Tech Security Black Monday

It's not a good day for IT security. Two vulnerabilities were announced today, one affecting WiFi for almost everyone, and another that affects public key encryption.

Those who know me are aware that I often relate to most conversations about IT security as alarmist, and often find measures taken in Enterprise security to be self-defeating.

But this time, it's different.

This time the scope of these vulnerabilities is so widespread that many are calling this Black Monday.

Be Not Afraid of This Cloud

We've talked here about the Cloud before and it's likely that we'll be talking about it again. Whether you're ready for it or not, no other advance in business computing has had this big an effect since the dawn of the Internet in business.

So if you want to get ahead of the curve, and be ready for a technology that empowers your business, this is a good time to talk about it. We talked earlier about the what the cloud really is. It's most certainly more than just a decision about whether you'll put your business documents on Google Docs, or store your backups on Dropbox servers. Those are just the leaky edges of a trend that will engulf IT strategies for at least a decade.

Here's how to think about the cloud...

About Cloud Storage

What do you know about Cloud Storage? Everyone is talking about it, some people are using it, some aren't sure if they are, and as with any major shift in technology or computing, there's a lot of folklore and wives tales swirling around the concept. So let's talk about it straight.

Straight Talk

The questions on everyone's lips are, "Is it safe to use cloud storage," and "how will this change what I do when I save documents and media files," and "which cloud storage choice is best for me?"

In the first place, when we talk about cloud storage, we're actually talking about a place in some company's data center where your data resides. This is in contrast to your own hard drive in your own safe, secure home computer or home office.

But is it safe? Cloud storage seems to put your data out of your reach, and in someone else's control. How can that be good? On the other hand, just how safe is your data on a hard drive at home? Let's tell the truth about that first.

How You Manage Passwords

Okay now, tell the truth.

With all the passwords you have to manage just to do your job and stay in touch with friends and family, you cannot possibly have a separate password for every account you manage, can you?

Some systems want you to have the password be a certain length, some want you to use at least one digit and one special character, (but it can only be from a certain subset of acceptable characters,) and some insist that you change the password on a periodic basis.

So you do what almost all the rest of us do. You use a standard personal password for most of your trivial accounts (like the Hilton Honors program and the Starbucks rewards program and your local gardening community forum site), and something special and (hopefully) secure for your online banking or your important social media accounts. But even with that strategy,  it's unlikely that you can keep all those passwords in your memory. So you write it down somewhere, don't you?!

Yes you do! Even the more progressive companies that require you to maintain credentials are beginning to acknowledge this age-old fact. No security system is stronger than the Post-It™Note.

So what are your alternatives? There are two. We'll talk about one today because it's something that's completely within your control

Why We So Afraid of that Cloud?

You'll hear a lot of folks flinging the term around today, some as an epithet, others as a panacea. Cloud computing, or simply The Cloud has come to mean a lot of different things to different people and industries.

Some will tell you that it's a magic elixir that opens a new age of computing and business solutions and makes things possible that never were before. Others will tell you that it's a dangerous trend and that it cedes control of our corporate and cultural data assets to a faceless service provider determined to dissolve our privacy and likely to compromise our proprietary knowledge.

Neither is completely true and we'll see a shift begin from dominance by the latter myth to dominance by the former. If the two camps were tasked with carving up Grandma's best pie, the anti-cloud forces would by far take away most of the delicious calories.

From my observations, and given my opinions about what's possible with The Cloud, it seems that perhaps the division should be canted slightly in the other direction.

Trail of Techs

Technologies I've Known

I'm not sure what provoked the idea, but some reflection of mine on a long gone technology inspired me to make a word cloud from the technologies I've wrestled with in my time.

Some readers here may have become familiar with Wordle  (http://www.wordle.net/) as a handy online tool to create word clouds from source material you supply.  It seemed a perfect tool to visualize this set of operating systems, programming languages, and communication protocols.

The job of creating the word could was easy. A quick list of the names typed into a Google Doc gave me the source material.

A visit to the Wordle website allowed me to paste the words in and experiment with layout for a bit until I had the look and distribution I wanted.

Where I find this particularly interesting is when the process creates the word cloud from a substantial body of work. The primary concepts begin to emerge visually and the tone of the work can be seen a little as well.

Since this was a simple list and the frequency of the words' appearance could not be used to emphasize the important ones, I had to use an advanced feature of the tool at Wordle.

This one allowed me to supply a weighted list of words and phrases and using that it would generate the image.  A little bit of experimentation here with the weights and layout -- and a picture finally emerged that in my opinion, effectively depicts and emphasizes the technologies that have required my attention.

The fun part about this was admiring the final result.  As my eyes wander over it, I am reminded of the quirks and crannies that I've had to discover and adapt to.  I have to confess that a tear comes to my eye when I think back fondly to the rock-solid sturdiness of SCO Unix. It was rock solid that is, if you could somehow live through the installation process from 42 floppy disks and the complex partitioning of your hard drives as you did the installation. There was always the fear that disk #39 would be bad.

I love thinking back to the wild-west chaos of Perl programming syntax where everyone was free to write the program in a completely different way and in a completely different style. And Everyone did! So almost every feature addition or bug fix by a new programmer required that "the whole thing had to be rewritten from scratch."

I remember defending the hermetically sealed isolation between Java programmers and their beloved pointers. And promising that program startup time was not consistent with runtime performance, so it would be okay to write server code with it, maybe even more than user facing code.

I remember arguing with Solaris kernel engineers about the pros and cons to various memory segmentation strategies. And marveling at the elegance of a new filesystem design that seemed capable of lasting through a virtually infinite number of iterations through Moore's Law.

I remember scoffing at the simplicity of HTML and then learning that being simple doesn't mean being easy, and realizing that I'd have to internalize many of the fundamentals (and quirks) of this markup language simply in order to get my job done.

There are dozens of other memories that come back as I look at the trail. I hope that as you gaze upon the odd path through the technologies of the past couple of decades, you'll find your own memories of that time come to light. It's been quite a ride so far, hasn't it?

If you feel inspired to make your own technology Wordle, be sure and drop back in to let us know where to see it.

Why You Should Be Reading Facebook at Work (Pt 3)

We started by looking at why various social media platforms can constitute a vital and valuable part of your business intelligence stream. The principle is that default ways of reading Facebook, Twitter and Google+ may not suffice, but that if you're committed to finding the valuable content, there are ways to get it.

 

This installment looks at how you can use Twitter to be on top of the news at about the same pace as professionals at major news outlets. The two secrets you need are:

• Understanding hashtags
• Using the right tools

Why You Should Be Reading Facebook at Work (Pt. 2)

There is a great deal of value available to us at Facebook and from what people tell me, most of us are leaving the money on the table.

Here's what I mean.  Facebook is more than just a cheerful little place to see our friends' baby pictures.

It's actually a vigorous marketplace and news source.  But you won't get that experience by simply logging in, and scrolling down the default news stream.  Where you get the power is when you start reading what you want, and when you add meaning to your social media graph.

Don't worry, you don't have to dredge up your recollection of Boolean Algebra to do this.  There are some very simple (and logical) actions you can take to make your social media graph more accurate and useful. There are also some simple actions you can take that get you to the pot of gold hiding in the Facebook update stream.

Let's talk about how to get there with Facebook.

Where Next? How About Here!

My friend asked me the other day, "what do you think will be the next big social media influence? I'm hoping to find the next Facebook before it gets big."

After more consideration, I thought that the question we should be asking ourselves is how well we use the networks we already inhabit.  You see, the well established networks (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ -- all of which have well over 100 million subscribers) are vital to business and media communication strategies.  If we fail to use these tools well, then seeking out the 'next hot platform' will not work any better. The endeavor simply dooms us to being participants in the "Red Queen's Race."

Vital questions to ask are:

Following the Discussion

Over the time that online discussions have been around, there has been an evolution in the way we read things. Near the dawn of "social media" the metaphor required that you first find the right discussion, and then you could see what people say. (This was the way it worked in the BBS and "discussion forum" days.)

The current fashion is to start with the people (presumably that you know and trust) and then delve your way into the discussions (which, presumably would be the ones of interest to you). We progressed from "who's talking about my topic" to "what topics are on my friends' minds?"

The mechanism that allows us to use the topic or idea to discover people, and of course to explore the ideas themselves is the #hashtag. Here are some of the things we've learned about the use (and abuse) of the hashtag.

Where do you want your photos?

...everywhere you go, people are taking snapshots on their handy smart phones (even on some not-so-smart phones).

If you want to see the photos your friends are taking, there are several places they might appear.

There are a number of common places that people use, and if you haven't explored them all, you may want to hear about your choices.

A Magic Black Object

While I was growing up, I read a ton of work by the established Science Fiction greats. In fact, until just a very few years ago, the term Science Fiction meant to me, a book or a story written (on paper) by someone who actually had some education in a field of science.

So I was raised on (often) bright visions of the future in which the ingenuity and creativity of man had resulted in devices that seemed incredible, nearly magic.

In fact, it was Arthur C. Clarke, one of the undisputed giants in the field of SF, who said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (Profiles of the Future, 1961)

Well today I hold in my hand an artifact that demonstrates the truth of Clarke's vision.  It is, by inspection, simply an inert black object. But when powered up and operating correctly, it is just the thing I've been waiting for.