Security
The New York Times, 7/7/03: A Simpler, More Personal Key to Protect Online Messages
By JOHN MARKOFF
PALO ALTO, Calif., July 6 — A Silicon Valley start-up company on Tuesday plans to unveil a new approach to sending secure electronic messages and protecting data, a simpler alternative to current encryption systems, which use long digital numbers, called public keys.
The new company, Voltage Security, which is based here, instead uses another unique identifier as the public key: the message recipient's e-mail address.
Under the Voltage system, the sender of a message uses software that converts the recipient's e-mail address into a number and then encrypts the message using a mathematical formula. The recipient can then use a similar formula in conjunction with a secret key to decode the message. The company says it would be almost impossible for an eavesdropper to use the formula. The software can be used with several existing PC e-mail programs.
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Collaborative Tools
The New York Times, 7/7/03: Blogs in the Workplace
By WILLIAM O'SHEA
For Nicholas Tang, the deluge of work-related e-mail messages became overwhelming. "It got to the point where I was getting hundreds of e-mails a day, sometimes more than a thousand," said Mr. Tang, director of operations at Community Connect, a company in New York that operates AsianAvenue.com and other online communities with an ethnic focus.
For several years Mr. Tang viewed this daily surge of e-mail messages as an unpleasant but necessary part of his job managing a team of eight engineers. Then, a few months ago, he began using an alternative to e-mail, a Web log.
Web logs, or blogs as they are known, are a type of frequently updated online journal, often featuring excerpts from news articles and links to other blogs. So far, Web logs are best known as a medium for communicating with the general public — like the blog by the noted journalist Andrew Sullivan (www.andrewsullivan.com), which is devoted to culture and politics, and sites like the Veg Blog (www.vegblog.org), which is about all things vegetarian. In the corporate context, some chief executives, for better or worse, have adopted blogs as a way to share their personal wisdom with the wider world.
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Infoworld, 7/3/03: RSS Killed the Infoglut Star
At last, a way to manage the Internet information overload
By Chad Dickerson
It's fairly common knowledge in pop-culture trivia circles that the first video to air on MTV was the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," a song with a title that proved prophetic in its bold announcement of a shift in the way music was consumed and marketed. Something similar but perhaps just as profound is happening with the delivery of information online with tools that leverage RSS (Really Simple Syndication or RDF Site Summary, depending on whom you ask).
When I started using an RSS newsreader daily, some remarkable things happened that I didn't necessarily expect: I began to spend almost no time surfing to keep up with current technology information, and I was suddenly able to manage a large body of incoming information with incredible efficiency. My newsreader has become so integral that it's now sitting in my Windows startup folder along with my e-mail client and contact manager. I'm humming "RSS Killed the Infoglut Star" when I fire up my RSS newsreader in the morning.
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