LANSING - Two high-profile events this week provided an excellent opportunity to promote our diversification efforts and showcase some of the great things happening in Michigan. On Tuesday, Governor Granholm and I met with venture-capital firms and life-science industry leaders at the 2010 BIO International Conference (BIO) in Chicago. BIO featured high-level industry leaders discussing
BIRMINGHAM - Scenario planning is an important tool in the realm of cyber security. Stakeholder teams are assembled to create plausible scenarios of possible future threats. Repercussions are predicted to help quantify risk and justify mitigating investments in technology and changes to policy and operations. Here are several cyber security scenarios. The scary thing is,
BIRMINGHAM - Wired's ThreatLevel reported that a disgruntled ex-employee of a car dealership in Austin, Texas, used a black box lock-out device on over a hundred vehicles to disable them or make their horns sound. The service he used is provided by Payment Technologies in Cleveland. The product is well thought out with safety features
LANSING - The headlines definitely point to the kind of week we had at MEDC: "Gov. Jennifer Granholm announces more than 17,300 new jobs for Michigan," "Yacht maker Four Winns to hire 2,320 workers in Cadillac," and, my personal favorite, "2,500-Job Surge to Energize Michigan." On Thursday, company leaders, community representatives, local partners, the Capitol
NEW YORK - Technology executives are signaling a readiness to make critical IT investments, a new survey shows. More than one-third (37 percent) of chief information officers (CIOs) interviewed said, post-recession, they plan to implement software and hardware upgrades that had been deferred due to a soft economy. Others foresee moving forward with virtualization projects
BIRMINGHAM - We have had eleven days to absorb the implications of wide spread Chinese supported attacks against Google and thirty or so other organizations. The US Secretary of State made one of the most affirmative statements on Internet freedom yet articulated by a government. Various policy analysts have chimed in as well. Some thoughts
BIRMINGHAM - Last month, I related communications I had with The Jester, an individual who has decided to express his outrage at Jihadist organizations by systematically taking down their web sites. A week later, we learned that engineers at Google had been engaging in their own form of cyber vigilantism by hacking into a command
BIRMINGHAM - I had an interesting demonstration in January from a hacker who goes by the handle "The Jester" or in so-called l33t speak, th3j35t3r which is his Twitter ID. Since January 1, The Jester has been systematically wreaking havoc with several websites he associates with Al Quiada and Jihadists via a Denial of Service
SAN FRANCISCO - We've heard a lot about security issues with the iPhone, but the BlackBerry isn't immune to threats from malicious apps. Tyler Shields, a senior researcher at the Veracode Research Lab, has written a piece of spyware that allowed me to shoot an SMS command to his phone and have his contact list
STAMFORD - A lot has happened in a year within the social software and collaboration space. And analyst firm Gartner says companies quickly need to develop best practices for embracing social networking with a maximum of safety. "The growing use of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by business users has resulted in serious enterprise