But even allowing for our natural tendency towards anarchy, this statement stood right out from the other stuff in the presentation. It’s an odd statistic. How is that data measured? 90% of all documents? 90% of stored bytes? When they said “ever again” did they mean explicitly retrieved by name, or should we include free text searches in that statistic? How long an interval needs to pass before some piece of data is clearly identified as belonging to the 90%, so that steps can be taken to reflect its reduced importance? These questions are just the starting point for an issue that demands quite a lot of thinking. It’s a fascinating finding to be offered to you by a vendor of servers, given that so few of the devices they try to sell to smaller organisations actually reflect this “fact” in their hardware and software specification.”

PC Pro – Dell: 90% of data is never read again

Nonsense, of course, but it helps illustrate a point: You will need a computer password today, maybe a half dozen or more — those secret sign-ins that serve as sentries for everything from Amazon shopping carts to work files to online bank accounts. Just when you have them all sorted out, along comes another “urgent” directive from the bank or IT department — time to reset those codes, for safety’s sake. And the latest lineup of log-ins you’ve concocted won’t last for long, either. Some might temporarily stay in your head, others are jotted on scraps of paper and stuffed in a wallet. A few might be taped to your computer monitor in plain view (or are those are from last year’s batch? Who can remember?).

Now, a study has concluded what lots of us have long suspected: Many of these irritating security measures are a waste of time. The study, by a top researcher at Microsoft, found that instructions intended to spare us from costly computer attacks often exact a much steeper price in the form of user effort and time expended.

“Most security advice simply offers a poor cost-benefit trade-off to users,” wrote its author, Cormac Herley, a principal researcher for Microsoft Research…”

The Boston Globe: Please do not change your password

”Like a bad Hollywood thriller, law firm technology has a villain that’s all too easy to spot. The economic downturn has — to no one’s surprise — taken a toll on the coffers of law firm IT departments: Fully one-third of the 110 Am Law 200 firms participating in our fourteenth annual survey of technology directors reported that their capital budgets were down more than 10 percent this year. Staffing levels and salaries have taken hits, and equipment purchases and software upgrades have been put off. None of it is happy news. (Access all the charts in our survey from the links below.)

‘When I proposed a budget similar to last year, it was clearly communicated [by the firm's technology committee] that it went beyond what the firm wanted to spend on the capital side, by 30-40 percent,’ says a law firm technology director who asked not to be identified. ‘So we had to go back and ask ourselves what we could live without for another year. We might get better performance on [Microsoft] Exchange 2007, but we were going to stay on Exchange 2003. We weren’t going to spend money on new BlackBerrys. We made conscious choices not to do certain things.”’

Law.com – Am Law Tech Survey 2009