Information Assurance, What the Heck is That?

I had the great opportunity to attend a discussion of "Information Assurance" hosted by Saint Michael's College this past Wednesday evening. The speaker was Professor M. E. Kabay of Norwich University. It would be easy, but wrong, to equate information assurance with computer or network security. When as Dr. Kabay asked us to consider the tenets of information assurance, it is quite apparent that concepts or issues like digital signatures, cyptographical methods, and biometrics (to name a few) are mechanisms within the information assurance framework.

In addition, I was particularly gratified to hear Dr. Kabay ask us to fully consider the psycho-social aspects involved in securing information which is often ignored by computer security specialists.

I hope to have another opportunity to hear Dr. Kabay speak again in the future.

Doing some testing at LiveJournal

I have been doing some testing at LiveJournal...JohnCVermont LiveJournal

So far, the testing has been interesting. More on that later.

But why am I testing LiveJournal when I already have a perfectly good Blogger account? It is a good question.

I am testing LiveJournal's blogging software because Blogger's performance is terrible.

So far, the designs and UI for Blogger are somewhat better and more free styles to choose for the free account but the performance of just publishing a single simple blog entry in Blogger is very disappointing.

Although the Blogger UI has a better look and feel, the LiveJournal performance is much better.

I have encountered some problems with actually composing the entries such as inserting a hypertext link which is probably the most common blog publishing action.