My first installment of lunchtime reading brings a number of articles related to technology and security:
- From the “Up From The Ranks” Department: The Los Angeles Times has a very nice profile on Ron Sugar, CEO of Northrop Grumman. Sugar started in South LA, and worked his way up the engineering ranks to become CEO of one of the largest defense contractors… and is running it very successfully. It is always nice to see engineers succeed like this. It is one of the reaons I admire my employer so — they made a very good choice for President — an engineer that worked her way up the ranks at the company.
- From the “Me First! No Me!” Department: The NY Times has an interesting piece on a security battle going on: Symantec and McAffee are battling for your desktop. Their goal is to get their security suite on your computer. Of course, each suite has its impacts. It’s almost like the old battles between Microsoft, WordPerfect, and AmiPro for Word Processor superiority.
- From the “Trusting One’s Family” Department: Speaking of security, there was an interesting security breech over the weekend: personal details about the head of MI6 were publically revealed. The interesting part is the how: his wife bragged about her family on Facebook.
- From the “Book Em” Department: One last item from the NY Times: Yet another idea has emerged from Silicon Valley for these trying times: modelled after Netflix, two young businessmen have started chegg.com, a site that aims to rent textbooks instead of selling them. Some believe it could be quite successful. It is an interesting notion — after all, you don’t need the text after the class (unless you want it for reference).
