Who is liable ?

Security economics teaches that you're unlikely to get a secure system if Alice guards it while Bob pays the cost of failure.

Steven Murdoch and Ross Anderson

Unbreakable Cryptography

Hackers don't break encryption, they break how encryption is used.

Robert Graham

Cloud Computing

A few years from now, if you’re a business, having your own datacenter is going to look just about as smart as generating your own electricity.

Ed Lazowska

Cloud and Security

The effect of the growing dependence on cloud computing is similar to that of our dependence on public transportation, particularly air transportation, which forces us to trust organizations over which we have no control, limits what we can transport, and subjects us to rules and schedules that wouldn't apply if we were flying our own planes.

On the other hand, it is so much more economical that we don't realistically have any alternative.

Whitfield Diffie

Programming Today

Programming today depends more and more on combining large building blocks and less on detailed logic of little things, though there's certainly enough of that as well. A typical programmer today spends a lot of time just trying to figure out what methods to call from some giant package and probably needs some kind of IDE like Eclipse or XCode to fill in the gaps.

Brian Kernighan

Systems, Society and Technology

Because the minimum costs of being an organization in the first place are relatively high, certain activities may have some value but not enough to make them worth pursuing in any organized way. New social tools are altering this equation by lowering the costs of coordinating group action.

Clay Shirky

The country of "smart people"

La pressione fiscale effetti­vamente subita da chi non evade è maggiore di quel­la ufficiale, di circa 11 pun­ti. In Italia chi non evade paga più tasse che in Sve­zia, il Paese dell’Ocse in cui il fisco è più esoso, e la differenza non è piccola, circa 6 punti in più.

Fiscal pressure for those who do not evade taxes is greater than the official one, approximately 11% more. In Italy, those who do not evade pay more taxes than in Sweden, the OCSE country with higher fiscal pressure, and the difference is not small, roughly 6% more.

Francesco Giavazzi