The November Atlantic Magazine carries an article, "Hacked!" by James Fallows, who relates the damage done when a (probably) Nigerian con-artist hacks his wife's email account and she loses six years of communications. Excellent read, good advice, and a telling paragraph on the connection between innovation and high-skills immigration.
It's a techno whodunnit plus customer service review -- Google comes out pretty good, all things considered -- combined with a strongly worded consumer advice column. To those who are moving to the "cloud," improve your password security! And back up your e-mail! (For a broader, policy-oriented examination of cybersecurity issues, we recommend the BRT's latest paper, "Mission Critical: A Public-Private Strategy for Effective Cybersecurity.")
We also appreciated this detail in Fallows' piece.
“Every year, we do an immersion session with people involved in consumer operations,” I was told by Birendro Roy, one of the two young engineers at Google who developed the software for the Undeletion Project. He and his colleague Jaishankar Sundararaman were introduced to me as “the people who actually restored your wife’s mail.” (Roy, whose father is from India and mother is from Finland, grew up in Baton Rouge and went to MIT. Sundararaman grew up and went to college in Tamil Nadu, in southern India, and then did graduate work at Virginia Tech. I mention this as part of my ongoing chronicle of America’s strength through attracting foreign talent.) “The consumer reps tell us what are the common user ‘pain points,’ and restoring mail had definitely been something users were requesting.”
Fallows has been covering the immigration issue for some time, we see. The November 1983 edition of The Atlantic published his article, "Immigration: How it's affecting us." His blog at TheAtlantic.com is a must-read for those who follow China and China's econom and civil aviationy; we also appreciate Megan McCardle's blogging at the Atlantic site. Her latest is discouraging, though: "The Incredible Shrinking Supercommittee."