Brian Tokuyoshi - Product Marketing Manager

I had a recent conversation with a friend who just opened a new checking account at a major national bank. My friend was complaining about the difficulty remembering her PIN (personal identification number) for her ATM card because of the policies for the number.

It’s usually passwords that people complain about when it comes to difficult policies.  Typical policies usually require that passwords cannot be shorter than 6 characters, and must have a mix of upper/lower case, numbers, or symbols. Often, such policies make the password computationally safe from a dictionary attack, but users find the resulting password so difficult to memorize that they need a written reminder in order to recall it at a later date.

So I found it interesting that this is a scenario where the PIN was difficult to use.  PIN numbers for ATMs are typically numeric only, so there isn’t the same complexity...

Brian Tokuyoshi - Product Marketing Manager

As the Academy Awards wrap up, I’m reminded of the film Amadeus, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1985. The eponymous film is a dramatization about the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. In a famous scene, Emperor Joseph II, offering his opinion on Mozart’s new symphony, comments that,  “There are simply too many notes”, without providing any deeper insight into which particular sequence trouble him.

Enterprises today are facing a related situation, except the issue should be called “too many encryption keys” as well as its closely related issue called “too many encryption products”. Let’s take a common example. Growing concerns about data breach notification laws lead ACME company to deploy a disk encryption product. Over time new requirements emerge, and ACME realizes that they need to...

I wrote about this case in October and thought at the time it represented a case of prosecutorial indulgence. The issue at stake here is whether or not an undocumented immigrant that uses false identification can be charged with identity theft if the data on the false documentation actually belongs to someone else.

To be clear, the case does not address the issues associated with immigrating illegally or using false documents to obtain work or social benefits. Even the defendent's counsel concedes his client is guilty of those infractions. The sole issue in question here is if you create or purchase a fake Social Security card with an I.D. number on it that belongs to someone else, have you in addition committed identity theft.  It seems like a reach to me and  in October the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Based on this...

WARNING: This posting is off topic.  It's going to happen occasionally.

To be clear, I've never met Peggy Noonan, nor do I ever expect to. As such it's not really Ms. Noonan herself with whom I'm in love. It's her writing. For the last year or more, my regular Saturday morning routine has included reading her column on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. Normally, Ms. Noonan covers political matters, but this week's column focuses on the impact of an apparently still deepening recession. I'll get back to this week's column in a minute, but first let me tell you a few things about Ms. Noonan.

Peggy Noonan first came to national prominence as Ronald Reagan's speech writer. Her book on the experience, What I Saw at the Revolution, is considered one of...