Giving thanks to Bill Gates

So His Billness is set to retire this summer, stepping down from that small software company outside of Seattle that he began at about the same time that I was starting my own humble career in IT. We both are about the same age (well, he is a bit younger) and have three kids (and they are a lot younger than mine). While I am not ready to retire (my own funds are shall we say a bit more modest), it is interesting to see how my own career has tracked Gates’. And I just wanted to say, thanks Bill. Thanks for making my career so interesting and exciting: if Microsoft (and others, I don’t want to just blame them) had made better products, I probably would have less to write about as a tech journalist and fewer support issues when I was on the front lines toiling in the Information Centers of yore.

Lately, I say thanks Bill for Vista: if you had stuck with XP, we would be bored writing about it by now and using it wouldn’t be as challenging. Vista has given us full employment for IT people for years to come as we track down those drivers, buy more RAM, and mess with Aero. And thanks for all the fun with Yahoo over the past couple of months, too. That has been very entertaining; even it is mostly watching Ballmer doing another one of his famous hyper-kinetic dances. He learned from the master, to be sure.

I wanted to especially thank Bill for publicly cursing me out for some of the op/ed pieces that I wrote for Network Computing: there was this scene in one of those posh Palm Springs hotels where I met him randomly in the lobby, and asked innocently what he thought of my articles. (I guess this is around 1991.) For what seemed like eternity but was just a few minutes, he proceeded to use most of George Carlin’s famous seven words and told me exactly how little he valued my ideas, writing style, publication, and I think ancestry and family background too (memory is a bit faint on these last couple of points). Why thank him? Well, it gave me my requisite story to tell people about my own Gates Encounter. There were other times where I interviewed him, back in those early days when he only had a couple of Wagged hall monitors nearby, and they were interesting, but not as good stories.

I also wanted to also thank Bill for killing off a bunch of products that we are all better off not having around us anymore: things like Microsoft Bob, OS/2, Netware, DOS, Windows ME, Lotus 1-2-3, Word Perfect, and Web TV. But not NT: they can’t seem to kill that sucker no matter how hard they try. And speaking of NT, thanks Bill for producing such an insecure OS that helped generate of one of my favorite PC Week cover stories back in the late 1980s: we wrote about how anyone could take over a server with a simple boot floppy and physical access to the machine. Ah, those were the days! Remember floppies? Thanks for making software so big they now only fit on DVDs! Forget about floppies! Too bad we can’t forget about Hotmail, Active X and MSN, they have generated lots of extra hours of support for me over the years, and all deserve to be retired now.

And how can you not appreciate all the work that Microsoft has done to introduce such great phrases into the IT lexicon, things like “fear, uncertainty and doubt,” which is what they say before they actually write one line of code, or “we are on a product death march” when they are close to releasing their first beta, or “our software is now code complete,” which is what they say when they are on their second beta, or “our software is now released to manufacturing,” which is what they say when they first take money from paying customers. Who could forget such phrases as “cut off Netscape’s air supply” during the monopoly trials of the 1990s: now Netscape is just a quivering mass of open source jello somewhere inside the Googleplex, and Microsoft is still a monopolist, but the world is supposedly better off.

Speaking of lawsuits and monopolies, if you are a lawyer, you probably have your own special series of thank yous to Bill. Microsoft has been great at feeding you over the years, to the tune of some $9 billion. At one time, the company had 130 different active suits underway, with companies such as AT&T, IBM, the state of Montana, and Sun. Indeed, Sun has its own special thanks, it got a bunch of cash from Microsoft for its troubles, and all those times that Scott McNealy called Windows a hairball of an operating system and used Microsoft’s foibles to amuse his audiences, too.

So let’s all thank Bill on all his years of service and congratulate him on his upcoming retirement. He has served us all well and made our industry entertaining, fun, and even profitable for some. This column is taken from a series of (hopefully humorous) keynote speeches that I will be doing this month as my own personal tribute. If you want to hire me to continue the celebration and come speak at your organization, let me know.

Beware of network printer hacks

I am not sure that I should be telling you this, but your network is a sitting duck for a break-in that is both so elegant and potentially dangerous.

All you need is your Web browser and some basic knowledge, and while I have put a few things together in this post, it didn’t take me more than a few minutes of research to do it. This exploit can easily pass through your firewalls, it can get around your most sophisticated intrusion prevention systems, and once someone is inside your network, they can operate in full view of your anyone, avoiding the scrutiny of even the savviest network administrator.

How so, you might ask? Go to Google and type in the following text in the search field, and you’ll see an example of what I am talking about:

inurl:hp/device/this.LCDispatcher

What is going on here? Simple. Your print servers (among other devices that are connected to your network) have built-in Web and other servers that can be used to launch an attack on your network. Many of these print servers have been long forgotten about by anyone in IT. They operate from a position of trust inside your network—they have to, otherwise no one would get anything printed out on them. And if you click on any of the retrieved pages in our search above, you will be transported instantly to print servers that are sitting ducks for hackers to take over. I managed to connect to ones in China and Germany, and see that some are needing toner or paper, for example.

Yes, it will take a bit more work to install some rogue application, and yes, just Googling them isn’t really an exploit, but you should have gotten a chill up your back as I did when I first started thinking about this situation.

And print servers aren’t the only sitting ducks, just the easiest to explain. How many other IP-connected devices are running on your network that have been long since installed and forgotten about? Web cameras? Industrial equipment? Fax servers? Scanners? These last two could be even more trouble, because they come with phone lines to the outside world that a hacker could use for further exploits.

As the number of these networked devices increases, the situation is only going to get worse. So what can you do to stop these sorts of attacks? First off, take the time to first locate all these forgotten servers. Do a regular scan of what active IPs are out on your network, and see if you can associate all of them with known users. Start doing the research on the unreconized IP addresses.

Second, scan for traffic on port 9100, this is often the port used by print servers and it is an easy way to track down the servers that you have forgotten. Finally, take some time to read through this documentation from HP (if you have HP servers) or something similar from your vendor:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=bpj05999

Those of you that have additional commentary, I would love to hear from you, please post your suggestions and I will share them.

This column also ran in Baseline Magazine’s Web edition this week.

Time to talk about tablet PCs

Tablet PCs have firmly established themselves in certain vertical markets where users don’t have offices or need to compute while standing. But as the tablet market matures, more sedentary office workers could benefit from using them, particularly when it comes to annotation and approval tasks. This presents opportunities for solution providers to spread the message about tablets.

In my story for eWeek’s Channel Insider this week, I talk about what the channel can do to help promote tablets as a solution for their customers.

What becomes collaboration most

What makes the PC successful as a personal productivity tool has also been its biggest obstacle towards better collaboration, that it is personal. And the more powerful PCs become, they more difficult it is to collaborate with them.

The primary collaboration tool today is still what it was ten years ago: sending an email attachment with a Powerpoint deck or Word document back and forth between two or more parties. It is a serial form of collaboration: I put together my work product, send it to you, and you send back your thoughts or changes. It is fraught with problems: I have to wait on your revisions before adding my own, and if I don’t agree with them, we pretty much have to start the process from scratch. I have seen documents that had more changes and comments than the original text.

Weren’t local area networks supposed to help us share our documents, at least around the office? Now the hard disks on the average computer can contain hundreds of gigabytes, so we can carry around our entire work output for the last decade and still have room to digitize our movies, music, and pictures. And just in case we don’t carry our PCs around, we all have iPods and can shut out the rest of the world by booting them up. Our electronic cocoon has become more potent.

Wasn’t a constant Internet connection supposed to make it easier to connect distributed work teams? Well, it has made email even more powerful, and now most of us feel bereft when we are off line for a few hours. Organizations like CA that turned off their corporate email system for several hours a day (which they did in the early 90s to get people to actually move around and talk to each other) seem so quaint now.

What about blogs and wikis, putting the power of communication in the hands of the common folk? Still, email is the main notification system of when this content changes. And while Google Docs and all those nifty Web 2.0 mashups have made it easier to build collaborative applications, someone still needs to collect the data sources together and do the heavy lifting. And social networks, which are great at grabbing and spamming your contact list, aren’t really all about collaboration, but more about who can collect the most names fastest. I didn’t do well at popularity contests in junior high, and I still feel somewhat deficient today.

There have been some notable attempts at collaboration, but all have been abject failures. Look at Lotus Notes, which is nearly 20 years old. It is still 95% used as an email system. Yes, it has some wonderful collaborative features, particularly with its SameTime messaging and telecommunications add-ons, but most people don’t know how to build their own Notes apps or don’t have these add-ons installed. The inventor of Notes is now at Microsoft with his Groove product, which is also a great idea that has hasn’t gotten much traction. To get any real collaborative benefit from Groove, you have to change the way you think about your data. Sharepoint isn’t much better, but to leverage that you need a lot of Microsoft infrastructure, and many organizations are just getting started with understanding how to use it for something besides running a simple Web bulletin board.

I’ve seen some promising signs of change, particularly with two-person teams that make use of screen-sharing technologies like LogMeIn or GoToMyPC, where both parties are connected and can control the same desktop, to make changes to a presentation or to interactively edit a document. Call this the Jurassic period of collaboration: we still have a ways to go up to evolutionary chain. Salesforce.com is another good case in point, where multiple people can share contacts and client information, provided they are religious about doing the updates. And a third area that is also promising are shared calendars, which at least make scheduling meetings easier.

So, as PC processors get faster, disks get bigger, and our social networks get larger, we still don’t have the perfect collaboration solution. We still think of the data on our hard disks as our own, not our employer’s. Sharing is still for sissies. Until that attitude changes, the headphones will stay firmly stuck in our ears, blocking out the rest of the world around us.

Running Windows on your Mac

I took a look at two books that offer plenty of guidance to run Windows as a guest OS on your Intel-based Mac. I have an aging G5 and it is getting time for an upgrade, and I am considering which of the four potential solutions to use when I get a new Mac: the Apple-supplied Boot Camp (requires 10.5 OS), Parallels, VMware Fusion, and Sun’s Virtual Box. The two books that are worthy of purchasing are:

• Dwight Silverman’s book from Peachpit press ($35), which doesn’t cover Virtual Box but does a great job showing you the tradeoffs and settings for the other three solutions. He goes into lots of details for new Mac 10.5 users, which is very helpful. He also does a better job about describing how to run Vista as the secondary OS.
• Joe Kissell’s Take Control book ($10 eBook download, paper $22), which includes the free open-source Virtual Box. He goes into more details about how to protect your Windows sessions from exploits (some of which are briefly mentioned in Dwight’s book), and more details on the various Boot Camp options.

Both have step-by-step installation and lots of tweaking tips to get the most out of your mixed mode Mac. Some things that I learned include:

• Fusion supports dual-core CPUs and has less load, making it more attractive for processing-intensive Windows apps
• Neither Parallels or Fusion support Firewire connections, and not all USB ones either.
• Parallels comes with a free install of Kaspersky Anti-virus and has a nifty P2V utility to make virtual copies of running Windows configurations
• Boot Camp is better for Windows gamers, since it isn’t running in a VM session

Both books are excellent resources, written by people who have experimented with the products and know what they are talking about, and filled with copious screen shots and practical advice.

Tritton Micro AX Bluetooth headset

I had a chance to check out a new and very stylish BT headset from Trtitton, the Micro AX. It is about an inch long, and weighs less than 10 grams. The trouble I have with tiny BT headsets is that you can easily loose them in your hair (if I had more hair), or they can easily fall out, which defeats the purpose of wearing them, or their buttons are so small that my fingers invariably fumble. The AX gets around all three of these problems by having a special rubber cleat that grips the inside of your ear, and a big button in the most logical place to answer calls. Plus, it is comfortable too. The sound quality is acceptable for voice calls, although you probably don’t want to listen to music through them. It comes with a very nifty and compact charging station, and the standby time is impressive.

It is about $40 at your favorite electronics retailer.

How to best manage telecommuters

Here’s a common-sense approach to the technology that will significantly boost the productivity of those team members who live elsewhere. If you have remote staff, or are considering a revised telecommuting policy, this column is for you. I have had the pleasure and pain of being on both ends here–as an employee and employer.

Done right, telecommuting can be a real morale and productivity booster. Done wrong, it can be a major disaster. In my column this week in Baseline magazine, I provide 10 tips for managers on how to get the best out of their telecommuters.

Making the switch to computer-based calling

I have been a user of Vonage for my main business line for at least four years and mostly a happy customer. But a series of anticipated moves this summer got me thinking: do I really need this service any longer? And so I have come up with a rather strange plan, so stick with me here for a minute while I explain how I got to my post-VOIP mobile telephony world.

I spend about $60 a month for my business telephone service: half on Vonage, half on AT&T for providing DSL service to my home (which I share for both home and business connectivity). This summer I will be moving across town and splitting off my office into a separate location. First I thought I would just get a cable modem and move the Vonage box and line over to run on that. That is the beauty of tying your business line to a VOIP service: it can move with you. Plus, with the cable downloads at 10 Mb, I can get those mission-critical movies and other image files that are so important to my day-to-day work life.

But the more I pondered that situation, the more I thought I would be better off if I got one of the AT&T broadband PC modems and used my computer for all my outbound calls. The modems are free with rebates and a two-year service plan, and you pay $60 a month for unlimited Internet access. Some of them are USB so can work with desktops, laptops, Macs or Windows. This is the same $60 a month that I was paying for my business line. The downside is that I won’t get anywhere near 10 Mb downloads, but that might cut back on the opportunities to view unneeded visual content.

I am already a big fan of Skype, and they offer an unlimited Skype Out subscription for less than $3 a month to everyplace that I would call with the Vonage account for the most part (you can get more expensive packages if you want to call international places). You can also purchase an inbound number for Skype for a few more dollars a month, but the number of people calling me doesn’t justify this, yet.

There are a couple of important caveats to note here. First, I make a lot of calls to conferencing services, so I need to be able to continue to dial touch tones after the initial call goes through. With Skype, this isn’t a problem: you get a cute little keypad that you can type in your conference number and PIN and away you go.

Second, more importantly, I no longer will be using the actual telephone that has been sitting on my desk for the past 16 years. Granted, this phone has been in many difference cities, and at the beginning of its life was used on New York Telephone where I was paying something like two cents a minute for local calls. The more I thought about my solution, the more I began to miss this old friend and desk totem. As a friend of mine said, it is like you have to clean out the last boxes from your old bedroom at your parents’ house. I will miss the concept of this old Ma Bell ringy-dingy most of all — even though it doesn’t serve any current purpose in my new post-VOIP life.

I don’t mind the headset, and in fact I have a whole passel of Bluetooth headsets that should work on my Mac and Windows PCs for the calls, if I don’t want to use the wired one.

But the third issue is the most important one. To make this trick work, I would need to port my existing Vonage number over to one of my wireless phones. The only way to know if you can do this is to go into an AT&T company-owned store (there are other franchise stores that look exactly the same so it pays to call their support line and find out) and ask them if it is eligible for porting.

I called my local AT&T store and first was told they couldn’t port any Vonage numbers. Then after I persisted, they said I could and just stop by. So far so good.

So what I have in mind is extreme mobility: I should be able to make calls anywhere I have my laptop, as long as I have AT&T broadband service (which should be in most of the major cities I am in). This also has the extra advantage that I am not trying to find Wifi service or have to pay extra when I am in a hotel or airport, because usually those places have wireless broadband. If not, I can use my cell phone, which will be my primary business line. And under the worse case scenario, I can carry an Ethernet cable (remember those) and a phone card and use a payphone!

I am interested in your experiences with the AT&T broadband PC cards, so leave a comment on my Strominator.com blog if you don’t mind. Do you think I am crazy, to contemplate doing this? I think it is kinda exciting.

Anatomy of the YouTube-Pakistan February block

The good folks at RIPE, the European Internet research agency, have put together a fascinating analysis of what happened earlier this year when the Pakistan Telecom tried to hijack the IP address space of YouTube and divert traffic to its own servers. They even have some nice animations of what happened here on their site.

Choosing the right email listserv

I am doing a seminar tonight here in St. Louis that talks about how to use blogs and other Internet tools for self-published authors. And one of the first things that I wanted to talk about has to do with email lists. Ironic, but the underpinning of Web 2.0 is something so old that we take it for granted.

Email is at the core of just about anything else that you do on the Web: it is the primary notification mechanism for Facebook et al. when you make changes to your site. It is the way these social sites find your network of contacts, and the way that you keep your audience informed of what you are doing, too. You can have the best Web site going, but you need to remind people about what you have on it. Ironically, that was the original reason that I started Web Informant lo’ those many years ago.

Why bother with an email list when you can just send out a bunch of emails from your desktop? Several reasons: First, you get a more professional means of communication that can manage all the bounces and mistaken reply-to-everyone situations. Your desktop program isn’t designed to send out a message to hundreds or thousands of recipients either, while the list servers are. You also don’t have to reveal all your subscribers in the “To:” field, which I still see from certain PR people. (Hey, thanks for sending me your contact list! I will be sure to take note of whom you think are my colleagues.) Finally, a list server or list provider can manage unsubscribes automatically, as well as post your messages in an archive that is available online for anyone to review.

Over the years I have used many different technologies to maintain this humble email list, so I have had some experience with the technology. If you are starting a new list, you have three basic choices: the free, the cheap, and the pricey. While price alone is a good way to decide, there are some other reasons that are less obvious. Let’s talk about a few typical providers for each category: Google and Yahoo Groups (free), Mailman hosted by EMWD.com for $4 a month and iContact. If you don’t want to read how to do this and want to watch one of my screencast videos that actually shows you the process, go on over to http://yourpersonalgeek.tv now.

No matter what method you choose, you will need to assemble all your email addresses that you want to start your list with. You can export these from your email program into a text file, and then bring up the file in a word processor program. The first time that you do this is painful, no doubt. You have to cull through all your correspondence, and I guarantee you that many of your addresses will be outdated, given how quickly people change jobs these days.

For free list servers, I like Yahoo Groups. It offers a lot of control, easy list management, and the Web-based control screens are easy to understand and figure out where things are located. There is one big downside, though — the ability to set up large lists quickly. Yahoo only lets you add 10 people a day to your list without asking them to opt-in. To get around this, you can use Google Groups, which supports lists up to 500 names. Google Groups has fewer features though. I use Yahoo Groups for supporting many community lists that I maintain.

To get started, go to groups.google.com or groups.yahoo.com and click on the create a new group button at the top of the page and fill out the form. You can cut and paste the email addresses from your master list right in the Web form and you are ready to go. With both Google and Yahoo, you have a few parameters that you want to make sure you set correctly in terms of who can join your list and how they see messages from you. I suggest you experiment with just a few names as a test before you add the entire list so you can get the hang of things.

Mailman is a more professional program and gives you all sorts of control over the message and recipients, and it is what I currently use for this list. I recommend the provider EMWD.com – there are others but they are more expensive. You need to obtain an account for $10, and this will give you access via the Web to a series of control screens, fill-in forms, and zillions of parameters. This is more complex than Google, but you have more control.  As I said, each list only costs $4 a month to operate. You need to set up a subdomain that points to their list server, and you can usually do that with your registrar’s control panels.

But this may not be fancy enough for your purposes. If you want to add Web links in your emails and track who clicks on which link, such as for promotional purposes, then you want iContact. I personally don’t like rich HTML emails but I know many of you want this, so I mention it here. The cheapest plan is $10 a month for up to 500 names. If you have 2500 names, the fee increases to $30 a month.  The more names, the more you pay a month. The advantage of iContact is that you can send out very snazzy emails, with pictures, color, and links to Web sites, and maintaining lists is all they do. You don’t have to mess with setting up domains or servers, either. And like the others, everything is set up with a series of Web forms that are fairly easy, with lots of control over how the newsletter will look like.

So there you have it. Good luck with your list.