Why you Can’t Solve Complex Problems with Simple Solutions
“Huid del pais donde uno solo ejerce todos los poderes: es un pais de esclavos.”
“Flee the country where a lone man holds all power: it is a nation of slaves.”
- Simon Bolivar — Venezuelan Military General and liberator of Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Panama from Spanish rule.
Venezuela has a rich and turbulent history. Like most countries in Latin America, its first meeting with the ‘old world’ was characterised by Spanish conquistadors exploiting its rich natural resources for the purpose of funding the fancies of a monarch half a world away.
Simon Bolivar, the legendary general that brought independence to the region may have freed Venezuela — and other northern Latin American countries — from Spanish rule, however, the exploitation of Venezuela’s natural resources for the sake of appeasing one man’s wants has remained almost constant throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. …
On Blockchain and its potential to change the way we trust one another
In the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) an anonymous developer or group of developers, known only as Satoshi Nakamoto, invented the blockchain technology. The first fully distributed database combining peer-to-peer networking, public-private key cryptography and digital signatures.
Nakamoto used blockchain technology to build a decentralised digital global currency — Bitcoin — that completely removed the need for intermediaries and allowed individuals to send and receive any transaction amount across any geographic region in near real-time. …
Two previous attacks can help us prepare
Recent reports reveal Iran is planning a cyber attack on the United States and the United Kingdom in retaliation for the US’s departure from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (aka The Iran Nuclear Deal).
This type of threat — cyber — is fast becoming part of the geopolitical norm as nation-states try to influence the behaviour of their adversaries, not through all-out war and military confrontation, but by exploiting their dependency on technology.
To understand just how severe a cyber threat from Iran is, it’s important to know what can happen when such an attack is carried out successfully. Two of history’s most successful cyber attacks can help shed some light on what actions public and private firms should take in order to prevent others. …
On Blockchain and its potential to change the way we trust one another
In the wake of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) an anonymous developer or group of developers, known only as Satoshi Nakamoto, invented the blockchain technology. The first fully distributed database combining peer-to-peer networking, public-private key cryptography and digital signatures.
Nakamoto used blockchain technology to build a decentralised digital global currency — Bitcoin — that completely removed the need for intermediaries and allowed individuals to send and receive any transaction amount across any geographic region in near real-time. …
On Monday, the Wall Street Journal came out with a shocking, yet not at all surprising story about how Gmail, the world’s most popular email service, was letting third-party developers read users’ emails. For some, especially those that work in marketing, this was a ‘business-as-usual’ news story, and to some extent it was.
Most of us in the marketing industry have become accustom to, even benefited from, the existence of automated algorithms that scan through users’ messages to pull out key words or phrases that can then be used to either serve frighteningly relevant advertising collateral to users of those services or improve the design and user experience of a particular service. …
Equipping ourselves for the changing online world
Last month, the world was up in arms that Cambridge Analytica and Facebook had betrayed users’ trust by using their private data to potentially swing the 2016 US Presidential election in favour of Donald Trump and the 2016 Brexit Referendum in favour of Britain leaving the European Union.
Facebook’s users are angry, their public representatives are angry, and as Mark Zuckerberg’s 2018 world apology tour shows, Facebook itself is feeling the backlash and is at least trying to appear as if it cares and wants to atone for its mistakes. …
Words by Camilo Lascano Tribin
Well, it’s finally here. Come midnight Thursday, the Y2K of data protection will kick into full swing and business executives across Europe will be waking up on Friday with one burning question on their minds: I hope I didn’t leave anything out!?
That’s right, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, aka, the GDPR hits stores this Friday and anybody who runs a business or is responsible for the security of customer and client data from a marketing perspective through to an operations perspective is on notice.
[Read: Personal privacy and security: Why I’m thankful for the GDPR.] …
Words by Camilo Lascano Tribin
If you were reading this piece in the 1960’s and I asked you for your thoughts on Spain, you’d most likely describe a country brought to its knees by a dictator who jailed and killed political opponents, heavily censored all forms of cultural, religious and artistic expressions and vehemently opposed the notion that Spain was a country full of many different languages and ethnicities. Life in Spain, under the authoritarian rule of Francisco Franco, was a very illiberal affair.
If I were to ask you that question now, I’d be genuinely curious as to what your answer might be. I would venture to guess — based on Spain being a member of various binding treaties that guarantee and promote the right to freedom of expression and human rights (the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights); that it’s a European Union member and one of the most visited countries in the world by tourists, that it’s the home of Pedro Almodóvar, Penelope Cruz and the setting for Vicky, Christina, Barcelona — that you’d probably say it’s a pretty chilled out liberal democracy, known more for being one of the first countries in the world to legalise same-sex marriage than jailing rappers and various other artists for expressing opinions considered anathema by the ruling establishment. …
Words by Camilo Lascano Tribin
Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, it’s hard to feel sorry for either one of them and to be fair none of us really have to. They’re in the wrong, they’ve taken advantage of most people’s reliance on vanity, convenience and addiction to ‘likes’ and turned it into one of the most profitable businesses ever.
It’s not that I’m not mad at Facebook — I am — it’s just that none of the revelations that have come out over the past few months or years are that surprising. Facebook has all this information on us, useful ‘damaging in the wrong hands’ type of information, and they have it not because they stole it from us but because we gave it to them — willingly. We got obsessed with seeing our faces pop up everywhere, obsessed with being able to tell the world who our significant other was, what bands we liked, what books we read, what crew we hung with and what issues we cared about. We got so obsessed with seeing our lives being digitally tracked that we couldn’t even go to the cinema or take a bathroom break without ‘checking-in’ so somebody could ‘check us out’. We wanted to be seen, that was the point of Facebook — yes, yes, the connections, the community, the staying in touch over long distances, these were all part of it — but at the end of the day we just wanted to be seen, for someone on the other side, with a like or a comment, to say ‘I see you and I understand you’. …
Words by Camilo Lascano Tribin
Forget the year of the dog, 2018 is the year of the €20 million/4% annual global revenue fine (whichever is greater). Or if you’re looking for a pun to bring your blood pressure down, it’s the year of British business owners doggedly trying to keep up with all the legislation the EU (and the UK government) keeps throwing at them.
Should SMEs be worried? For those of you that are pressed for time and aren’t interested in the ins and outs of the NIS Directive, the short answer is: no, unless you’re an operator of essential services like water, electricity, transport or health; or you’re a digital service provider of an online marketplace, a search engine or a cloud-computing service, you should be fine. …
About
