Spotlight: Mindbreeze Information Pairing
November 2, 2011
We wanted to continue our spotlight on Mindbreeze, a unit of the highly regarded Fabasoft. You will want to bookmark the Mindbreeze blog at this link and take note of “Information Pairing. Knowledge Match Making for Your Company.”
With companies flopping like caught trout in the bottom of a fishing boat, the ability to locate the person in your organization with information germane to your work is essential.
The challenge, according to Mindbreeze, is to locate the individual with the experience, information, and insight to assist in answering a business question. Walking around no longer works because many companies have employees who are at client locations, working from a different facility, or responding to email from an airport waiting lounge.
The blog article asserts:
Fabasoft Mindbreeze has the answer: Information pairing. This involves the boundless networking of company relevant information within an enterprise or organization and placing it in the Cloud. In my opinion acting in this way in all business issues is reliable, dynamic and profitable – the basis for competitive advantage.
The method relies on the Mindbreeze core technology which delivers information with pinpoint accuracy. The write up continues:
Existing identities and access rights to company-internal and Cloud data remain preserved. The user only receives information displayed for which he/she has access rights for. This ensures that Fabasoft Mindbreeze fulfills the strictest compliance requirements. Furthermore, Mindbreeze is certified according to all relevant security standards.
The Mindbreeze technology for “information pairing” allows in a unique way to enrich documents and information in a secure and highly efficient way with enterprise and even content from the Cloud. Information gets dynamically annotated with “knowledge” extracted and harvested from cloud services (public and private ones), e.g. like Wikipedia or Fabasoft Folio Cloud. This is a very innovative and impressive way to combine information effectively and annotate existing and preprocessed entities on the fly.
So for instance: You need to know everything about a lead? Mindbreeze combines every information in your enterprise, like your CRM and connects the information with suitable content from sources like Wikipedia, LinkedIn, social media like Facebook and even on your web analytics account and comes up with a unified view of all the information that’s available for this lead.
Unlike some search and content processing vendors, Fabasoft has taken care to ensure that privacy and security work as the organization intends. Fabasoft and Mindbreeze hold SAS70 and ISO 27001 certifications for their cloud services. This is unique in the enterprise search space. According the write up, the focus has been on putting “values” about these important norms in the firm’s software and systems.
Take a look at www.mindbreeze.com.
Stephen E. Arnold, November 2, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com
Data Breach Leaves 5 Million Patients Holding the Bag
October 11, 2011
A data breach of military health care records from the past 19 years has left nearly 5 million past and current patients vulnerable to identity theft and other acts of malintent.
Tricare, the healthcare program serving current and former military service members, revealed that contractor Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) lost backup tapes containing health data and other personal information of about 4.9 million people. The tapes were stolen out of an SAIC employee’s car during a Sept.13 burglary.
Tricare released a statement saying that the risk of harm to patients has been judged low and this is why the do not intend to provide the people affected with credit monitoring services.
According to the Information Week article, Military Health Plan Data Breach Threatens 4.9 Million, Ruby Raley, director of healthcare solutions at IT integration and security company said:
Unlike HIPAA, FTC regulations don’t require entities to sign agreements with ‘business associates’ that hold third parties to the same standards when handling sensitive data. Also, HIPAA regulations require organizations to provide a year of credit monitoring to anyone who may have been affected by a breach. They’re only [offering] fraud protection for 90 days.
While no financial records were stolen, this incident leads us to wonder whether government enitites should be forced to follow HIPAA regulations, instead of less strict FTC regulations. This may prevent similar problems from occuring down the road.
Jasmine Ashton, Oct 11, 2011
Paving Stones of Good Intentions
October 9, 2011
Even Orwell didn’t foresee this, not specifically. From Kindergarten through college, students are now subjected to more forms of monitoring than I could have conceived of when I was a little rabble rouser. From cameras to RFID badges, it’s an entirely different world.
Now Michael Morris, is a lieutenant with the University Police at California State University-Channel Islands, is calling on universities to take surveillance to a whole new level. NetworkWorld reports on this in “Privacy Nightmare: Data Mine & Analyze all College Students’ Online Activities.” That’s right, the good lieutenant recommends recording every little thing college students do online and analyzing the data to predict and prevent “large-scale acts of violence on campus.” What’s more, it would be easy enough to do with today’s data management tools. Wrote Morris,
Many campuses across the country . . . provide each student with an e-mail address, personal access to the university’s network, free use of campus computers, and wired and wireless Internet access for their Web-connected devices. Students use these campus resources for conducting research, communicating with others, and for other personal activities on the Internet, including social networking. University officials could potentially mine data from their students and analyze them, since the data are already under their control. The analysis could then be screened to predict behavior to identify when a student’s online activities tend to indicate a threat to the campus.
Take a moment to reflect on the side effects of such a large-scale invasion of privacy. What other behavior, unrelated to potential violence, will be “predicted?” And how will those predictions be acted upon? The possibilities are endless.
Look, I get it. I once attended Virginia Tech, after all, and now I have a child in college myself. Not much scares me more than visions of some nut-job with guns descending on that campus. But I also realize that throughout history, fear has been the key to gaining citizen acceptance of the unacceptable. And now we have technology that allows the unacceptable to reach heights like never before.
Cynthia Murrell October 9, 2011
Recrawl Searches Your Browser History
September 19, 2011
You know you saw a website, but you don’t have the URL and you can’t remember how you got there. Ever happened to you? It happens to everyone in our culture of technological ADHD. Shallow thinking is encouraged by our “click and browse” society. For all of us there is help – there is Recawl.
Recawl is a fast and efficient way to find information and pages from your browsing history. The idea was borne out of frustration at not being able to find a page, despite knowing that it had already been visited . . . Recawl automatically indexes every page you visit and lets you do full-text search on the content of all those pages. This makes recalling information from your browsing history much faster & easier, without the need to bookmark anything.
Your history is available for search on any computer via the Recawl site. The extension is currently only available for Chrome. However, we can see a demand for this sort of service, one that elevates or potentially eliminates the bookmarking trend.
This new angle on search of course poses security questions. No doubt privacy will be a concern.
Emily Rae Aldridge, September 19, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com, publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search
Breaking Relevance: The TrackMeKnot Method
July 18, 2011
Okay, with ProQuest, Cambridge Scientific, and Dialog about to jump into the statistical fog of relevance, I fell pretty glum. Most old school searchers prefer to type in explicit commands; for example
b 15
ss cc=77? AND cc=76?? AND esop
When the new “fuzzified” version of the commercial search system for ProQuest, Cambridge Scientific, and Dialog-type users, good luck with that. In the new commercial systems, the old school, brute force, Boolean approach would return consistent results search in and search out. Take it to the bank.
Change is afoot so queries will return somewhat unpredictable results depending on what pointers get jiggled in an index update.
If we shift to the free Web search engines, the notion of relevance is based on lots of “signals”. A signal is something that allows the search system to disambiguate or add context to an action. If you are running around an airport, the mobile search wizards want to look at your search history and hook those signals to your wandering GPS input. The result is search done for you.
Why is relevance lousy? Well, search engine optimization is to blame. The focus on selling targeted ads is a contributor. And there are some interesting software tools that aim to confuse certain traffic analysis systems. So far, no one wants to confuse the ProQuest, Cambridge Scientific, and Dialog-type systems, but the Web search world is like catnip.
One of our readers alerted us to TrackMeKnot, which is an obfuscation software designed to defeat certain types of usage tracking. Here’s what the developers say:
TrackMeNot runs in Firefox as a low-priority background process that periodically issues randomized search-queries to popular search engines, e.g., AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. It hides users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. To better simulate user behavior TrackMeNot uses a dynamic query mechanism to ‘evolve’ each client (uniquely) over time, parsing the results of its searches for ‘logical’ future query terms with which to replace those already used.
If you want to cover your search clicks, give it a whirl. Obfuscation methods, if used by lots of people, may have an adverse impact on relevance, particularly when personalization is enabled. Lucky me.
Stephen E Arnold, July 18, 2011
Sponsored by Pandia.com (www.pandia.com), publishers of The New Landscape of Enterprise Search.
Facebook Face Play No Big Surprise
June 14, 2011
You might be living under a rock if you haven’t heard about Facebook’s newest addition to its social network–facial recognition software. That’s right – the beloved social network is building a database of their user’s faces and telling us it’s all to make our lives easier. As discussed in “Facebook Quietly Switches on Facial Recognition Tech by Default” the controversial feature allows users “to automatically provide tags for the photos uploaded” by recognizing facial features of your friends from previously uploaded photos. Yet again, Facebook finds themselves under fire their laissez-faire attitude towards privacy.
This latest Facebook technology is being vilified. It has been called “creepy,” “disheartening,” and even “terrifying.” These are words that would usually be reserved for the likes of Charles Manson or Darth Vader, not an online social network. The biggest backlash seems to come from the fact that the didn’t “alert its international stalkerbase that its facial recognition software had been switched on by default within the social network.” This opt-out, instead of opt-in, attitude is what is upsetting the masses. Graham Cluely, a UK-based security expert says that “[y]et again, it feels like Facebook is eroding the online privacy of its users by stealth.”
To be fair, Facebook released a notice on The Facebook Blog in December 2010that the company was unleashing its “tag suggestions” to United States users and when you hear them describe the technology it seems to be anything, but Manson-esque. In fact, it invokes thoughts of Happy Days. They say that since people upload 100 million tagged photos everyday, that they simply are helping “you and your friends relive everything from that life-altering skydiving trip to a birthday dinner where the laughter never stopped.” They go as far as to say that photo tags are an “essential tool for sharing important moments” and facial recognition just makes that easier.
Google has also been working on facial recognition technology in the form of a smartphone app known as Google Googles and celebrity recognition. However, now Google is claiming to have halted the project because, as Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said “[p]eople could use this stuff in a very, very bad way as well as in a good way.” See “Facebooks’s Again in Spotlight on Privacy”.
So who’s right? Facebook by moving forward or Google by holding up its facial recognition technology?
It seems to me that Google is just delaying the inevitable. Let’s face it. As a Facebook user my right to my privacy may be compromised the second I sign up in exchange for what Facebook offers.
Technology, like the facial recognition software, is changing the social media landscape, and I suppose I should not be surprised when the company implements its newest creation even when it puts my privacy at risk.
Is it creepy?
Probably and users should be given an opportunity to opt-in, not out. Is it deplorable. No. It’s our option to join and Facebook is taking full advantage of it.
Jennifer Wensink, June 14, 2011
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, the resource for enterprise search information and current news about data fusion
About that Cloud Security?
May 21, 2011
Let’s assume the Bloomberg story “Amazon Server Said to Be Used in Sony Attack”. If a one cloud based service can be used to attack another cloud based service, does the owner of the service used in the attack have an obligation to prevent the attack? Bloomberg reports that Sony is concerned. No kidding, but what about the customers? Bloomberg says:
…the breach at Amazon is likely to call attention to concerns some businesses have voiced over the security of computing services delivered via others’ remote servers, referred to as cloud computing. Cloud security is Amazon’s top priority, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos said at an event sponsored by Consumer Reports magazine this week.
Will substantive, timely action be taken to address the issues associated with this type of alleged use of cloud services? I suppose that the companies involved will try to slap on a patch. When the dust settles, will there be significant change? My hunch is that the quest for revenues will come first. The costs associated with figuring out problems * before * they occur are just too high.
We’re still in the react mode when it comes to online. Learning to live with unknown risks just adds spice to the online stew.
Stephen E Arnold, May 21, 2011
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Tracking: Does It Matter?
May 11, 2011
A news story broke this week that was more difficult for many to ignore; it seems our beloved iPhones and iPads are paying us the same attention we lavish on them. It turns out these Apple devices keep an internal log of every cell tower or hot spot they connect to, in essence creating a map of the user’s movements for as long as ten months. It gets better. The log file is highly visible and unencrypted, making it accessible to anyone with your device in their hands.
Getting the scent. Source: http://www2.journalnow.com/news/2011/feb/07/wsweat01-beagle-found-in-a-jiffy-by-tracking-dogs-ar-760887/
This news stems from a couple of British programmers who stumbled upon said “secret” location file. In the midst of the melee that ensued from outraged consumers and lawmakers alike, I was directed to a Bloomberg article titled “Researcher: iPhone Location Data Already Used By Cops”.
Interestingly enough, a rendition of this same story has been covered by the press months ago, only featured in a different light courtesy of an individual studying forensic computing. Per the write-up: “In a post on his blog, he explains that the existence of the location database—which tracks the cell phone towers your phone has connected to—has been public in security circles for some time.
While it’s not widely known, that’s not the same as not being known at all. In fact, he has written and presented several papers on the subject and even contributed a chapter on the location data in a book that covers forensic analysis of the iPhone.”
The FTC, Google and the Buzz
March 30, 2011
I read “Google Will Face Privacy Audits For The Next 20 Long Years.” The Federal Trade Commission has under its umbrella the mechanism to trigger privacy audits of Google’s practices for the next 20 years. Okay. Two decades. The matter fired off the launch pad in February 2010 and, if the story is spot on, landed with a ruling in March 2011. Here’s the passage that caught my attention:
As the FTC put it, “Although Google led Gmail users to believe that they could choose whether or not they wanted to join the network, the options for declining or leaving the social network were ineffective.”
I think this means that Google’s judgment was found lacking. The notion of just doing something and apologizing if that something goes wrong works in some sectors. The method did not seem to work in this particular situation, however.
I noted this passage in the article:
Google has formally apologized for the whole mess, saying “The launch of Google Buzz. fell short of our usual standards for transparency and user control—letting our users and Google down.”
Yep. Apologies. More about those at the Google blog. Here’s the passage of Google speak I found fascinating:
User trust really matters to Google.
For sure. No, really. You know. Really. Absolutely.
I am not sure I have an opinion about this type of “decision”. What strikes me is that if a company cannot do exactly what it wants, that company may be hampered to some degree. On the other hand, a government agency which requires a year to make a decision seems to be operating at an interesting level of efficiency.
What about the users? Well, does either of the parties to this legal matter think about the user? My hunch is that Google wants to get back to the business of selling ads. The FTC wants to move on to weightier matter. The user will continue with behaviors that fascinate economists and social scientists.
In a larger frame, other players move forward creating value. Web indexing, ads, and US government intervention may ultimately have minimal impact at a 12 month remove. Would faster, more stringent action made a more significant difference? Probably but not now.
Maybe Google and the FTC will take Britney Spears’s advice:
“My mum said that when you have a bad day, eat ice-cream. That’s the best advice,”
A modern day Li Kui for sure. For sure. No, really.
Stephen E Arnold, March 30, 2011
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Will DuckDuckGo Ruffle Feathers?
January 8, 2011
Search engine DuckDuckGo’s new marketing campaign, summarized in Search Engine Journal’s “DuckDuckGo Pitches Private Search” ) says that what differentiates them from Google is privacy—they don’t store personal Internet data or associate it with a user account.
The heavy-handed marketing maneuver is being touted by DuckDuckGo founder and sole employee Gabriel Weinberg in a Search Engine Land report as an educational tactic. “I am trying to make the privacy aspects of search engines understandable to the average person who doesn’t have a lot of background knowledge on the more technical aspects.”
We are interested to see if Weinberg’s approach ruffles the feathers of the average searcher. Will they sit up and take notice of the privacy issue or does the attempt fly south?
Christina Sheley, January 8, 2011
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