risk

When I think of Risk, the board game, I think of sitting around a table with a bunch of buddies, arguing loudly, cursing dice-rolls, and just generally being aggravated for several hours.

Risk: The Official Game for iPhone, iPod, and iPad offers a wholly different experience--and that's not at all a bad thing.

For one thing, it gives you the opportunity to play solo, something you can't do with the board game. You can declare war on two-five AI opponents and choose between three difficulty levels.

On the multiplayer side, Risk lets you "pass and play" … Read more

Though cloud computing is often touted as a cost-saver for companies, IT pros still have lingering doubts about the safety and security of working in the cloud.

Around 45 percent of IT professionals recently surveyed by the ISACA (formerly known as the Information Systems Audit and Control Association) said the risks involved in cloud computing outshine any benefits. A global organization focused on the auditing and security of information systems, the ISACA conducted its first annual IT Risk/Reward Barometer survey (PDF) in March.

Questioning more than 1,800 IT professionals in the U.S. who are members of the … Read more

Consideo's Modeler is the sort of unusual software that turns up from time to time. It's designed to visualize and analyze "connections of arguments, ideas, strategies, projects, and processes." It can model complex, multifactor business strategies, but it's useful to everyone from scientists to students. Among the real-world virtues it claims are the ability to shorten meetings by focusing questions and clarifying arguments. It functions as both a qualitative analysis tool, identifying, tracing, and describing factors and connections ranging from "weak" to "strong," and a quantitative modeler, running simulations based on … Read more

Although there is no conclusive proof that mobile phones cause cancer, a Maine legislator wants to require all mobile phones sold in the state to carry warnings that say mobile phones may do so.

State Rep. Andrea Boland, a Democrat, told the Associated Press that "numerous studies point to the cancer risk." She has worked her proposal into the upcoming schedule for the 2010 session in Maine's legislature. Boland said that she uses a speaker, so she can keep her mobile phone away from her head. She also keeps it off unless she knows someone will call her.

If Boland's bill makes it through the state legislature, vendors would be forced to place labels on all mobile phones and packaging that tell customers they could get brain cancer from using the device. Those warnings would also recommend those people keep phones as far away from their bodies as possible.

Boland is apparently acting in what she believes is her constituents' best interest. But the debate over whether or not mobile phones really cause brain cancer rages on. So far, there is no conclusive evidence on either side of the debate for legislators to summarily require all mobile phones within the state to carry a cancer warning.… Read more

Most businesses seek competitive advantage through some kind of change. Whether they want to beat the competition to market with a new service or introduce new product categories, disruption is the norm.

The challenge in today's IT-centric world is that every one of those disruptions requires a software change, introducing the potential for downtime and lost revenue.

Change control and the associated risk mitigation is a big problem that every large organization faces. Last year, the London Stock Exchange crashed during a software change and was down for more than seven hours, costing traders millions, if not billions of … Read more

ID Theft Calculator from White Sky is a free utility that scans your PC and assesses your vulnerability to online identity theft, a growing problem. It's linked to the publisher's ID Vault online financial identity protection service, which isn't free.

ID Theft Calculator is simplicity itself; just a wizard that scans your computer for personal data, especially financial data, and passwords, account numbers, and other potentially compromising information. It displays the results of the scan on a colorful graph representing your risk of online identity theft, and it offers a link to learn about what you can … Read more

Web 2.0 sites that enable people to create content are increasingly used to carry out a wide range of attacks, according to a new security study.

Websense's State of Internet Security" (PDF), released Tuesday, notes that attackers are focusing their attention on interactive Web 2.0 elements. Some 95 percent of user-generated comments on blogs, message boards, and chat rooms are either spam or contain malicious links, the security vendor warned.

"The very aspects of Web 2.0 sites that have made them so revolutionary--the dynamic nature of content on the sites, the ability for anyone … Read more

Plenty of news to talk about, but first we recap our weekends. We all used the holiday weekend differently: Jeff sailed a boat (in the sun!) on the Potomac river; Wilson became the only Asian Agent Double Oh Nothing for Her Majesty's Secret Service, and I had the unfortunate experience of actually laboring at work on Labor Day. Hear all the juicy details on the first half of the show.

Next up, we talk about Google's latest product, a version of the popular Monopoly real estate game that uses Google Maps as a giant playing board! Turns out that this isn't the first role-playing game to incorporate the popular online mapping Web site: users found a way to play RISK using Google Maps when it first debuted in 2005!

Speaking of things to come, we always like taking a look into the future, so this week in time travel, we bring you Boondock Saints 2! Every male born after the year 1970 should be well aware of the original Boondock Saints, which featured two brothers on a mission to cleanse their city of scumbags--classic story, but something about the theatrical gunfights and archetypal characters made it into a cult classic. We're excited about the new one, even though it doesn't feature Willem Dafoe.

Finally, in typical Monday show fashion, we delve off into a trip down memory lane and rediscover our love for Beavis and Butthead, who recently made a short comeback to promote Mike Judge's latest film "Extract." Surprise! Wilson hates it. All that and more on today's episode of The 404!

In my humble opinion, the RSA 2009 security conference, held this week in San Francisco, was extremely flat compared with past years. Yes, the economy had a lot to do with it. I believe last year's attendance was around 17,000 people, and I've heard that this year was off about 12 percent to 13 percent. Personally, I can't believe there were more than 10,000 folks there.

Beyond economic woes however, RSA 2009 was still rather lifeless for a few reasons:

The speakers. The keynote speakers really had nothing new to say. This was especially troubling … Read more