I’ve seen some cool Walmart visualizations before, and this one at FlowingData is no exception. The one thing I wondered about as I watched was if it captured store closings–despite the seemingly inevitable march in the visualization, there have been more than a few.
One of the reasons I like climate studies is because the world of the climate scientist is not dissimilar to ours. Their data is frought with uncertainty, it has gaps, and it might be kind of important (regardless of your stance of anthropomorphic global warming, I think we can all agree that when the climate [...]
A Gartner blog post points out the lack of data reported by vendors or customers regarding the false positive rates for anti-spam solutions. This is part of a general problem in the security industry that is a major obstical to rational analysis of effectiveness, cost-effectiveness, risk, and the rest
http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/about/presskits/SES_report_Feb2010.pdf Thanks to big yellow for not making us register! Oh, and Adam thanks you for not using pie charts…
In Verizon’s post, “A Comparison of [Verizon's] DBIR with UK breach report,” we see: Quick: which is larger, the grey slice on top, or the grey slice on the bottom? And ought grey be used for “sophisticated” or “moderate”? I’m confident that both organizations are focused on accurate reporting. I am optimistic that this small [...]
As best as I can describe the characteristics of the threat agents that would fit the label of APT, that threat community is very, very real. It’s been around forever (someone mentioned first use of the term being 1993 or something) – we dealt with threat agents you would describe as “APT” at MicroSovled when [...]
I posted this also to the securitymetrics.org mailing list. Sorry if discussing in multiple venues ticks you off. The Not Obvious blog has an interesting write up on the Heartland Breach and impact. From the blog post: “Heartland has had to pay other fines to Visa and MasterCard, but the total of $12.6 million they [...]
I also posted about this on Emergent Chaos, but since our readership doesn’t fully overlap, I’m commenting on it here as well. Chis Soghoian, has just posted some of his new research into government electronic surveillance here in the US. The numbers are truly astounding (Sprint for instance provided geo-location data on customers eight million [...]
I’d like to wish US readers a happy Thanksgiving. For those outside of the US, I thought this would be a nice little post for today: A pointer to an article in the Financial Times, “Baseball’s love of statistics is taking over football“ Those who indulge my passion for analysis and for sport know that [...]
Cormac Herley at Microsoft Research has done us all a favor and released a paper So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users which opens its abstract with: It is often suggested that users are hopelessly lazy and unmotivated on security questions. They chose weak passwords, ignore [...]