Tag Archives: Cupertino

About 2454 days ago Data Security

The Basics: What is Encryption?

The Internet has changed the way companies do business, allowing a growing number of small and medium-sized firms to pay bills, conduct financial transactions with partners and sell goods and services to customers online. But the Internet has also made it more possible for sensitive company information and private customer information to be tracked and gathered and stolen online, including credit card numbers, social security numbers, bank account data, and other sensitive information that could be exploited if it ends up in the wrong hands. The total cost of Internet-related fraud complaints from consumers rose from $206 million in 2003 to $336 million in 2005, according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission. Internet-related complains accounted for 46 percent of all fraud complaints to the agency. For businesses with Internet related transactions, or other forms of ecommerce, encrypting sensitive data about a business or customers is essential these days. “SMB systems may hold data that companies want to protect, such as business critical or personal information,” says Dave Cole, Internet Security Expert at Symantec, the Cupertino, Calif. security software maker. “Encryption increases the security of data transmissions, reducing the risk of third-party observers being privy to content (for example, the password to your online banking services). Encryption can also be used for stored data. Encryption can help protect your Web site or e-business information assets from unauthorized access.” Basics of Encryption To combat the threat from fraud and hackers, most major Web sites use some form of digital encryption to protect sensitive data. Encryption is the process of scrambling data in order to make it unreadable without special knowledge of steps that can lead to unscrambling the code. While in computer terms, encryption is performed today with the use of algorithms, the concept of encryption has been around for many centuries in the form of ciphers and codes. In fact, in the decades following World War II, encryption in a digital form was primarily used only by government agencies and major corporations. Until the advent of the automatic teller machine, most banking customers didn’t even have a personal identification number (PIN), and a signature was all that was required for most transactions when payment was made with a check or credit card. How Encryption is Used With increased online use, business is conducted where the various parties have practically no contact either face-to-face or even over the phone. Orders on a Web site can be processed with a few clicks of the mouse. The buyer often never communicates with a seller, except to enter a form, and the seller just simply processes orders much as it was done in the past via mail order. Likewise, credit card or banking information can be accessed via a Web site, and businesses can transfer funds, make payments and even send money electronically through services like PayPal. It is because of this that encryption has become crucial, and for that reason, businesses should operate Web sites that offer a secure (i.e., encrypted) order forms in order to reassure customers that the business is a trustworthy one. Layers of Encryption Sites such as PayPal use some of the industry’s leading encryption to keep customer information and company data highly secure, says Amanda Pires, spokesperson for PayPal. “The PayPal system was built by one of the most highly regarded cryptographers in the industry, Max Levchin. Max built PayPal’s financial system from the ground up using high-level encryption.” Historically, encryptions in the form of ciphers were codes using transposition or substitution of characters. This made deciphering the information slow and tedious. But even that method could be defeated with enough time and resources. With computers, encryption and decryption can be done extremely fast, and in many ways, the encryption from most Web sites is far more advanced than any used by governments only a few decades ago. Today, in fact, there are symmetric key algorithms that are basically private-key cryptography, where two users must share the same software to read each other’s messages or information. This is used by businesses and government agencies to keep outsides from reading any of the data. Each party needs to have the common key.  But if the key is compromised, a new key can be provided for future transmission of information. Asymmetric Keys The other type of encryption, one that most small businesses will likely deploy, is asymmetric key algorithm, which uses both public-key and private-key cryptography. With this method, a user can send data via the public-key that is then encrypted, while the receiver, who is only one who can decrypt the information, uses the private-key. This is how credit card information is protected when a customer orders online from your Web site. The downside to this type of key is that if a site is successfully hacked, then the user’s information is compromised. However, when you consider that credit cards regularly pass through the mail, charge slips can be lost with vital information clearly printed and cards are often stolen, encryption is actually pretty secure. It should make customers feel more secure in using your company’s Web site to buy goods or services.

About 2789 days ago PCs, Laptops, and Notebooks

Why Cornice Said No, Thanks, to Apple

Kevin Magenis hung up the phone, looked out his office window into his company’s development lab, and thought about what he’d just heard. The callers were from Apple Computer, and they wanted to talk business. Magenis’s start-up, Cornice, had developed tiny hard drives with a one-inch platter for storing music or digital files. And it made them for a third of the price of rivals like IBM. That’s why the Apple execs called that afternoon in late 2002. Would Cornice be interested, they wanted to know, in supplying the drives for the iPod Mini, the new, smaller version of Apple’s MP3 player? Digital music was still new, and no single player had emerged to dominate. But Apple was clearly the most innovative player on the scene and hooking up with the company would definitely be a coup for Cornice. Magenis was tempted. The problem was that Cornice was already working with two other makers of MP3 players, Thomson/RCA and Rio, and the Apple execs were insisting on an exclusive deal. Honoring that request would mean betraying two key clients. Cornice, which is based in Longmont, Colo., had been doing business with those two companies almost from the moment it was founded in 2000. At the time, Thomson and Rio were the leading manufacturers of MP3 players, both of them outselling Apple. Both companies had new products in the prototype stage designed around Cornice’s hard drives, and Cornice expected the two clients to account for as much as 40% of its revenue. Cornice also was negotiating to supply drives, for nonmusic uses, to Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Sony. Indeed, digital music was just a tiny part of Cornice’s business plan. The way Magenis and his team saw it, the real opportunity was in the much larger market for mobile phones–which they believed eventually would function as hand-held computers, storing and sending all manner of data. Still, Magenis knew he’d be a fool not to at least try to forge a relationship with Apple. He contacted some of his board members and told them about the offer. In addition to an exclusive arrangement, Apple also wanted Cornice to make some changes to its technology; specifically, it wanted Cornice to design a new, double-sided drive capable of storing more information. That seemed reasonable. Nonetheless, the board members concluded it would be bad business to abandon Thomson and Rio. Instead, they decided to propose a compromise: Cornice would keep its two current customers, but the iPod would be the only other MP3-device manufacturer it would make drives for. (Apple declined to comment for this story.) Over the next few months, Magenis made several trips to Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., and Apple’s engineers came out to Cornice’s Colorado offices. Magenis could sense how excited everyone at Apple seemed to be about the Mini; the iPod team was in constant contact with CEO Steve Jobs, and Magenis couldn’t help but be thrilled when he got to meet the man in passing. In the back of his mind, Magenis fretted that Apple would fix the problems in the digital music business, and Cornice might miss out on being inside the market leader. “I could see it was going to be a hell of an effort on their part,” he says. But Magenis was also juggling nearly 40 other deals. Apple could consume only so much of his time. By the end of the year, Apple was getting impatient. The executives were friendly but insistent. Apple wanted to work with Cornice, but it absolutely refused to budge on the issue of exclusivity. The Decision After hearing the news, Magenis sent an e-mail to his board members. All of them had the same response: It was time to move on. Magenis was disappointed but convinced it was the right decision. Cornice would forget about the iPod and forge ahead with its original business plan. That meant pushing hard into the cell phone market. The first move was to perfect its technology. Hard drives, after all, were invented for computers, which are far less likely to be dropped than cell phones, especially while in use. Cornice’s engineers have been hard at work shockproofing the company’s products. One innovation, CrashGuard, actually alerts the hard drive that the phone has been dropped, allowing the drive to brace itself for impact. Cornice’s drives can now fall 1.5 meters without disturbance–a market best, according to industry analysts. In July, Magenis became Cornice’s chairman, handing CEO duties to Camillo Martino. Both men believe that Cornice’s engineering will give the company an edge with cell phone makers, which obviously do not want consumers calling to complain that their phone stopped working because the hard drive crashed. “We have a two-year advantage on our competitors,” says Martino. Indeed, the company is working with Samsung, one of the world’s largest cell phone makers, to develop hard drives for its upcoming line of high-end smart phones. The iPod Mini, of course, proved every bit as successful as Magenis sensed it would be. The Mini debuted in January 2004, with hard drives from Hitachi. Seagate also became a supplier and both companies lowered prices and expanded storage capacity–essentially erasing Cornice’s early lead. Still, both Magenis and Martino say they have no regrets about Cornice’s decision. “The original vision was to create the ultimate storage solution for cell phones,” says Martino. “The iPod presented a turning point for the company.” Just look at the numbers, they say. According to market researcher iSuppli, the market for all MP3 players will hit 132 million units in 2009. The number of cell phones sold is expected to hit one billion. While only 10% or so are likely to have hard drives, it’s still an enormous market. Martino predicts that in three years hard drives will ship in more than 100 million cell phones a year. No cell phones with hard drives are currently being sold in the U.S. That should change late this year, when Samsung introduces a smart phone with a version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system and a camera that can shoot up to four hours of high-quality video–thanks to a Cornice hard drive. While Cornice waits for the cell phone market to materialize, the company continues to sell to manufacturers of MP3 players, digital video cameras, global-positioning systems, and personal storage units. It’s eyeing the market for hand-held video game players. And the company recently started talking to Apple again and hopes to be in a position to collaborate on some future version of the iPod. “We still covet an Apple opportunity,” Magenis says. The Experts Weigh In A Smart Move If you look at the numbers, it’s probably the smarter move to pick cell phones over the iPod. It’s pretty clear that as these cell phones become more personalized media devices, the demand for localized storage is probably going to increase. Consumers will want to have more stuff on their phones. Cornice is in a very strong leadership position to be a provider to cell phone makers, and that’s the larger potential market. Tim Bajarin Principal analyst Creative Strategies Campbell, Calif. Numbers Don’t Lie I would’ve made the same call. No one knew Apple could knock this out of the park. Focusing on cell phones is a good choice, given where the market is going. Eventually, every device we carry will have a hard drive in it. If you look realistically at the numbers, iPods sell maybe 25 million a year. But in three years there will be 100 million cell phones with hard drives in them. Sean Ryan CEO Donnerwood Media San Francisco I’m Not Convinced Going with cell phones wasn’t a bad move, since that market will always be larger than the MP3 player market. The question is, how many consumers will want a cell phone with 10 gigabytes of storage, with music, photos, video, GPS? There will be cell phones with hard drives. But will there be hundreds of millions of them? I’m not convinced of that at this point. David Reinsel Director of storage research, IDC Framingham, Mass.

About 2911 days ago Telecom and Wireless

The “Always On” Economy

I don’t envy science-fiction writers. After all, it’s getting pretty hard to stay ahead of the curve these days. Take The Golden Age, the acclaimed novel by John C. Wright. Published in 2002, the novel describes a future 10,000 years away in which people are shadowed at all times by a computer assistant ever ready to deliver dazzling tableaux of information and entertainment, as well as crystal-clear, three-dimensional visual connections to others. As it turns out, we may not have to wait 10 millennia to see Wright’s vision come to life. Three years should do it. When it comes to telecommunications, it’s hard not to feel as if we’re catching up with our own imaginations. Broadband Internet access hurls multimegabyte files at us in seconds, hand-held devices give us our e-mail on the run, Wi-Fi hot spots put us into the office network while enjoying lattes at Starbucks — mobile phones can even determine our exact location and relay it to the police in an emergency. But the networked present is about to look as out of date as a 200-pound Pong console would to a PlayStation Portable-packing teenager. A host of new technologies is on the verge of creating a new, even faster-moving “always on” business culture, in which anyone anywhere can reach out and touch almost anyone or anything else — and not just in text, snapshots, or murky video. At first ding, this might sound like your worst nightmare, especially if you already grumble about our BlackBerry culture. In reality, though, the next wave of electronic connectivity may feel less invasive, and a lot more human, than the current one — especially to the employees, suppliers, and customers of companies that master it. What will that brave new world of telecommunications look like? My guess is it will look a lot like this: 10 a.m. You’re at the airport waiting to board when you get a video call on your mobile phone from a major customer in Europe. You can tell from a twitch of his lips and his finger-tapping that he’s losing patience with the project delays. Your relaxed smile reassures him some, but not as much as the video clips you zap him of the completed mockup that came in from the subcontractors in Bangalore two hours ago. Such a scene is closer than you think. “The quality of PC videoconferencing is becoming amazing,” says Malachy Moynihan, a vice president at Linksys, in Irvine, Calif. New technology already developed by Apple and others relays about 250 times more data than you get with conventional video connections. And such transmissions will look great on the next generation of high-resolution mobile smart phones, thanks to new mobile networks already coming online that send data up to 500 times faster than conventional mobile connections, making even cable modems seem logy. 11:30 a.m. During the flight, you connect your notebook, via the aircraft’s local area network, to the screens of engineers in Minneapolis and Copenhagen, and the three of you collaboratively tweak three-dimensional blueprints of a complex new design. As you move your mouse to suggest a change, a supercomputer 2,500 miles away adjusts the design on everyone’s screen. Later, you review some freshly updated reports and video clips sent by employees and subcontractors scattered around the planet, all of which were blasted wirelessly onto your laptop just before you stepped on the plane. In fact, high-end computing vendor Silicon Graphics in Mountain View, Calif., already sells software that allows a PC user to manipulate ultracomplex images via remote supercomputer. Meanwhile, “infostations” at airports, gas stations, and other hot spots will soon use super-high-speed short-range signals to blast huge files onto passing notebook PCs and mobile devices. As for broadband networks on planes, Lufthansa has offered them for more than a year, and other airlines, including Japan Air and Scandinavian Airlines, are following suit. 2:15 p.m. You land and head over to a branch office, where you take a meeting with other top managers. Because your mobile phone now runs on a supersmart network, the device recognizes your location and knows from prior experience that you rarely take calls when you’re in this particular conference room. It knows not to interrupt you now, instead taking video messages or routing calls to others in the company. But suddenly your phone does chime — it’s a major customer in South America, someone worth interrupting a meeting for. The smart, always-on infrastructure will provide people with unprecedented control over who will be able to reach them and in what circumstances, according to Alain Briancon, chief technology officer at InterDigital, a wireless technology and applications developer in King of Prussia, Pa. Within the next five years, telecommunications networks will be able to recognize patterns in your phone use, understanding which calls you always accept and which are screened — taking into account time of day, location, and even, by noting the location of their phones, who you’re with. 5:20 p.m. In a taxi on the way back to the airport, you replenish your phone’s fuel cell with a razor-blade-size cartridge and reach your son on the school bus to ask him how the game went. Not so well, he says, beaming you a video clip taken by a teammate’s mom that clearly shows the referee wrongly calling him out of bounds on a key play. After commiserating, you call your daughter. She points her mobile phone at the math homework she’s stuck on, and you help her spot the mistake in her work. You reach your wife driving back from work; she suggests you tap into the local news back home, which is just now showing a news clip of the damage from a fire across town. Video-quality mobile phone access will become so inexpensive that you’ll probably want to give it to all your family and employees. Not only that, you won’t need separate wire phone or broadband services — you’ll do it all through a mobile network, for maybe $80 a month combined. “You’ll be able to stop thinking about what it costs to make a call or send a message,” says Michael Gold, senior research engineer at SRI Consulting Business Intelligence in Menlo Park, Calif. As for fuel-cell-powered phones, disposable fuel cells are about to hit the market as a replacement for phone batteries; refillables are a year or so off, and thumbnail-size micro-jet-engine power generators now under development at MIT and elsewhere are about five years off. 7:00 p.m. Back at the airport, your flight delayed, too tired to work, you download a movie that isn’t in theaters yet — it’s been released on the network first. The picture quality, however, is better than that in your local movie theater, which, unlike your phone, has not yet been upgraded to high definition and surround sound. Your network holds all but urgent or family calls and messages while you enjoy the show. Entertainment already dominates data usage on phones, and phone fun is only going to get bigger with rich broadband access as users fill their downtime with multimedia sports clips, 3-D games, and, of course, music. Some new music already is going straight to mobile phones. Robbie Williams’s greatest hits collection, for example, was released on memory card in December in the United Kingdom. Music videos are starting to do the same. The new, more intense, more discriminating level of interaction coming to a pocket near you may well prove so compelling that some businesses will want to restructure themselves around it. There will be a lot of ways to do it: Create closer collaborations between more geographically scattered employees and partners; develop deeper and more frequent connections with customers via always-on video selling, training, and service; even sell services delivered by mobile broadband networks. “The number of applications is going to explode,” says Sanjay Mehta, marketing director for Portal Software in Cupertino, Calif. Sci-fi author Wright needn’t fret about all this stunning progress robbing The Golden Age of its futuristic punch — he was smart enough to work in some interstellar travel. Now, there’s a technology that will safely lag our imaginations for decades, if not millennia. But here’s a bet: By the time we do make it to the stars, our phones will work there. David H. Freedman, a Boston-based writer and Inc. contributing editor, is the author of several books about business and technology.