A study demonstrates that simply knowing someone’s email (or a similar personal identifier) makes it possible to see what kind of products the victim buys online. The attack leverages the mechanisms used by advertisement companies that can track one person across multiple devices, and it is as simple as forging a browser cookie. In the case of retargeted ads, it is even possible to see what products the victim bought recently. [Read More]

The Standish Group concluded that there are five metrics to determine the chance of success: project size (in terms of the number or people and duration), project management methodology, skills of the team, skills of the product owner, and the organisation’s maturity. The success rates swing from 1 to 81% depending on the extremes, but a study found that exellence may bring the success rate to 95% (Gaikema et al. 2019). Also, an investigation on IT project failures in Malaysia found that, besides a lack of skills, problems such as scope creep, poor specifications, lack of support, and turnover are the most commonly reported issues (Sarif et al. 2018). Kasser&Williams (1998), a baseline for older studies, identifies “poor requirements” as the only frequent technical reason for failure, followed by “human” reasons such as a lack of communication or good project management practices. [Read More]

A startup has some costs and some customers. How much will the costs be with 10x or 100x customers? [Read More]

A POC helps reproduce a vulnerability, but there are no guarantees that its source is reliable. Some are fake, and some contain malicious code. With a heuristic approach, a study found that 4.893 out of the 47.313 examined GitHub repositories may have malicious intent. [Read More]

The mechanism of virality makes the content of the worst kind popular because the closer a post is to be unacceptable, the more popular it becomes. [Read More]