Tech Risk & Security

The earthquake stoke southern Taiwan on 26 Dec caused a major disruption of network communication in Hong Kong . It is believed that several cable connecting Taiwan, Japan and US were damaged and the restoration will take days. As banks and stocker brokers rely heavily on electronic settlement and straight though system, their operation are affected. Especially cross country trading, i.e. accepting oversea order to be executed in Hong Kong Exchange and at the same time, placing order to the US market. One of my broker in HK informed me that they will not be able to accept buy order until the network is restored (sell order is possible since they will execute instruction with telephone). The real issue is with STP system, there is a timeout value for each data transmissions and the timeout value is usually set to a reasonable time under normal network connections. The system may retry after timeout but the number of retry will only create more traffic on an already congested network. Th...

These two days a bunch of news related to the digital media distribution appears across the globe. These news seems unrelated and did not go to the frontpage but their total effect will shape our future and the economy. Companies are committed to protect and capitalize their intellectual properties. An regulations is one of the way. Sony BMG settles suit over CDs BBC moves to file-sharing sites The HKSAR Government CITB announced yesterday the following consultation paper which discussed a lot of Internet related copyright issues.

I wrote an article in PISA Journal about UK proposed legislation in banning Denial of Services (DOS). Last week UK enacted a law of similarnature, you can read the comments and full legislation below. UK enacted Police And Justice Act 2006 The definition of a criminal offence is broad and includes "hinder access" ! "(a) to impair the operation of any computer, (b) to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer, or (c) to impair the operation of any such program or the reliability ofany such data,"