Roam the open, warehouse headquarters of Facebook, and you'll see posters on nearly every wall encouraging innovation. One in particular reads, "Move fast and break things", a principle that Facebook CIO Tim Campos says is core to the success of his 65 person IT team."Facebook is all about innovation. To be the best, we need to innovate. And for people to innovate, they need the freedom to make mistakes, it's part of the learning process," he says. Campos, 38, adds that his IT department has benefitted from operating inside such a ground-breaking enterprise. "We've been fortunate enough to be right next to this huge source of new ideas and innovation, Facebook the product, and those new ideas and innovation are bleeding over to how we think and manage IT at this company," he adds. Since joining Facebook as its CIO in August 2010, Campos has learned a thing or two about innovation: what works, what doesn't and how to foster an environment conducive to it. Here, he shares five lessons he's learned about innovation in the workplace from his first hand experiences with success and failure at Facebook.

 

After Sony finally fully recovered from the PSN hacking incident – reinstating the PlayStation Store yesterday – the company seems to have suffered another embarrassing security breach. This time it’s the Sony Pictures website which has been compromised by the group known as LulzSec, with rather breathtaking results. LulzSec claims it accessed the details of a million customers on the SonyPictures.com site, including emails, home addresses, passwords, dates of birth and other info, of which it copied at least 50,000 and then released them onto the net. They also made off with a number of music coupons and codes. Of course the personal information is the critical part, but the breathtaking aspect is that according to the organisation, the data – including passwords – wasn’t encrypted. LulzSec wrote: “Our goal here is not to come across as master hackers, hence what we’re about to reveal: SonyPictures.com was owned by a very simple SQL injection, one of the most primitive and common vulnerabilities, as we should all know by now. From a single injection, we accessed EVERYTHING. Why do you put such faith in a company that allows itself to become open to these simple attacks?”

 

Lawmakers in the state of Tennessee have passed a potentially significant new law, stating that it is illegal to share passwords to paid-for online services. The bill was promoted by the music industry, keen to find another way to stop music sharing. The law, the first of its kind, is awaiting a signature from the governor, but soon it will be illegal for the people of Tennessee to share passwords to music- or film-streaming services. Apparently the law was aimed at fraudsters who sell these passwords, but it will technically be illegal to use a password belonging to a friend or family member. It is unlikely the police will crack down on siblings sharing an account, but it seems the law could take an interest in any kind of larger scale sharing, such as emailing your password to all your friends.

 

You’ve probably heard a lot about 4G of late, with blisteringly fast download speeds set to change the way we use our mobiles. Some handsets already on sale are being classified as 4G, but are they worth checking out? Exactly how much faster is it than 3G? And when will we be seeing it rolled out completely in the UK? We’ve spoken to industry experts for the full lowdown on everything you need to know about 4G, and it’s a mighty exciting prospect, not just for those heavily into their phones, but for those in rural areas in need of some decent broadband. So no matter if you’re a technophile or technophobe, read on to find out just what it means for you after the break.

 

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop took to the Qualcomm Uplinq stage in San Diego on Thursday to deliver a keynote address where, as is becoming common for the under pressure boss, he pulled no punches. The straight talking former Microsoft man described exactly why Nokia chose to tread the Windows Phone 7 path rather than the green-brick road of Android, and also described how Nokia is no longer in straight competition with other manufacturers in a device environment, but rather fighting on the side of Microsoft in a mobile OS arena. "We believe that what has happened over the last couple of years is that there has been a shift from the battle of devices to a war of ecosystems," he said. "Our strategic premise at Nokia is that there is an opportunity for a third and competitive ecosystem to emerge and that is the basis on which we are going forward.

Yahoo! News 

 

he past six months has seen a 165% rise in the number of women being employed in the digital sector, according to a report from PeoplePerHour.com released today. 48% of these jobs were in the area of design and programming, with 10% of them being in database development. Web graphics and flash programming each represented 9%. "The IT sector had predominately been seen as male dominated, but these figures show that women are easily a match for men in the sector," says PeoplePerHour.com founder and CEO, Xenios Thrasyvoulou. The high statistical increases are likely to be at least partially due to the upswing in employment following the recession. Thrasyvoulou thinks the downturn is part of the reason women may have retrained to find work in the digital sector: "The figures today also show that women who have been hit hardest by the recession are becoming more entrepreneurial and gaining new skills to beat the depressed jobs market."

Shiny Shiny 

 

Yesterday, Google announced that Gmail had again been hit by hacking attacks which allegedly originated from China. The web giant reported a phishing campaign to obtain passwords for its webmail service, but this was no normal phishing scheme, rather a targeted campaign to obtain access to the accounts of senior US officials, journalists and political rights activists. The cyber-ne’er-do-wells’ intention was to monitor said accounts by setting up instructions to forward correspondence on, and apparently White House staff were targets for this surveillance, according to an article by the Wall Street Journal.

 

In Intel’s greatest gift to narcissists, the Museum of Me is a site they have built that displays your entire Facebook life in what appears to be a virtual museum  hosting a rather unsettling retrospective on you. When you visit the site you have give it permission to connect to Facebook in the usual way. It then goes off and grabs your whole world of stuff to build the virtual museum which it displays to you in the form of a rolling movie clip. In case the creepy element was enough, the video tour even has some decidedly strange music (by Takagi Masakatsu), as well as random people standing around in this rather soulless museum, gazing at your stuff as if you were dead. In the first “room” you meet your friends. The second displays all the photos you have uploaded. In the next room, labeled “Travel”, you are shown places you have visited. And so on until the very end when you discover that the whole thing is in fact just a massive ad for Intel’s Core i5 processors. It takes a couple of goes to get it to build—if you don’t get the loading information bar you know it hasn’t worked so hit reload. Depending on how active a Facebook user you are will affect how long you have to wait. In my case, sadly, it was almost immediate.

 

IT roles are fundamentally changing in nature to cope with a hugely different workforce and business environment, according to Forrester. Marc Cecere, VP at the analyst house, told Computerworld UK that completely new models for IT jobs would evolve over the next decade. Speaking ahead of the Forrester IT Forum in Barcelona next week, Cecere said technology departments were beginning a major shift in order to cope with greater demands from end users to implement or use their own systems. The shift was also being prompted by vast changes in the number of external suppliers businesses use. “There’s no doubting that a number of IT roles will become more managerial, more of a broker role,” he said. “It’s a move from building to consulting.” “IT is really flat out at the moment. There’s no capacity and they have so much running,” he said. “On the other side you’ve got tech savvy business people in managerial positions, as well as those entering the workforce, with all sorts of technology demands.” While IT departments were clearly the technology experts in any business, there would be more pressure from a workforce wanting to implement its own technology. As a result, IT staff would have to manage these changes, and make sure other staff understood the implications by educating them. “You’ve always had some departments in businesses rolling out systems, but it’s been under the radar. There’s going to be a lot more of it, and it’ll be a lot more obvious,” he said.

 

Provisions of the Digital Economy Act that could see music and film pirates cut off from the internet are disproportionate, it said, contradicting a recent judgment at the High Court. Frank La Rue, the report’s author and UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, called on the government to “repeal or amend” the legislation. He said he was “alarmed by proposals to disconnect users from Internet access if they violate intellectual property rights”. “This also includes legislation based on the concept of ‘graduated response’, which imposes a series of penalties on copyright infringers that could lead to suspension of Internet service, such as the so-called ‘three strikes law” in France and the Digital Economy Act 2010 of the United Kingdom.” Under the legislation those who do not respond to warnings against unlawful downloading could face a regime “technical measures”, imposed by broadband providers. The sanctions are likely to include speed limits and suspension of access for the most persistent.