Friday 30 November 2012

Security and Privacy Best Practices


This is a security policy recommended by IEEE with regards to dealing with passwords on the internet.   
I thought I should broadcast this out.

Changing Your Password: 
• Never change your password by following a link in an email that you did not request, since those links might be compromised and redirect you to the wrong place.
• In order for passwords to be effective, you should aim to update your online account passwords every few months or at least once a quarter.

Creating a Strong Password: 
• Variety – Do not use the same password on all the sites you visit.
• Do not use a word from the dictionary.
• Length – Select strong passwords that cannot easily be guessed with 10 or more characters.
• Think of a meaningful phrase, song or quote and turn it into a complex password using the first letter of each word.
• Complexity – Randomly add capital letters, punctuation, or symbols.
• Substitute numbers for letters that look similar (for example, substitute “0“ for “o” or “3“ for “E”.)
• Never give your password to others or write it down.

A few other account security and privacy best practices to keep in mind are:
• Sign out of your account after you use a publicly shared computer.
• Keep your antivirus software up to date.
• Report any privacy issues to relevant service or customer content centers

Sunday 25 November 2012

Data Mining and Operations Research : Excellent Field Of Research




The world is flooded with data from different sources and it is becoming increasingly challenging to extract out useful and meaningful information.   Although enterprises are building large data warehouses where they put some useful facts and dimensions to gather strategy information, maintaining such data warehouses and data marts are becoming costly.

Data mining as a subject offers useful techniques in classifying, predicting and extracting meaningful information using mathematical and scientific approaches, but there is lot to be done in discovering new algorithms and approaches to retrieving meaningful information.

Operations Research offers several mathematical techniques for optimizing and retrieving information solutions.   By researching the techniques using OR and Data mining, there is a potential to unleash exciting ways to mine and efficiently retrieve meaningful information.

This is a field that has not been unleashed yet and is a potential research area.