apps, take responsibility for Android security and fix the holes. If Microsoft could do it, Google can.

There's nothing wrong with hope for the future, even unrealistic hope focused too hard on one unlikely version of the future. Trying to paint that one interpretation as the only possible way forward, OTOH, makes 'The Future' seem more like a scam than a celebration.

HR 1981, the SOPA alternative proposed by SOPA/PIPA author Lamar Smith, tries to give more power and less culpability to copyright owners already abusing enforcement system so badly that 67 percent of takedown orders come from competitors, not from simple mistakes.

There are plenty of economic indicators predicting (inaccurately) how well the economy is doing. The Tooth Fairy Poll doesn't predict changes in hiring, but it does indicate how much economic pain would cause a parent to short-change a toothless six-year-old.

Philosophers have wrestled for centuries with the difference between being and nothingness, pretty badly for the most part. Now physicists are mucking up even those inaccurate results by demonstrating there may only be one form of being, but there are all kinds of nothingness.

It's no secret IT is ambivalent about cloud computing's potential to steal jobs and user loyalty. That's no excuse for sloppy security negligence of apps in the cloud. That attitude doesn't come from hostility; it comes from overwork and the desperate wish that something new could happen without incremental additions to every headache IT ever had and never cured.

There is some justification to carriers' excuses about the data hoggery of smartphones: smartphones are data hogs, at least compared to dumb phones. AT&T goes further, bragging it signed up record numbers of users, then complaining they actually use the network.