Say a prayer for Joclyn and Jeffrey Bard of Huntington, Long Island. They suffered through the ravages of Superstorm Sandy, as had millions of businesses and households in the northeast U.S. Licking their wounds, the Bards in mid-November filed a lawsuit seeking class-action status before the New York State Supreme Court. They want damages from Cablevision for lost service, saying the cable company should be offering automatic credits to customers.
There is a dirty bomb music video. There are at least three dirty bomb movies.
But, when it comes to reality, such weapons are fairly easy to assemble and activate.
I walked every day with a best friend to Wilson grammar school. And, if memory serves me, the most dangerous things in my school life back then were the too-warm cartons of milk and Miss Hildenbrandt, armed with her fiendish ruler.
Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea, Yemen, Somalia.
Remember that Barry McGuire 1965 song, “Eve of Destruction?” “The eastern world, it is exploding / Violence flarin', bullets loadin' / You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'?”
Except for Troy Alstead, chief financial officer for Starbucks. But more about him later. It is more important to see how the CFO role has evolved and how it matches and mirrors others such as security. The CFO is more visible and influential. Many are able and expected to build strong relationships, across and beyond the company to be strategic business partners.
For cell phone users, and that includes most everyone these days, there are myriad choices in plans beyond the hundreds of phones themselves. Anytime minutes. Off-peak minutes. Domestic roaming charges. International roaming charges. Minutes overage fees. Text messaging plans. Data plans. Limits and slowdowns on data plans.
It was, in its time, a soothing miracle cure or a humiliating school day when I smelled like an over mentholated pine forest. But it’s also an example of a domino falling, which can lead to surprising places, both good and bad. There are domino effect examples throughout the security field, too.
The biggest advances in electronic security, in the past, came after World War II and the Vietnam War. No doubt, homeland security efforts and America’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan have also spurred technology advances. However, what happens in consumer electronics is more influential to the technology and pricing when it comes to enterprise security solutions.
As enterprise security executives cozy up to the C-suite folks, there is more focus on protecting the brand and the organization’s reputation. It may be a more complex assignment than first thought.
Who would have figured? A growing group of people now identify themselves as steampunk, a subgenre of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history and speculative fiction.