Month: August 2011

US Navy embracing social networks

While reading this article, I was really amazed by how much US Navy embraced social networks.

Over 90 documents relating to Navy social media use were made available online that give a window onto recommended military security practices for popular services and how naval culture squares with the anarchic world of Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. More importantly, it also reveals how the Navy keeps tabs on sailors via social media.
In one case, the Navy shared a poster of sexual assault prevention tips on their official Facebook page at the request of the Defense Department’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response office. The poster was a repurposed graphic that the Navy copied from Slutwalk Austin’s Facebook page.
The idea was to intentionally spur a debate among Navy personnel on sexual assault and to bring discussion of the topic into a semi-public forum. According to the Navy’s own report, “many thought [the poster] was funny, ‘dumb,’ or a joke, others were outraged, a few recognized the tone and intent” and Navy social media personnel managed the resulting comments thread. They moderated the discussion, noted how sailors treat discussion of sexual assault online and attempted to keep a respectful tone. In one case, the thread even uncovered what appeared to have been the sexual assault of a former sailor.

I wish more companies and organizations did the same.

Civil servants salaries in Cyprus

Cyprus Mail reports:

Around 65 per cent of civil servants (some 35,000) are paid wages that are substantially higher than the national average.

And if that wasn’t enough,

The discrepancy between the wages of civil servants and the general population may be substantial, yet even this is slightly misleading. Civil servants’ salaries weigh heavily in calculating the average national salary. It follows that the figure for the average national salary, as given by the Statistical Service, is “bumped up” by the high wages received by civil servants, thereby concealing the true extent of the difference between public and private sectors.

The numbers breakdown follows:

Civil servants wages (May 2011)
Salary Number of recipients
€0 – €1500 10,871
€1501 – €2500 16,465
€2501 – €3500 14,449
€3501 – €4500 6,866
€4501 and above 5,360

Read the rest of the article for more details.

Day in brief – 2011-08-24

On how Google+ will succeed

The Next Web blog runs a piece by Tom Anderson in which he explains why Google+ is not at all a failure many journalists paint it to be.  It’s quite interesting really, I do agree with a lot of it.

While perhaps all social networks need to capture subgroups of people to chew away at the core of more dominant players, Google’s massive scale — both the attention the brand receives — and the domains it owns: google.com, youtube.com, blogger.com, and gmail.com — have given Google a weapon no one else has: the power of attrition, via that little black bar and red notification. The constant reminder this black bar/red notification provides, means that Google+ doesn’t need to have high engagement numbers from all its users in the beginning. Day by day, one key person after another will find that they enjoy the G+ platform more than its competitors. They’ll start posting and then the ball starts rolling.

How broken is broken?

The Register runs an article with the title “AES crypto broken by ‘groundbreaking’ attack“. Inside the said article they have the following quote:

This technique is a divide-and-conquer attack. To find an unknown key, they partition all the possible keys into a set of groups. This is possible because AES subkeys only have small differences between rounds. They can then perform a smaller search for the full key because they can reuse partial bits of the key in later phases of the computation.

It’s impressive work but there’s no better cipher to use than AES for now.

So, it’s broken, but not really broken? Is that confusing or what? If not, you are probably versed in the field of cryptography. For the rest of us, there is a very useful update at the bottom of the article, which clears up some confusion:

Vulture Central has been deluged with missives from outraged readers complaining about the use of the word “broken” in the headline. “Broken” in cryptography is the result of any attack that is faster than brute force. The biclique technique described here allows attackers to recover keys up to five times faster than brute-force. AES may not be completely broken, but it’s broken nonetheless.

Today I’ve learned something new.