Archive for the ‘internet’ Category

LinkedIn, Twitter and eHarmony are just the latest sites to have suffered a security violation in what seems to be an ongoing catalogue of breaches and hacks over the past few years.

Are these, in the scale of things, just minor – albeit high profile – cases, or is the internet simply not as safe as we hope and believe? A recent report on internet security from Symantec highlighted that there were 5.5 billion malicious attacks online in 2011, an increase of 81% on the previous year.
The same report also showed that one in every 298 emails is a phishing attack seeking information such as passwords or usernames, and one in every 239 is affected by viruses.

Are we witnessing the demise of the desktop and laptop?

John Herlihy, Google’s VP of online sales, believes that the desktop has about three years before phones replace it. And he first made that prediction a year ago.

Previously, only those with BlackBerrys used phones for everything, including simple tasks such as email. Now, according to a new Nielsen smartphone report, 43% of mobile phone users have smartphones. People use phones to do things that used to be reserved for desktop PCs, such as surf the web, play games, and watch video.

Efforts to shift the internet to a new addressing system have been boosted by US internet service provider Comcast.

The firm has begun switching some customers over to a system built around the net’s new addressing scheme, called IP Version 6 (IPv6).

The change is needed because the older version has almost exhausted its pool of available addresses.

Some small UK ISPs have also begun putting domestic customers on a network that uses the new system.

Should the US President – should anyone – have the power to shut down the internet during a period of cyber terrorism?

Keeping the internet free from regulation, state interference and corporate control has divided nations. While China along with many other nations makes no secret of its wish to control who can access what and when most see the internet as a free, open and unregulated platform.

Now A US Senate committee has approved a wide-ranging cybersecurity bill that some critics have suggested would give the US president the authority to shut down parts of the internet during a cyberattack.

A digital marketing approach and its associated channels are critical for overcoming the declining effectiveness of mass marketing, according to Gartner, Inc. Although marketers have been using digital channels as part of their campaign management strategies for more than 10 years, most are using them for traditional push, mass-marketed, interruption-type execution of campaigns rather than a two-way engagement approach.

“Mass marketing is no longer a long-term strategy. Mass-marketing campaigns have a 2 percent response rate and are on the decline, whereas by 2015, digital strategies, such as social and mobile marketing, will influence at least 80 percent of consumers’ discretionary spending,” said Adam Sarner, research director at Gartner. “Marketers still need to shift their traditional campaign management strategy around executing campaigns to a customer and move toward a digital marketing, two-way engagement approach.”