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Visitors to the South Bank during the Olympics
were treated to a light show with a difference
when the EDF Energy London Eye was lit up
each night in colour schemes dictated by the
mood of Olympic-related Twitter messages.
Software was used to analyse the mood of 24
hours’ of tweets and the results filtered through
a computer programme that converts sentiments
into colours (e.g. purple for negative, yellow for
positive and green for neutral). These were then
compressed into a 24-minute light show reflecting
the mood of the nation.
Tweets on the Olympics were analysed using
the SentiStrength system developed by Mike
Thelwall, Professor of Information Science at
the University of Wolverhampton’s School of
Technology, which looks out for 2,750 terms to
gauge the positivity or negativity of tweets.
www.edfenergyofthenation.com
All over the world
By 2017, 85% of the world’s population will have
3G coverage and 50% will be covered by LTE/4G
(source: Ericsson’s second
Traffic and Market Report
– On the Pulse of the Networked Society
). Mobile
phone subscriptions are expected to rise from 6
billion at the end of 2011 to 9 billion by 2017
(excluding machine-to-machine subscriptions). Of
these, 3 billion will be for smartphones, up from
700 million in 2011. For many, a mobile phone will
be their only way to access the internet and mobile
broadband subscriptions are predicted to rise from
1 billion in 2011 to 5 billion in 2017. This, plus
increasing use of video, cloud-based services and
the internet, will contribute to a 15-fold increase in
global data traffic, says Ericsson.
www.ericsson.com/traffic-market-report
Workers more social
at work
UK adults spend more time on social
networks at work than they do in their
free time, according to research by
VoucherCodesPro. The money-saving
website questioned more than one
thousand adults in full-time employment
and found that on average, they spend 1.5
hours per day on social network sites when
they are meant to be working (i.e. not in
their lunch hour) and just 45 minutes in
their spare time. Half said that they did
so because it was easy to access the sites
discretely through a mobile phone or PC.
www.VoucherCodesPro.co.uk
The true cost of data
Symantec has calculated that managing,
storing, securing and accessing digital data costs
businesses £714 billion or $1.1 trillion annually
(source:
Symantec State of Information Survey
)
The total amount of information stored
globally by businesses is 2.2 zettabytes (1
zettabyte is a 22-figure number). Small-to-
medium-sized businesses (SMBs) on average have
563 terabytes of data, compared with 100,000
terabytes in the average enterprise. The volume of
information is expected to grow by 67% over the
next year for enterprises and by 178% in SMBs.
In the last year, 69% of businesses have
experienced some form of information loss caused
by human error, hardware failure, security breach
or lost and stolen devices. In addition, 69% have
had confidential information leaked outside their
company and 31% have experienced compliance
failures.
Another challenge identified by Symantec is
the amount of duplicate information businesses
store (42%) and poor utilisation of storage (31%
within the firewall and 18% outside).
www.symantec.com
Mood lighting
agenda
01732 759725
magazine
05
Social networks make
cracking passwords
too easy
The average kid could crack most
end users’ passwords using social
network tools. So say 42% of 300
IT professionals questioned by
SecurEnvoy.
The amount of personal information
available on sites like LinkedIn and
Facebook mean that it is no longer
sufficient to rely on a single security
question, such as one’s mother’s maiden
name, first school or pet. Yet, still 21%
confessed this was all that was required to
reset passwords in their organisation.
Instead, SecurEnvoy advocates two
factor authentication (2FA) that uses a
combination of two out of three possible
factors: something you know e.g. a
username, password or PIN; something you
have e.g. a credit card or authentication
token; and something you are e.g. a
fingerprint. A username and password does
not constitute 2FA as it is a combination of
two types of the same factor.
Authentication tokens, first used over
30 years ago, generate a one-time passcode
(OTP) which can be entered as part of a 2FA
process. They are different to PIN numbers,
as they change every time and expire within
a set time. Unlike the physical tokens of the
‘80s, OTPs today can be generated by apps
on a smartphone or sent via SMS.
An example of an OTP in use is
GetCash, a new service from the Royal
Bank of Scotland and NatWest, that works
by sending a six-digit code to the user’s
phone, which can then be entered into an
ATM to retrieve money. It can only be used
once and expires after three hours.