Howard (right) and Prince (below) say online peace can only come when corporations achieve "cyberbalance." Photos: Perimeter

On  the Internet, the good guys and the bad guys are inextricably connected. But what happens when one side gets the upper hand?

By Doug Howard, chief strategy officer, and Kevin Prince, chief technology officer, Perimeter E-Security

(The following is an edited excerpt of the forthcoming book, Security 2020, scheduled to be published next year.)

Since the inception of computers and more specifically, our global reliance upon them, the number, severity, complexity, and source of security threats have all increased exponentially many times over.

Why do threats emerge? Sometimes a developer wants notoriety (that was the primary motivation in the late 90’s and the first few years of the new millennium) but today the main force behind digital threats is the hope of monetary gain.  Political and religious motivations are coming on strong, too.

At the same time, threat mitigation solutions and tactics constantly are developing to deal with these threats.  These solutions evolve over time and balance out each each new threat. The problem comes when threats emerge faster than solutions, and companies lose their balance. More

Laughter and applause greet a dig at the iPhone on Saturday Night Live

SNL's Seth Meyers. Image: NBC

You know you've got a public relations problem when you're a punchline on SNL's Weekend Update.

The host, Seth Meyers, doesn't make a lot of Google (GOOG), Apple (AAPL) and AT&T (T) jokes, but this one worked.

"It was reported this week that Google would soon launch its own cellphone as a challenge to the iPhone. Also a challenge to the iPhone? Making phone calls."

The audience — presumably the usual mix of tourists and enough reception-challenged New Yorkers to appreciate the humor — laughed and applauded.

Video clip below the fold.

UPDATE: The clip has been removed from YouTube by NBC Universal. But you can watch the whole episode below or on hulu.com. The joke begins at 37:20.

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To promote democracy, the United States is working to get Eastern Europe connected to the 'net. The results are more practical.

By Julia Ioffe, Contributor

When the village of Syn’kiv in Western Ukraine first got a computer with web access in 2003, the local priest encouraged people to come out for the grand opening of the library’s Internet center. It had been paid for by the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, and the web access, which was free, was a novelty for this hamlet of 1,100 people.

Since then, however, the residents of Syn’kiv, a town known for its early tomatoes, have used the web to find out more precise local weather forecasts as well as the breeds of tomato best suited for the area and how to grow and fertilize them. In the last six years, this knowledge has helped Syn’kiv double its tomato crop.

Syn’kiv was part of a larger U.S. Embassy push to hook Ukraine, which has one of the lowest Internet penetration rates in Europe, to the web. More

Jason Schwarz's "Seven Reasons the Shorts Love Apple" is an investor's must-read

Source: TheStreet

"If you can keep a good stock down," writes Jason Schwarz, "then you are able to load up for the ride back up. It's like a slingshot — the harder you pull, the more propulsion you generate."

Schwarz, an investment analyst with a knack for self promotion — through a newsletter, an e-book, and a new hardcover — has written an easy-to-follow primer on why Apple (AAPL) has become the hedge funds' favorite punching bag. It was published as a gallery last week in TheStreet by Jim Cramer, a guy who knows a thing or two about manipulating Apple's stock price. (See here.)

For investors who wonder why Apple goes down just when common sense suggests it should go up, it's a must-read.

Below fold, the highlights:

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Lily Sussman is back from Egypt with the laptop that got "blown up" at the Israeli border

Photo: Lily Sussman

Three weeks ago, an American student working in Cairo was questioned for two hours at the Israeli border before security officials confiscated her Apple (AAPL) MacBook, called in a sapper, and shot it full of holes.

Lily Sussman, 21, told the story on her blog, where it drew more than a thousand comments and a fair amount of coverage in the Mideast press.

Before she flew home for the holidays, she gave The Daily News Egypt the video interview posted below the fold.

UPDATE: By luck or careful aim, Sussman's hard drive emerged unscathed. "I've managed to recover all the data!" she writes. "Yayy…It's a survivor. I have yet to hear back from the man handling my case about when and what I will be compensated."

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

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Ma Bell's wireless network is still standing after Friday's grassroots iPhone attack

The appointed hour — Friday, from 12 noon to 1 p.m. PST — came and went and AT&T's (T) 3G cellular network had not been brought to its knees, despite the best efforts of thousands of Apple (AAPL) iPhone users.

"As far as I can tell, there’s been no impact at all," wrote Dan Lyons in The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs at 12:19 p.m. "My iPhone is working just the same as ever. "

It was Lyons, writing as Fake Steve Jobs, who on Monday had encouraged iPhone owners to overwhelm AT&T's network by turning on a data-intensive app and running it for an hour. Operation Chokehold, as he dubbed it, was intended as a protest against AT&T's threatened imposition of data usage fees.

By Wednesday, after the FCC's chief of homeland security issued a stern warning, Lyons began to have second thoughts. But by then the protest had taken on a life of its own. See here.

Although there were scattered reports of slowdowns Friday on the Operation Chokehold Facebook page, AT&T's 3G network seemed to be holding up just fine.

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By 35% a month lately, according to the ad requests pouring into AdMob's network

Click to enlarge. Other includes HTC Desire, Samsung Moment, Samsung Galaxy and HTC Tatoo. Source: AdMob.

"Traffic from Android devices has increased dramatically over the last year," according to a report issued Friday morning by AdMob, the world's largest purveyor of mobile ads.

In November alone, Android devices accounted for 27% of the hits on AdMob's U.S. ad network, up from 20% in October — a 35% increase in one month.

Of course, AdMob is counting ad requests, not handset sales, so its numbers cannot be used to measure market share in the traditional sense. But its reports do provide a monthly snapshot of where the rapidly expanding smartphone market is headed. The growth in Android traffic — fueled by the release of new Android-powered devices — is one of the featured themes of AdMob's November report.

Among its Android-related findings:

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Mostly in the U.S., but Japan, France, Australia and China are coming on fast, says AdMob

Click to enlarge. Source: AdMob

By the end of December, according to Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster, Apple's (AAPL) will have sold 78 million iPhones and iPod touches worldwide.

So where, exactly, are those devices?

A report issued Friday by AdMob, the world's leading supplier of mobile ads, tries to map the location of Apple's handsets country by country based on the number of users who requested at least one of its ads in November — a number that increased 150% in 2009.

Among the highlights of its findings:

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The Beautiful Life will air five episodes on YouTube – and if it's popular enough, it could live on. Photo: Jan Thijs / The CW.

We know that the Internet can build a TV show’s buzz, and sometimes even keep it from getting canceled. But can it bring one back from the dead?

We’ll soon find out: A recently canceled show has come to YouTube.

The Beautiful Life, a drama about the New York modeling scene, met a swift end on the CW early this season. The show had the misfortune of going head-to-head with Glee, the Golden Globe-nominated breakout hit on Fox, which competes for the same young demographic. After managing just 1.4 million viewers for its first episode and 1.1 million for its second, the CW gave The Beautiful Life the ax.

But here’s the twist: One of the show’s producers is Ashton Kutcher, a.k.a. the most popular guy on Twitter. (He has 4.1 million followers.) More

Apple's U.S. smartphone installed base has surpassed Microsoft's for the first time

Click to enlarge. Source: comScore

Given that the iPhone has been outselling Windows Mobile devices in the U.S. for nearly two years, it comes as something of a surprise that Apple (AAPL) has only now caught up to Microsoft (MSFT) in terms of active smartphone users.

But that's what the latest data from comScore show. The bar graph at right, drawn from numbers obtained by FierceDeveloper, shows that the installed base of iPhone users in the U.S. overtook Windows Mobile's sometime between July and October 2009.

Microsoft had a big head start, of course, but its market share has been stagnating lately. Research in Motion (RIMM), by contrast, enjoys both a head start and a growing market share. According to comScore, about 40% of the smartphones still in use in America are BlackBerries, while less than 25% are iPhones.

A copy of comScore's report can be purchased at the compay's site for $4,995.

Below the fold: A full-size version of the chart.

[Follow Philip Elmer-DeWitt on Twitter @philiped]

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