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Monday, March 28, 2011

Iran and certificate authorities

9 Secure socket layer (SSL) certificates were issued through a compromised account by the certificate authority Comodo. The compromised account was created from an IP address originating in Iran.

The main idea behind SSL is asymmetric key encryption, which originated with the Rivest Shamin Adleman (RSA) algorithm in the 1970s. The public-private key pairs can be used to exchange information securely and to verify identities, hence its importance in a networked age.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Happy Birthday Dear Virus

The computer virus recently turned 40.

The recent, devastating earthquake in Japan disrupted much of the Internet's infrastructure connecting to Japan (see the map at the end), but much of Japan is still connected to the Internet, albeit at a slower speed. Here is a worldwide undersea map of the Internet and one of our part of the country in PDF form. As mentioned in the textbook, accidents and natural disasters are threats to information systems.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Mmmm Bacon

Some info about the Kevin Bacon problem is available on Wikipedia. The actors that make this possible are called "connectors". A similar experiment (the small world experiment) found the same thing out about the real world 60 years ago.

The Oracle of Bacon will solve all our Kevin Bacon needs.

Here is the Internet as a graph and a person's Facebook friends as a graph and another neater one.

Finally, on an unrelated note, here's an old article about what the inventor of the web had to say about Web 2.0.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

A recent article says colleges and universities are doing a poor job of training IT professionals. It is interesting to look at the features/skills companies want in job candidates and compare that to informatics training.

J.C. Penney has gotten in trouble with Google because they worked the system of the ranking process. Google has changed its ranking process as a result.

Bioinformatics is among the informatics disciplines with the most well-developed use of information systems. Entrez is a portal to a vast amount of biological information and databases.