Back in November, the blog of venture capitalist Brad Feld became the target of a distributed denial of service (DDoS), knocking the site out of commission for a couple of weeks. In a report released yesterday by Web Applications Security Consortium, a study of internet hacking revealed that the greatest number (24%) of attacks are aimed at defacing sites, followed by the motives of stealing sensitive information (19%), planting malware (16%), and causing monetary loss (13%). An article published last week by Nils Gilman in IET points out that hacking has become a globalized, multi-billion dollar business, where coders sell malware-as-a-service (MaaS) to other criminals and even provide technical support.
Some sort of cap and trade system for carbon emissions seems to be moving closer to reality. While the debate is far from over on whether a system should be implemented, questions on how to implement the system are becoming more relevant: How will caps be set to balance the goal of reducing emissions with the possibility of driving electricity prices higher? Who should regulate the carbon trading market and how? What sort of crazy derivatives will be created on this new market? Marc Stuart in a post on the Greentech Blog suggests that its going to take a while to get things right – but that is not reason not to try. The US benefits as it can draw on five years of European experience but even so the first attempt is unlikely to be perfect.
