Beyond Google

The industrial revolution and steam age reduced the value of physical labour. Google has now set the bar pretty high for any aspiring knowledge workers. Essentially to deliver value you have to be able to deliver beyond what Google has to offer for free. What might the hourly rate be for a professional Googler ? Would a Google Scholar Googler get a premium ?

Imagine a researcher not delivering what could be discovered on Google in 30 mins and hoping to be paid for it ? Trust has a part to play and perhaps Googling the symptoms of pancreatic cancer would not be enough to head direct to the operating theatre.............but give automated eye scan based diagnosis a few years and we might be there.

DeepMind the Google AI project will really accelerate the erosion of value in knowledge work and challenge the value of many previously well protected professions.

CERT-UK shines a light on internet safety in 2015/16

CERT-UK the excellent UK government sponsored cyber resilience entity  has released its overview of cyber risk in 2015.

It pulls together data from a range of sources and listed below are some key extracts;

1. The 2015 Information Security Breaches survey found that 74% of small businesses suffered a breach 38% of which was from an external attacker. So the disgruntled employee / freelancer is alive, kicking and armed with a USB stick. The average cost of breach was between £75,000 and £311,000.

2. The cyber insurance market is set for rapid expansion from £1.7 billion to £5 billion in 5 years. There is a caveat here that as the risk level is poorly understood there is some doubt in respect of whether cyber policies will prove effective until the market is more mature.

3. Top malware types (most common first were)

conficker
zeroaccess
ramnit
xcodeghost
sality
gameover zeus
neverquest
bamital
tinba
bedep

Conficker was the clear winner and represents a very serious threat for anyone still running XP or other unsupported software.

4. DDoS as a service is one to watch in 2016 potentially in combination with Ransomware.

Vtech tries to wash its hands re internet safety

As some of you will be aware Vtech (baby monitors to cordless phones) was seriously hacked recently and personal data was comprised. A potential response to this could be to improve security levels on it s products but it appears that the Vtech legal department has jumped in and tried to push liability away and onto the users of Vtech products.

So the proposition is presumably that if a live feed from a hacked Vtech baby monitor appears online Vtech has excluded all liability ? This may or may not be legally sound and it seems likely that the tort of negligence might have something to say here but it is pretty cheeky from Vtech.

When you entrust personal data to a third party online it seems only reasonable that they take care of that data in the same way that a bank need to take care of your money. If not it might be best to use an alternative supplier.