In this era of the all-pervasive cloud, it’s easy to assume that the data we store will somehow be preserved forever. The only thing to fret about from a posterity perspective, we might think, is the analog information from days gone by—all the stuff on papers, tapes and other pre-digital formats that haven’t been explicitly converted.Vinton Cerf, often called “the father of the Internet,” has other ideas.Now chief Internet evangelist at Google, Cerf spoke this week at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he painted a very different picture.Rather than a world where longevity is a given, Cerf fears a “digital dark age” in which the rapid evolution of technology quickly makes storage formats obsolete thanks to a phenomenon he calls “bit rot.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Security-conscious IT leaders already have a rocky romance with the BYOD trend, and as Valentine’s day approaches it’s emerged that lonely-heart employees could be putting company data up for grabs by using dating apps.More than 60 percent of the leading mobile apps available in this category are potentially vulnerable to a variety of cyberattacks, an IBM Security study found. Besides putting the user’s personal information at risk, if these apps are on devices also used for work, corporate data could be vulnerable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Katherine Noyes