Nota Bene

Hurray! One of my long held dreams has come true! To fly Singapore to New York – the longest commercial flight route in the world (almost), and probably the all-time longest in the history of commercial civil aviation. The flight takes from around 18 to more than 20 hours (depending on the wind). No stops, one fuel tank, 16,000 kilometers. Strewth!

JFK EWR – thank goodness

// I wrote ‘(almost)’ above… Actually, the longest flight route in the world is the one that goes in the opposite direction – from New York to Singapore. It’s 15 minutes longer, as the wind tends to be kinder in that direction.

Read on: So what on earth to do during all that time?…

Who are these folks? Maybe the color of (most of) the ties should give you a clue…

And I was trying to blend in…

…For most of you they’ll never have anything to do with you, and you’ll have nothing to do with them. You hope.

But for those who make up the Internet minority who steal money from online banks, clog up e-mail with spam, hack websites, produce credit cards with stolen numbers, etc. – maybe they should take note of this modest crowd. Because these here suits and ties have a particular, burning… obsessive professional interest in that same Internet minority.

Read on: so, who are these people?…

I think Canberra has to be the most unusual capital in the world.

Capitals are normally grand old cities (well, besides Washington, Brasilia, and a few other such exceptions to the rule), with pompous historical centers, town halls, royal residences, mayor’s offices, large central squares, bronze horsemen, pigeons galore, paving stones galore; crowds of locals plus plenty of tourists with their cameras a-clicking. Plus the central railroad station. Plus traffic jams.

In Canberra it’s all just the opposite. It’s a small city of nearly 370,000. Very cozy, very green. In the middle instead of a square there’s a lake. It’s also a very young city – just 100 years old or thereabouts. There are no traffic jams! At all! Ever! From parliament to any ministry it’s just a five or ten minute drive. Parking space-wise there are also no probs at all. There are never that many folks about, civil servants are rarely to be seen on the streets in the center (in the university district it’s a little more lively – pubs and cafes, but not that many). Up above of course there’s the bright, hot Oz sun.

Rush hour

Read on: finally 404!…

How time flies. Though we sponsor Ferrari’s F1 team, I haven’t made it to a single Grand Prix race this year – and it’s November already! 2013? Where did that go?…

Anyway, better late than never – here we are, at the 17^th 2013 Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.

Sooo, Abu Dhabi… what can I say? One word – a surname – sums it up best: Vettel. This man is just…irrepressible. An exceptionally skillful driver. A skillfully exceptional car. They must add Red Bull to the gas or something… But no – the real secret weapon car-wise is this unassuming fella. Jeeez, what a fearsome combo… these two on energy drinks. So fearsome of late that the red meat isn’t letting anyone else have a look in. Black horses in yellow fields included.

Alonso for the umpteenth time already started from somewhere in the middle, but then incredibly forced his way through to up near the front. This time he was fifth to pass the checkered flag. His leaving the second pitstop – have a watch on YouTube; clearly more than a little vexed was he…

Qualifying – the view from the garage

Read on: fitting-up, start, fight!…

From time to time I tend to share some geo-politico-economic observations from my travels. Here’s one of those times…

There’s this island in the Atlantic – an island called Ireland. There aren’t a lot of useful things to extract out of the ground there, the climate’s nothing to write home about, and its location is quite a bit out of the way – let’s say… Euro-peripheral. And every now and again it suffers from a serious alien financial crisis.

So what’s a country with hardly the best physique in the gym to do? Think – that’s what!

And that’s just what they did…

They thought about – and followed through with – making the country as attractive as possible to foreign investors and companies by creating the most comfortable business environment possible. They even created a special governmental agency for this purpose – IDA Ireland, made up of an army of enthusiastic civil servants whose sole task is to promote their country. And they’ve done rather well so far: there are around a thousand foreign companies located here, and that includes many IT ones. Google’s here, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, and many others. In fact everyone’s here! Now Facebook too – lured here by Bono (just don’t mention ‘philanthropy’ and ‘offshore tax residency’ in the same sentence:).

The keen-as-mustard Ireland promotion agency reminds me of a similar agency in Singapore, which has helped enormously the country’s strategy of industrialization and modernization to develop the economy. Btw, Ireland’s Ryanair is the second largest airline in Europe (after Lufthansa) – just another example of this country’s low-key powerhouse status. There’s more to Ireland than long-pour Guinness meets the eye.

So what was I doing in Ireland? I was here for a local IT posse get-together – this time an exhibition-conference called Web Summit: more than 600 (!) startups of varying caliber and nationality, all in a small and tightly packed exhibition center. The startups show themselves off and get acquainted with neighbors and investors, while big companies have a gander at all the fresh innovative ideas. All good, exciting, interesting, worthwhile and proper!

Read more: more silicon island…

Prevention is better than cure. And that goes for fighting patent trolls too.

With this old adage in mind we recently filed a lawsuit against Device Security LLC seeking invalidation and non-infringement of the patent covering the tech involved in protecting data on mobile devices. This marks a distinct change of tactics on our behalf: Though we’ve been warring with patent parasites for eight years already, this is the first time we’ve gone for a preventative attack.

Read on: So why have we done this, and why?…

Hi folks, from Cartagena, Colombia!

You may be puzzled why this particular city in South America suddenly became the safest on the planet… Read on…

But first:

Ohhh how HOT it is here, but worse – it’s INSANELY humid too. But then it would be: from September through December here it’s the rain season. If you go out onto the street for as little as 10 minutes you literally end up drenched with sweat! You kinda just get used to it after the first day here, but at first it’s… most unusual and uncomfortable, to say the least.

Inside, with a/c on, of course things are different, but then I’m told you can easily catch a cold with all the extreme changes of temperature and humidity. Must say, it is odd how when you open the balcony window condensation swiftly forms on the ceiling, which collects into drops, and which then fall unpredictably onto the old loaf!

More: what are we doing here?…

բարեւ բոլորին!

// Not sure if Google translated ‘Hello everybody’ into Armenian correctly. This is just to flag that I was in this exotic (for most readers) country, as usual for a nice mix of business and pleasure – both covered below.

Last week I had the honor of receiving a prestigious academic award from the State Engineering University of Armenia, which awarded me an honorary doctorate! Namely, ‘for an outstanding contribution in the field of information security’, and handed to me by the uni’s rector.

KL/SEUA backgammon!

Hurray! And thank you!

This makes me a doctor in two countries! I’m now a ‘British-Armenian academic’, as some scoffed :) (my first doctorate was from Plymouth Uni).

Oops, beg your pardon – the above pic was a bit of fun. Here come the ‘proper’ photos…

Read on: proper photos тв Armenian landscapes…

Hola, a todos!

A couple of years ago a bunch of like-minded adventure seekers and I decided to make the long trip to Peru in South America to the long-abandoned City of the Incas – Machu Picchu. We took plenty of photos, and I took detailed notes of our experiences along the way.

The result (finally!) is a book that’s to be published – currently online here in pdf format – chock full of hi-res pics from our travels accompanied by my commentary.

Read on: An unforgettable trip that easily made it into my

“The person needs to be brought round to the idea that he has to part with his money. He needs to be morally disarmed, and his proprietary instincts need to be stifled.”

No, not Don Draper; this is a quote of Ostap Bender, a classic fictional hero from 1930s Russian literature. And no, there’s no relation to the other famous Bender!

Thus, it would appear that, curiously, Mr. Bender knew a thing or two about capitalism, despite being from a Communist country. Hmmm…

Anyway, what he knew is that it’s sometimes possible to make folks part with their hard-earned shekels if they are manipulated the right way – the folks, that is.

Fast-forward to today… and we find this kind of manipulation alive and well – in a modern, hi-tech, cyber kinda way: Today, folks gladly hand over their Benjamins to the crims behind blockers, aka ransomware, an especially sneaky form of computer malevolence. But have no fear, KL users: in the new version of KIS, we’ve got a nice surprise waiting for the blocking blockheads and their blockers.

The principle and tech behind blockers/ransomware are rather simple.

Using one of the various means available (for example, via a software vulnerability), a malicious program is sneaked into computer, which then displays an amusing (not) photo with scary (not – with KIS:) – text, and blocks the desktop and all other programs’ windows.

Unblocking is only possible (well, was possible – see below) by entering a unique code, which of course you can only get from the cyber-tricksters who infected the comp in the first place, and of course – for a fee, through premium SMS numbers or online payment systems. Until you pay the ransom, the comp remains kidnapped – no matter what you do (including Ctrl+Alt+Del), and no matter what programs you try to run (including antivirus); all you see is something like this:

The rise, the decline & the return of ransomware…