Tableau and WikiLeaks

Previously Tableau had allowed thea visualization of the Wikileaks data to appear on their Tableau Public site, this was not the actual emails and documents, but merely a visualization of the data – Tableau Public is a bit like YouTube for data visualization.

However, much liks Amazon, PayPal, and other companies they soon pulled the data from their site ( at the end of 2010).

As a result many people were not happy about this, lots of complaints and accusations about government collaboration, etc.

Below is the formal statement by Tableau on the reasons for the data being taken down.

Wednesday afternoon, Tableau Software removed data visualizations published by WikiLeaks to Tableau Public. We understand this is a sensitive issue and want to assure the public and our users that this was not an easy decision, nor one that we took lightly.

We created Tableau Public—a free service that enables anyone to make interactive graphs from their data and share them online—because we recognized the need for strong analytics tools in a data-driven world. Given the controversy around the WikiLeaks data, we’ve closely followed the debate about who actually has the rights to the leaked data.

Our terms of service require that people using Tableau Public do not upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any content that they do not have the right to make available. Furthermore, if we receive a complaint about a particular set of data, we retain the right to investigate the situation and remove any offending data, if necessary.

Our decision to remove the data from our servers came in response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, when he called for organizations hosting WikiLeaks to terminate their relationship with the website.

This will inevitably be met with mixed reaction. However, our terms of service were created to ensure responsible use of data.

Tableau Software 6.0

Tableau Software‘s just-released 6.0 version may prove to be one of the company’s biggest releases and one that heightens the business intelligence competition with QlikTech, Tibco Spotfire, and Microsoft PowerPivot.

Tableau previewed its latest release in my “Cool BI” class at The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) World Congress in Orlando earlier this month. As I wrote in a recent in-depth review, Tableau’s visual discovery tool is one of the easiest to use.

With Tableau 6.0, customers seem to get the best of both worlds. Tableau’s new Data Engine leverages the source database when necessary, or it can bring portions of the data into memory when that offers better performance. Adding support for Windows 64-bit operating environments improves the product’s scalability.

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Business Intelligence Predictions: Gartner

Gartner has made four predictions for the near future of business intelligence and analytics. Below are some key predictions

• By 2013, 33% of BI functionality will be consumed via handheld devices.
• By 2014, 30% of analytic applications will use in-memory functions to add scale and computational speed. By 2014, 30% of analytic applications will use proactive, predictive and forecasting capabilities.
• By 2014, 40% of spending on business analytics will go to system integrators, not software vendors.
• By 2013, 15% of BI deployments will combine BI, collaboration and social software into decision-making environments.

Mobile Phone Security

Mobile Phone Security Breached

Image via Wikipedia

Mobile calls and texts made on any GSM network can be eavesdropped upon using four cheap phones and open source software, say security researchers.

Karsten Nohl and Sylvain Munaut demonstrated their eavesdropping toolkit at the Chaos Computer Club Congress (CCC) in Berlin. The work builds on earlier research that has found holes in many parts of the most widely used mobile technology. The pair spent a year putting together the parts of the eavesdropping toolkit.

“Now there’s a path from your telephone number to me finding you and listening to your calls,” Mr Nohl told BBC News. “The whole way.”

He said many of the pieces in the eavesdropping toolkit already existed thanks to work by other security researchers but there was one part the pair had to create themselves.

“The one piece that completed the chain was the ability to record data off the air,” he said.

In a demonstration at the CCC, the pair took attendees through all the steps that led from locating a particular phone to seizing its unique ID, then leap-frogging from that to getting hold of data swapped between a handset and a base station as calls are made and texts sent.

Key to grabbing the data from the air were cheap Motorola phones which can have their onboard software swapped for an open source alternative.

“We used the cheap Motorola telephones because a description of their firmware leaked to the internet,” he said.

This led to the creation of open source alternative firmware that, he said, has its “filters” removed so it could see all the data being broadcast by a base station.

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IBM Acquires PSS Systems

The lines between compliance and e-discovery are drawing closer. New York’s IBM has acquired California-based PSS Systems. PSS Systems develops Atlas, an information governance suite that helps users analyze and assess risks in maintaining data and formulate policies and automate workflows to dispose of excess data. According to Ron Ercanbrack, vice president of enterprise content management at IBM, Atlas is a “logical complement” to other IBM products like Content Collector and eDiscovery Analyzer and Manager. “With the acquisition of PSS Systems, we are able to expand our portfolio with a broader set of legal solutions that for the first time link corporate legal hold policies to the reality of how information is managed and disposed of,” explains Ercanbrack.

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