Privacy Working Group

A group of computer scientists at the University of Washington has developed a way to make electronic messages “self destruct” after a certain period of time, like messages in sand lost to the surf. The researchers said they think the new software, called Vanish, which requires encrypting messages, will be needed more and more as personal and business information is stored not on personal computers, but on centralized machines, or servers. In the term of the moment this is called cloud computing, and the cloud consists of the data — including e-mail and Web-based documents and calendars — stored on numerous servers.

The idea of developing technology to make digital data disappear after a specified period of time is not new. A number of services that perform this function exist on the World Wide Web, and some electronic devices like FLASH memory chips have added this capability for protecting stored data by automatically erasing it after a specified period of time.

But the researchers said they had struck upon a unique approach that relies on “shattering” an encryption key that is held by neither party in an e-mail exchange but is widely scattered across a peer-to-peer file sharing system.

Public key cryptography makes it possible for two parties who have never physically met to share a digital secret and as a result engage in a secure electronic conversation sheltered from potential eavesdroppers. The technology is at the heart of most modern electronic commerce systems.

Read More

Business Intelligence provider MicroStrategy said today that it will make its business reports and dashboards accessible through Amazon’s Kindle DX reader, bringing one of the first business tools to a device that’s been mostly defined by its ability to display electronic books.

The company already has an iPhone/iPod Touch app to allow mobile access to reports and the dashboard.

For iPhone users, the app is just one of thousands that users can tap into to customize how their phones double as work or personal computers. But for the Kindle DX, the MicroStrategy advances the idea that the $489 device could have some legitimate business uses.

It’s too early to say how much of an impact this will have on Kindle sales in the business world. I tend to be a bit of a pessimist about the Kindle as a business document reader, largely because I don’t think it offers enough of a return on the investment, compared to the alternatives.

Read More

Supercomputers are more like aging academics than bloggers: Give them a well-defined problem, like modeling a protein or measuring the radioactive decay of a nuclear warhead, and they’ll give you a well-defined answer. But ask them to chew through dynamic information from the real world as fast as its produced, and the answers can’t keep up with the questions.

For the last five years, IBM has been working to change that now-stodgy mode of problem solving. Thursday, it plans to announce the results of an experiment with Toronto-based TD Bank that it claims has produced the fastest financial calculations ever. IBM used a Blue Gene supercomputer to chew through 5 million options valuations a second, a benchmark the company says is 20 times faster than the previous fastest rate.

Read More