Gamification of the aviation sector

Restructuring IT systems in the aviation sector requires cross-disciplinary collaboration between experts from different organisations and countries. This isn't easy. Can help be found in the world of computer games?

The use of games mechanics for purposes other than pure entertainment is called gamification. In recent years the method has been used in different settings to boost user involvement and motivation linked to a variety of activities.
"In its simplest form this may just be hype, such as awarding points for things like filling out your time sheet before the weekend," says SINTEF researcher Erlend Andreas Gjære. "But our focus is on quite a different track," he says.
Together with researchers from Italy and Germany, Gjære and his colleagues at SINTEF are going to find out how aspects of games technology can be applied in a context somewhat out of the ordinary. Specifically – how to achieve the best possible adaptive solutions to changes in information security, safety, economics and organisation in the aviation sector.

Getting Serious About Mobile Security

Technologies like biometric authentication and DLP are making enterprise mobility more secure. Are mobile UC and mobile-first team collaboration apps keeping pace?

One of my longtime favorite observations about UC and mobility is that everyone in the UC space talks about mobility, but nobody in the mobile business talks about UC. The focus there instead is on security, which happens to be an area of ongoing concern among those of us watching activities around mobile UC and the rise of mobile-first team collaboration apps.

It might seem that the mobile security story broke onto the scene with the advent of BYOD and the trend of allowing personally owned devices to access corporate systems. This trend, however, only intensified what was already a serious information security concern. On top of traditional worries, an organization's attack surface increased exponentially as it rolled out BYOD and had corporate data residing on so many easy to lose or steal devices. Further, as BYOD took off, the only platform capable of delivering enterprise-grade security was BlackBerry, and no one was bringing his or her own BlackBerry.

Britain has declared war on Internet security

For the past two and a half years, many have hoped that the mass surveillance programs revealed by U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden would inspire serious reform of Western intelligence agencies, nudging the post-9/11 national security pendulum back in the direction of privacy and civil liberties. Unfortunately, the opposite is occurring.

With few exceptions, the past year has seen governments around the world double down on intrusive mass surveillance. Unprecedented and draconian new laws crafted in the name of fighting crime and terrorism have emerged in France, Australia and many other countries. Last month the U.S. Senate passed the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, a deceptively named bill that has nothing to do with security and everything to do with having companies give more of their customers’ data to U.S. government agencies. And last week, U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May presented a long-awaited draft of the new Investigatory Powers Bill, a collection of sweeping reforms that would give more powers to British police and spy agencies, including the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the NSA’s close ally and longtime collaborator.

The U.K. draft law is a nightmarish cocktail of bad ideas from both sides of the pond — an authoritarian wish list that goes beyond even the NSA’s powers. Rather than roll back its most indefensible abuses, the text makes clear that the British government intends to retroactively legitimize the most invasive and legally dubious surveillance activities that Snowden exposed. As Snowden put it, the bill is an attempt “to fit the law around the spying, rather than making spying fit the law.” If successful, it will have dire consequences in the U.K., the U.S. and beyond.

Read More: http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/11/britain-has-declared-war-on-internet-security.html