Epsilon Data Breach

Epsilon reported a data breach on Friday. This breach made a lot of shock waves last a few days as new information about impacted clients became known. Banks, retailers, you name it. I received an email Saturday morning informing me that my first and last name along with my email address were exposed (what a wonderful news for Saturday morning, isn’t it!?).

What is disturbing to me is how this breach was communicated. While it is good that I was notified, the notification I received was confusing. It stated that I may start getting spam. What is not clear to me whether information linking an email address to an Epsilon customer was exposed. This creates a possibility of more dangerous attacks – phishing – where you start getting emails “on behalf of” an Epsilon customer prompting users to reveal more information, for example, “You heard our database was breached. Please click *this link* to reset your password”. This information was not communicated at all and it may not be very obvious to the users of Epsilon customers.

My Blog on Twitter

Now this blog is available on Twitter (@ag_blog).

I chose to have a separate Twitter account for my blog since I do not want have all my blog updates be published under my Twitter account. Having two Twitter accounts will allow me retweeting some of my updates under my blog account and vice versa.

Integration notes will be posted later as I am working on integration with other sites.

HBR.org: Thin Men Get Lower Pay than Average-Weight Men

Last Friday Harvard Business Review in its “The Daily Stat” series quoted some results of research done by Timothy A. Judge of the University of Florida and Daniel M. Cable of London Business School. Researchers found that a man in the U.S. whose weight is 25 pounds below the mean earns $210,925 less, on average, across a 25-year career than a man whose weight is at the mean a woman who is 25 pounds below the mean earns $389,300 more across the same time span than an average-weight woman. Based on this researchers concluded that rewards people for meeting gender-role expectations on weight.

While I find the results a bit amusing, the researches may have come to a wrong conclusion that lower/higher weight is one of causes of higher/lower pay. It looks like they disregarded the fact that lower/higher pay may drive choices that lead to lower/higher pay. That is, in this case it is not very clear what the cause is and what the effect is.

John Zimmerman, originator of JAI, dies at the age of 58

I have learned a sad news. John Zimmerman, who conceived and led the Java Advanced Imaging (JAI), died last Wednesday, February 9th at the age of 58 from kidney cancer. John left Sun Microsystems in 2004. At the time of John’s tenure at Sun Microsystems, the JAI support group was the best group at Sun that cared a lot about its users responding quickly and clearly to all questions. JAI, a well designed and very powerful Java library for image processing, is a trace John left behind. JAI was/is used in many industries from space to drug research. John will be largely missed.

Memory Problems in Firefox on Mac. Caching Pitfalls

My MacBook Pro has been having some problems – performance problems, crashes, failures to come back from sleep, etc. Often it showed the black screen while heating up. Some signs point to Firefox. Right now I have 3.6.13 running under Mac OS X 10.6.6. Since I like Firefox more than other browsers, I wanted to find a solution.

It looks like I have found one solution. This is a Firefox add-on – RAMBack. It adds a menu item “Clear Caches” under “Tools” and allows Firefox users to release some memory allocated by Firefox for some performance improvement purposes. In the Activity Monitor I have seen the reduction in “Real Memory” from 250M to 215M. Not much, but that is 14%.

Ironically, at some point allocating more memory to improve performance (by caching) slows down applications. This is not only a Firefox problem. This is a more general architectural problem. When designing an application, one should make sure that improving performance of one aspect does not negatively impacts other aspects on which the former depends on.

Another problem with Firefox on Mac is that it seems to be inefficient in handling many open tabs. Firefox on Windows can handle easily up to 150 tabs open. This is an unreachable limit for Firefox on Mac with comparable hardware configuration. Firefox on Mac starts choking with just 20 tabs.

Global Risks 2011 Report from WEF and Interactive Risk Interconnection Map

The 2011 Report (6th) is out. WEF improved the Data Explorer a bit, but still the links are bi-directional. WEF no longer gives any numbers for likelihood estimation; uses the “unlikely, likely, and very likely” scale.

This year highlights:

• The most impactful is Fiscal crisis (impact about 1T USD, very likely)
• The most likely is Storm and cyclones (about 250B USD, very likely)
• The most likely and impactful is Climate change (about 900B USD, very likely)
• The least likely and impactful is Space security (about 60B USD, very unlikely)
• The last year leader, Asset price collapse, is assessed at about 700B USD, likely. Far away from the leaders and laggers.

Here is my post about the previous report. The link to the last year map does not work anymore.

Microsoft Mathematics 4.0

Microsoft did a good thing. Released Microsoft Mathematics 4.0. It is free! Available for Windows (both x86 and x64). Download it here. This is what is left from Microsoft Student and Encarta. Now it is a standalone application. Great tool and easy to use. I’m glad that Microsoft did not phase it out. The tool supports symbolic math, integration, differentiation, solve equations, and has a graphing calculator and unit conversion tool. It solves problem and also shows how it solved them. I wish it offered an interface to develop plug-ins. That would attract some of R, MATLAB, and Mathematica users.