Is it time for a more civil discourse?

The Internets have always been a place that cultivates the odd duck, the passionate one, the recondite techie who doesn’t quite fit in. Lately, it seems that, just like being an airline passenger, things are getting a bit nastier as we get more crowded in the clouds. The friendly skies are somewhat less so.

Barry Ritholtz, a financial journalist and speaker, has this to say to warn people who are about to post a comment on his blog the Big Picture:

“Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.”

Of course, one could turn off comments on one’s site completely. Or at least try to vet the comments that are coming through to a “real” email address, something other than a random Webmail account. But if the whole nature of the Web is to improve community and bring about better discussions, this can be counter-productive.

Then there is this frightening site, The Blacklist, which is coming online next week at theblackli.st. “The purpose of this website is to expose people that suck and save others from wasting their time, energy or money on them.” (What you don’t know the .st domain? It refers to two small islands off the coast of West Africa, yet another national domain that has been co-opted for commerce.) Say your boss has done you wrong and you want to level the score. You bring up this site and post some information (anonymously, of course). While the owners (who aren’t on the whois registry of course) say they aren’t interested in slander, the potential for this site to be an open chest wound loom large.

Of course, if no one posts anyone to this list, it becomes less useful and less potent. But can the Internets ignore something so tempting? I don’t know. Especially since the owners will pay a buck per submission, and advertising on Craigslist.

Many sites are hiring folks who have specific responsibilities to watch over our community, curate comments, and cross-post to bring our articles and link far and wide. I think this is becoming an increasingly important job position, and it requires a rare skill of technological and psychological flair and finesse.

I think that Ritholtz, in an odd way, sums things up nicely. Perhaps if we all took a moment to chill and just take a couple of deep breaths that might help. Now if we could only work on the airline passengers to ratchet things down next.

Network Box Offers New Form of Internet Security Services

If you are tired of patching your many security solutions and are looking for a simple yet effective managed security appliance, Network Box offers a new protection direction. Combining several dozen active scanning technologies, they can provide advanced anti-malware and network protection within seconds of discovering an attack.

You can view my latest screencast video review here of this product.

Improving enterprise video using Blue Coat MACH5

My latest screencast review is for Blue Coat Networkson using their MACH5 Web optimization appliance to better manage video use across enterprise networks.

We all know that video can be a network bandwidth hog, but these days there are more and more legitimate business needs for video, such as Intel’s site here. . Each minute on You Tube alone, people from all over are uploading more than 24 hours of video content!

It works for live, streaming, and on-demand video, and is easy to setup and configure.

What the Cell Phone Spoofing/UK Scandal Means to You

So the news this week is filled with ever-changing horror about how various reporters in the Murdoch’s News Corp. “hacked” into the cell phone voice mail accounts of prominent Britons. What exactly does this mean, and why should you care?

The hacking was minimal at best: apparently, reporters asked their shift editor to make calls using a phone spoofing service to the cell of the intended victim. These services can be set up to use any specified caller ID, so once a mobile number is known, it is easy to obtain your voicemail. Since most cell phones allow immediate access to your voicemail from your own calling number without any password or PIN number. Three of the four US cellular carriers operate this way – only Verizon requires all subscribers to use a PIN on their voicemail accounts.

In the past, many of us guarded our cell numbers for financial reasons: plans cost a lot for few minutes. But as cell plans got more generous with their minutes, and as more carriers made mobile-to-mobile minutes “free,” more of us have given out our cell numbers on our business cards and in our email signatures.

So what is involved with spoofing your cell number? The market is huge, and the number of sites that offer this “service” seem somewhat like walking past the part of town where merchandise is offered for sale on blankets along the sidewalk. Basically, you sign up for a service (there are some free ones around, too). Next, you dial an access number for the service and then enter the number you want to call and then the caller id number you want to be displayed. Most services have simple voice prompts. When your call is completed, your party will see the caller ID that you entered, rather than the “real” calling number of your phone.

Once someone accesses your voicemail, there is really no way you can know it, unless they delete your messages. Most services have a way to mark a message as unread after it has been listened to.

If you want to know more about caller ID spoofing, check out this Web site which has a nice historical perspective.

Skype Out has had for a long time the ability to adjust its caller ID, but it goes through a series of checks to make sure that you at least own (or have in your possession at the time) the mobile phone number that you give it for this service.

The moral of the story: If you care about your voicemail security, use a PIN. And preferably not 1234 or 2000 or something that is easily guessed.

Take a SysAdmin to Lunch on the 29th

Yes, it is time for the twelfth annual SysAdminDay coming up in two weeks. I must have missed the first eleven of them somehow, but I plan on celebrating in style this time around.

Stay tuned for the contest details at the end of this post.

Yes, those underappreciated folks that build your servers, debug your SQL code to keep it from getting injected, reroute your network cables, balance your loads, and all the other tasks to keep your applications infrastructure humming along. I was never a sysadmin, although I did do my fair share of tech support back in the days of DOS. We had our share of people who didn’t turn computers on (or even plug them in), users formatting their drives to see what happens, and people sending us photocopies of their floppies when we asked them to see what was wrong with the disks.

I just love the SysAdmin Day website above, it is a great time waster. There you can find gift suggestions to give your favorite SysAdmin (ThinkGeek is all over this sort of thing, rightly so, down to their LED Blade Runner-style umbrellas), humor, video clips. You can spend your time checking out their rogue’s gallery of bad cabling installations and cartoons, along with clips from previous year’s celebrations. Missing is my favorite TV show, “The IT Crowd” that ran on BBC awhile back. (Season 2 is the best.)

But lately, things are not so much fun and games anymore. The Internet is a dark place, where evil lurks on every router junction and underneath each seemingly harmless Acrobat file. You can get infected from just visiting a Web site, let alone downloading anything from it. You can’t be running an old browser version, because there are people Out There who will take advantage of your ancient software and send you nice little exploits that will live on your hard drive and make your life miserable. You can’t be too careful, which is why it is time to appreciate your favorite SysAdmin in a couple of weeks.

So here’s my deal. Those of you who live within a few hundred miles of the St. Louis area and would like to qualify for a free lunch, I am serious, send me a note and tell me your most outrageous end user support story, suitable for framing and posting around the Interwebs. The funniest one wins lunch. If you don’t live nearby, you can still enter the contest and I will take you out to lunch when I am next in your city, or when our Foursquare check-ins next intersect in meatspace. Decision of the judges is final, and not valid in Alaska. Post your comments right here.

The Asymmetric World We Live In

For those of you that are men (or women) of a certain age (as close to the age of the characters of the wonderfully named TV show), it will come as no surprise that the focus of our communications tools these days is social networks. But how our communications have evolved from synchronous to asynchronous is less well thought out.

Back when I was growing up in corporate America, we were coming off the mainframe era where most of the communications were encapsulated inside manila inter-office memos. That was mostly asynch – you received the memo and acted accordingly. Then came DISSOS and PROFS and the ability to email someone, and we quickly made the transition to more synchronous times. No more waiting, or so it seemed. It took a good ten years or so before email became the lifeblood of corporate communications, and this was before the Internet really took off in the middle 1990s, when dot coms could be purchased by anyone with a credit card.

But email wasn’t synchronous enough, and we needed instant responses, and by the middle 1990s IM became the main mechanism to tie together distributed workgroups and get things done. In my new position at ReadWriteWweb, I would be lost without the numerous Skype chat rooms and IMs that fly back and forth across the globe as our staff coordinates their work.

But IMs are so last five-minutes-ago, and now we live in the age of social networking. Last week our staff got onboard Google+, which is a better mousetrap than Facebook, or something like that. But it is completely asynch: you post something to your “stream” or to your “circle” of friends. Like Twitter, you “follow” people that you want to track their activities or bon mots or ideas of the moment. To get the best use out of any of these services, you want to set up different groupings of your contacts for different purposes. Just like there is that loudmouth in your office that always hangs out by the water cooler (Do offices even have water coolers anymore? Do we even work in offices anymore? Nevermind.) that you routinely ignore, you want to defriend or defollow the electronic equivalent on your networks.

The “aha” moment for me with G+ is that now I have an opportunity to construct my social graph from scratch, making the circles match my actual behavior, rather than just lumping everyone together under “friend.” It is my chance to truly turn my communications into an effective asynch tool. And like my boss, I am less enamored with G+ and pine for those simpler days; the only difference is I, being somewhat older, wish to return to the safety of my email Inbox, rather than the blog.

In other words, just because someone is my friend doesn’t mean I am theirs, and vice-versa. And with G+, we have an opportunity, if we want to take the time, to really understand the nature of our networks and segregate our contacts to take advantage of this disparity.

But here is the rub: serendipity accounts for a lot in my online life. Being a journalist, I try to connect to a lot of people and collect a lot of information. My Facebook account is a mess: I know there are people there that I have never met, and never corresponded with or otherwise interacted. Yet, I want to “friend” them because I value their opinion and sometimes see their updates in my feed that stimulate something for me personally or professionally.

When many of us older folks first got on Facebook et al. we were obsessed with the junior high (do they even call it that anymore?) mentality of pushing our numbers up, no one wanted to be sitting at the table of misfits in the back of the cafeteria, the people with no other friends. Well, I was one of those dorks back then, and could never aspire to be the cool kid in black with piercings everywhere that has 5,000 Facebook friends these days. Even though being a nerd is suddenly somewhat cool, or at least cooler. (An interesting review of Alexandra Robbins’ book The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth can be found talking about this experience in the New York Times .)

Does this mean that pendulum has swung as far over in the asynch side as possible? I think few of us will take the time to elegantly structure our social networks in G+, but maybe not. And now we have so many mechanisms to communicate that it is hard sometimes to keep track – do I DM, IM, Face-M, post a comment, write a counter-riposte (as I am doing here), cross-post, StumbleUpon, or just send a simple email? You got me.

And for those of you not of a certain age, the photo at the top is from the from the Tracy/Hepburn movie The Desk Set which was made in 1957 and features the two stars who are conflicted about the computerization of a TV station’s research department. Of course, the computer depicted was the size of a room.