As H1N1 (swine flu) continues to spread, so does misinformation on the Internet. There are several emails in circulation that are simply wrong, and web sites with false information are popping up all over. And scams are starting to emerge. We share this planet with people who still believe the earth is flat, lunatic conspiracy [...]

Making The Transition to a Social Business “Look, I’m all about loyalty. In fact, I feel like part of what I’m being paid for here is my loyalty. But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly, I’m going wherever they value loyalty the most.” – Dwight Schrute – The Office, ABC-TV Seriously… [...]

Tens of thousands of pounds of disgusting and dangerous sewage gets pumped into the basements of homeowners in Ottawa, not just once or twice, but three or four times – in what the City claims is a “hundred year occurrence.” The top public servant in Ottawa claims the sewers are working just fine, the way [...]

I hope that regular readers of my security column will forgive me, but today I’d like to get a few things off my chest. With the holidays approaching, we’ll undoubtedly hear Canadian retailers whinging about how the Internet is costing them revenue and begging us to “shop local.”  They’ll tell us how Internet shopping hurts [...]

We often hear banks complaining loudly about the losses they suffer from payment card fraud.  Campaigns like “Protect your PIN” and humorous commercials with a miniature armoured truck following a customer down the street must cost tens of millions of dollars. But then consumers still receive calls like I did on Saturday afternoon.  The bank [...]

Ars Technica has a great article this morning entitled 30 years of failure: the username/password combination. One of the things that they didn’t discuss is why we continue to use passwords for authentication even though they’re known to be a serious weakness. The first reason is that, as long as we don’t include the cost [...]

New ideas are almost a dime a dozen. There’s an innovation on almost every street corner. What makes a new idea successful is a well thought out, well developed marketing plan that everyone in the organization can understand, believe in and follow. Without a solid marketing plan it is too easy for an organization to [...]

I recently installed Windows 7 Ultimate (32 bit) on my brand new HP Mini 110 (it ships with XP). The Windows 7 distribution included all the drivers needed to get the system up and running, including the WiFi drivers, making it a very painless process.  Once running, it automatically downloaded the vendor-specific video driver, resulting [...]