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Strata Week: Hadoop adds security to its skill setHadoop and security, surprising results from a consumer data survey, and disconcerting data retention legislation.Here are a few of the data stories that caught my eye this week. Where big data and security collide
Juniper Networks' Chris Hoff has also analyzed the connections between big data and security in a couple of recent posts on his Rational Survivability blog. Hoff contends that while we've had the capabilities to analyze security-related data for some time, that's traditionally happened with specialized security tools, meaning that insights are "often disconnected from the transaction and value of the asset from which they emanate." Hoff continues:
But as both Harris and Hoff argue, Hadoop might help address this as it can handle all an organization's unstructured data and can enable security analysis that isn't "disconnected." And both Harris and Hoff point to Zettaset as an example of a company that is tackling big data and security analysis by using Hadoop.  Strata Conference New York 2011, being held Sept. 22-23, covers the latest and best tools and technologies for data science -- from gathering, cleaning, analyzing, and storing data to communicating data intelligence effectively.Save 30% on registration with the code STN11RAD What's your most important personal data?Concerns about data security also occur at the personal level. To that end, The Locker Project, Singly's open source project to help people collect and control their personal data, recently surveyed people about the data they see as most important. The survey asked people to choose from the following: contacts, messages, events, check-ins, links, photos, music, movies, or browser history. The results are in, and no surprise: photos were listed as the most important, with 37% of respondents (67 out of 179) selecting that option. Forty-six people listed their contacts, and 23 said their messages were most important. Interestingly, browser history, events, and check-ins were rated the lowest. As Singly's Tom Longson ponders:
But just as revealing as the ranking of data were the reasons that people gave for why certain types were most important, as you can see in the word cloud created from their responses.
House panel moves forward on data retention lawThe U.S. Congress is in recess now, but among the last-minute things it accomplished before vacation was passage by the House Judiciary Committee of "The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011." Ostensibly aimed at helping track pedophiles and pornographers online, the bill has raised a number of concerns about Internet data and surveillance. If passed, the law would require, among other things, that Internet companies collect and retain the IP addresses of all users for at least one year. Representative Zoe Lofgren was one of the opponents of the legislation in committee, trying unsuccessfully to introduce amendments that would curb its data retention requirements. She also tried to have the name of the law changed to the "Keep Every American's Digital Data for Submission to the Federal Government Without a Warrant Act of 2011." In addition to concerns over government surveillance, TechDirt's Mike Masnick and the Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez have also pointed to the potential security issues that could arise from lengthy data retention requirements. Sanchez writes:
New data from a very old map
The project to digitize the map, which now resides in Oxford University's Bodleian Library took 15 months to complete. According to the Bodleian, the project explored the map's "'linguistic geographies,' that is the writing used on the map by the scribes who created it, with the aim of offering a re-interpretation of the Gough Map's origins, provenance, purpose and creation of which so little is known." Among the insights gleaned includes the revelation that the text on the Gough Map is the work of at least two different scribes — one from the 14th century and a later one, from the 15th century, who revised some pieces. Furthermore, it was also discovered that the map was made closer to 1375 than 1360, the data often given to it. Got data news?Feel free to email me. Related:
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