McAfee, the Santa Clara security software company, has lost the personal information of thousands of its employees due to a lapse by an external auditor.

On December 15, the auditor, an employee of Deloitte & Touche, left an unencrypted CD containing the names, social security numbers and McAfee stock holdings for more than 9,000 McAfee employees in an airline seat pocket.

D'oh!

Security giant's data lost

IEEE Spectrum will host a must-attend online Career Accelerator Forum on 11 April 2006, geared towards mid-level technology and business executives seeking career advancements, a change in career or continuation onto graduate or post-graduate studies.

Confirmed topics for the Career Accelerator Forum (to-date):
Web Cast One: Advanced Degree Solutions for High Tech Professionals
Web Cast Two: Management, Money and Marketability for Technology Managers
- How can you become an entrepreneur?
- How can you get VC’s to fund your vision?

IEEE Spectrum Career Accelerator Forum

Your mind is for having ideas--not holding them.

Getting Things Done: an interview with David Allen

Most US workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago, according to newly released research.

Americans work more, seem to accomplish less

Most Americans tread lightly in discussing ethnicity and religion, and we do it so habitually that it's nearly unconscious. Some might call this dishonest, and maybe it is, but it also holds moral truth: until you've walked in the shoes of other people, you can't really grasp their frustrations and resentments, and you can't really know what would and wouldn't offend you if you were part of their crowd.

The Danish editor's confusion was to conflate censorship and self-censorship. Not only are they not the same thing, the latter is what allows us to live in a spectacularly diverse society without the former; to keep censorship out of the legal realm, we practice it in the moral realm. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable, but worse things are imaginable.

Robert Wright: Silent Treatment

In the aftermath of Fukuyama's essay, Bill Kristol is feeling defensive.

It would be nice to wait until we were certain conditions were ripe before we had to act, a world in which the obstacles are trivial and the enemies fold up. Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in.

To govern is to choose, and to accept responsibility for one's choices. To govern is not wishfully to await the end of history. To govern is not fatalistically to watch a clash of civilizations from the sidelines.

The Long War

The recent escape of 23 suspected al-Qaeda inmates from a maximum security facility in Yemen has spawned some baroque theories about their prison break. One theory presently circulating in Yemen is that the escape was orchestrated to transfer them into U.S. custody, thereby circumventing extradition laws.

One of the most corrupt states in the world, Yemen is plagued with embezzlement, smuggling, mismanagement, and corruption, which in the aggregate have ruined its economy. Unemployment and poverty rates are very high. Land ownership, business ownership, political and military power are increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small elite.

The E.U. has called Yemen "the forgotten crisis."

Of the four million children under the age of five, half are physically stunted from malnutrition, half never enter first grade, and 11 percent die before their fifth birthday-about half of those deaths from diarrhea. Nearly 90 percent of the population does not have access to clean water.

You think maybe that Brilliant Guy at Google could do something about Yemen?

The Two Faces of Yemen

As with so much in Los Angeles, the contrast is very enjoyable.

Strategic acquisitions of unfinished manuscripts are common; for example, "Guests of the Ayatollah," Mark Bowden's book on the Iran hostage crisis, was sold on the basis of just five pages.

The Observer | Review | Hollywood notebook

On the subject of documentation about Iraqi WMD:

How is it possible to make sense out of what is essentially an unruly and only loosely cataloged mass of data? And, how long would such a project take?

The reliance on the law-enforcement approach to digital media exploitation; the implementation of user-friendly forensics applications for use by non-experts, the insistence on following well-accepted approaches designed to withstand judicial scrutiny; and the focus on a single item or small collection of items easily attributed to a single user, are the primary reasons why we've not been able to uncover the full extent of what might be sitting right in front of us.

It's Not Academic

This is a press release; it's a marker to come back to later.

Basis Technology announced today the launch of an initiative to create the next generation of digital forensics products, and the appointment of two renowned experts to lead this effort.

Dr. Simson Garfinkel, a well-known author and award-winning journalist has accepted the position of Consulting Scientist and Forensics Software Architect.

Basis Technology (www.basistech.com) provides software solutions for multilingual text mining and information retrieval applications. The company's Rosette(R) Linguistics Platform is a suite of high-performance, highly reliable, interoperable software components designed for applications that analyze and process all the world's languages.

Simson Garfinkel To Lead Digital Forensics Initiative