security - semanticweb.com

Tim Berners-Lee Speaks Out About Privacy & the Web

Angela Guess — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:00:43 +0000

Sir Tim Berners-Lee recently spoke out against UK government plans to monitor citizen’s internet use, Ian Katz reports. Katz writes, “The government’s controversial plans to allow intelligence agencies to monitor the internet use and digital communications of every person in the UK suffered a fresh blow on Tuesday when the inventor of the world wide web warned that the measures were dangerous and should be dropped. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who serves as an adviser to the government on how to make public data more accessible, says the extension of the state’s surveillance powers would be a ‘destruction of human rights’ and would make a huge amount of highly intimate information vulnerable to theft or release by corrupt officials.” continued…

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White House Creates Blueprint for Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights

Angela Guess — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 14:30:10 +0000

The Obama administration has announced a blueprint for a consumer privacy bill of rights. The President’s cover letter to the proposal stated, “Never has privacy been more important than today, in the age of the Internet, the World Wide Web and smart phones. In just the last decade, the Internet has enabled a renewal of direct political engagement by citizens around the globe and an explosion of commerce and innovation creating jobs of the future. Much of this innovation is enabled by novel uses of personal information. So, it is incumbent on us to do what we have done throughout history: apply our timeless privacy values to the new technologies and circumstances of our times.” continued…

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A Marriage Made For The Global, Digital Economy

Jennifer Zaino — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 11:34:07 +0000

At the recent SemTech Berlin conference, husband-and-wife team Michael Trevor McDonald and Kim Chandler McDonald, CTO and Executive VP, respectively, of KimmiC, led a session that discussed a marriage of a different sort: that between the Semantic Web and the user interface. The session was described as providing the audience insight into the benefits of the semantic web, given that so much of the world’s economic brain/ecosystem is tied up in the relationships between companies, consumers and suppliers – an interaction between systems and people that is a real-life ‘Matrix’ whose ubiquity is hampered by the lack of a common way of talking about things such that they can be utilized and shared simply, and in a confidential, secure, and vendor-neutral manner.

The Semantic Web Blog had an opportunity to have an email discussion with the Australian-based minds behind KimmiC, and its FlatWorld cloud-based technology for enabling the global, digital economy, to learn more about the SemWeb/UI marriage.

Semantic Web Blog: Help us better understand this idea of The Matrix in the context described – considering the movie, is that a positive analogy and what does the Semantic Web have to do with it?

Michael: I think we can use the analogy pretty well as is. What we have seen in the market is essentially a few large companies trying to subvert the intent of the web into a controlled matrix (controlled by them) that they can exploit – it is, in fact, the cornerstone of their business models.

We view that consumers, once they become more aware of it, will see themselves as a “knowledge/insight” commodity in that they a) control their information and b) control who, when and where (what part) companies/friends/family etc. have access to them – it is most probably the next big frontier.

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The Semantic Web & the Right to be Forgotten

Angela Guess — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 11:00:59 +0000

Dr. Kieron O’Hara has examined how the semantic web might be used to implement a so-called ‘right to be forgotten.’ O’Hara writes, “During the revision of the EU’s data protection directive, attention has focused on a ‘right to be forgotten’. Though the discussion has been largely confined to the legal profession, and has been overlooked by technologists, it does raise technical issues – UK minister Ed Vaizey, and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office have pointed out that rights are only meaningful when they can be enforced and implemented (Out-law.com 2011, ICO 2011). In this article, I look at how such a right might be interpreted and whether it could be enforced using the specific technology of the Semantic Web or the Linked Data Web.” continued…

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Experian Acquires Garlik, Ltd.

Eric Franzon — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:30:07 +0000

Today, Experian, the global information services company, announced that it has acquired Garlik Limited, a provider of web monitoring services based in the United Kingdom. Garlik uses Semantic Web Technologies to help consumers protect themselves from the risks of identity theft and financial fraud. At the last SemTechBiz UK Conference, Steve Harris, CTO of Garlik, presented “Combatting Online Crime with RDF.” Mr. Harris presented a compelling case of Garlik’s use of Semantic Technology throughout its offerings to support business-critical, highly sensitive production systems to financial institutions worldwide. continued…

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WEBCAST: Enterprise Policy Management with Semantic Technologies (presenter, Evren Sirin)

Eric Franzon — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:30:34 +0000

If you missed this excellent live webcast with Evren Sirin, CTO, Clark & Parsia, the recorded webcast is now available. You also can meet Evren in Washington DC, November 29-December 1, 2011 for SemTechBiz DC. The customer mentioned in this case study, JP Morgan Chase, will be co-presenting and discussing how they are implementing Access Control using Semantic Technologies.

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Access control is an essential part of nearly every IT system; continued…

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An RDF based Permissions Model

Kurt Cagle — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 12:00:47 +0000

One of the primary challenges in putting together a good content management system is building a decent permissions model. Whether a particular user or process is able to perform some kind of an action upon a resource or not can be remarkably difficult to establish, especially when there are multiple constraints involved. For an XML-based CMS, this can be even more of a challenge, because the n-dimensional nature of such a constraint model is often difficult to model in hierarchical structures.

However, RDF is far more ideally suited for this particular role. A permissions system is, at its core, a set of assertions about who can do what to what, which fits nicely with the “subject predicate object” model that RDF exemplifies. Moreover, because such models are sparse — the number of assertions is likely to be very small compared to the total potential assertions that are possible — this fits nicely into models where sparseness of data is a common characteristic (again, RDF), as compared to storing this information (expensively) in tabular fields as with a relational database.

I’m working on building an XML-based CMS (specifically on a MarkLogic platform, though I would like to keep it portable), and realized as I was working on it that while the user permissions system that MarkLogic employs is powerful, it’s not portable and there are facets that don’t fit nicely into that particular model. Thus, I decided to chase the RDF triples approach to see if that would work better for this. (The end product may very well be a hybrid approach to take advantage of fast queries, but that’s beyond the scope of this particular article).

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Securing Ourselves through Semantics

Angela Guess — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 11:30:28 +0000

A recent article takes a look at three IT trends that are driving information security evolution. One of these trends is semantic security: “Like IT, humans network to exchange information. However, information security works at a syntactic level, while humans work at a semantic level. Commonly implemented security controls can detect individual words or terms and can block entire traffic for certain ports or addresses. These security controls currently do not work at the semantic level. I may accept and trust news from a friend that ‘the Dow dropped 500 points today.’ However, I would not trust the same friend with the statement that ‘today’s 500 point Dow drop proves the financial collapse of the United States will initiate Armageddon.’” continued…

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The Semantic Link – Episode 9, August 2011

Eric Franzon — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:00:17 +0000

On Friday, August 12, a group of Semantic thought leaders from around the globe met with their host and colleague, Paul Miller, for the ninth installment of the Semantic Link, a monthly podcast covering the world of Semantic Technologies.

In this episode, they were joined by special guest Steve Harris, CTO of Garlik, a UK-based company focused on prevention of identity theft and financial fraud.*

Steve Harris
CTO
Garlik

* On Sept. 26, Steve will present, “Combating Online Crime with RDF” at SemTechBiz UK
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US CIO Speaks Out About Data Security

Angela Guess — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:00:57 +0000

Vivek Kundra, the current US government CIO and a major player in the US’s open data initiatives, recently shared his concerns regarding data security. The article states, “In a wide ranging discussion Friday with President Barack Obama’s top science advisers, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra warned of the dangers of open data access and complained of “an IT cartel” of vendors. He also believes the US can operate with just a few data centres. Kundra, who is leaving his job in mid-August, offered a kaleidoscopic view of his concerns about federal IT in an appearance before President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.” continued…

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Time For Another Look at WebID?

Jennifer Zaino — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 09:56:42 +0000

Looked into WebID lately? Maybe it’s time. The open standard for identity and login seems to be gaining more momentum following the spring W3C Workshop on Identity in the Browser. That’s when W3C WebID Incubator chair Henry Story presented a position case on the standard; that was followed up by the Berlin Social Web event that included an explanatory video of WebID that he created. Recently The Semantic Web Blog also has noticed some positive commentary in the Twittersphere about WebID’s progress, too.

It’s been a few years since Story hit upon the Subject Alternative Name field in x.509 certificates as an appropriate way to accommodate an owner’s WebID URL. (A URL to name things, says Story, webizes trust.) Since then work has been underway to ensure implementations work across browsers and web servers and different systems, and earlier this year the WebID Incubator Group was born to further advance the protocol. “The biggest part of the battle until now was just to get people to realize there is a way of solving these issues they’ve wanted to solve for a long time that was completely open, built into browsers, and could work,” says Story. “So now people are enthusiastic about the concept because it is so simple.”

The problem having been that, without the aid of the Semantic Web, using a client-side certificate will only work with one web site, making it not much more useful than relying on a user name and password at each one anyway. “So that gives a whole lot of hassle for nearly no value, until we discovered how when you merged this with the Semantic Web …you can use this technology people think of as centralized in a de-centralized way,” he says. “And suddenly it works because you use the web in a webbish way, and you distribute trust around the web.”

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The Illusion of Data Anonymization

Angela Guess — Thu, 19 May 2011 11:00:40 +0000

Pete Warden recently commented on anonymized data, stating, “One of the joys of the last few years has been the flood of real-world datasets being released by all sorts of organizations. These usually involve some record of individuals’ activities, so to assuage privacy fears, the distributors will claim that any personally-identifying information (PII) has been stripped. The idea is that this makes it impossible to match any record with the person it’s recording. Something that my friend Arvind Narayanan has taught me, both with theoretical papers and repeated practical demonstrations, is that this anonymization process is an illusion.” continued…

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Security Slammer: Emerging Technologies May Increase Risk, But Not Oversight

Jennifer Zaino — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 01:19:29 +0000

So, what ways do you see your enterprise’s IT security plans evolving as the business begins introducing semantic web technologies to support data integration among applications and web sites; to help with social media analytics initiatives; to back-end massive data analysis services in the cloud; and to affect other new-age Web services within or connected to your enterprise infrastructure?

It won’t come as much of a surprise if the question of securing against risks that potentially arise with these – or any other – emerging technologies is greeted mainly by shoulder shrugs and shy headshakes. Ernst & Young’s 13^th annual Global Information Security

Survey shows that less than a third of global businesses have an IT risk management program capable of addressing the risks related to the use of new technologies.

While the newly released survey was focused on technologies across the board, it does single out that the business adoption of new technologies – cloud computing, social networking and Web 2.0 among them, all of which can intersect in some way with semantic web technologies – are shown to increase risk for 60% of respondents. Just one in ten companies, however, considers examining new and emerging IT trends, whatever they may be, as a very important activity for the information security function to perform.

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