Advice for job seekers

I was quoted in this past weekend’s St Louis Post Dispatch in Kate Uptergrove’s jobs column here about things you can do, such as keeping your Facebookand LinkedIn privacy settings up-to-date. Words to the wise.

Take a FOMO break this holiday season

Are you one of those people that aren’t satisfied with the number of
your Facebook friends, even if you have more than the average number
of 190 as I mentioned in an article last week for ReadWriteWeb.

Are you always checking your Facebook page to see what your friends are doing?

Do you get the feeling you are missing out on something big when you
choose to stay home rather than get all dolled up for a night out on
the town?

If so, you might be suffering from FOMO, for fear of missing out. This
isn’t a new phenomenon, and has been extensively quoted in a number of
blogs and newspapers, including an article in last week’s New York
Times. But as we move into the end of year holidays, it can be a
bigger issue.

“If you’re honest, the things you miss out on don’t always sound as
amazing as other people say they are,” says Sophia Dembling writing on
Psychology Today’s blog. She goes on to talk about how social media,
like many things, is both the creator and the cure for FOMO.

Perhaps some of it is just envy. Just as in middle school, we want to
be among the popular group, the trendsetters. This reminds me of the
Morrissey video, We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful. (A
modern musical version, perhaps, of this maxim by François VI, Duc de
La Rochefoucauld: “In the misfortunes of our friends, we take no small
pleasure.”) Of course, in middle school back in the day, I was more
outcast than popular. I was the kid getting picked on out in the
playground during recess. Nerds hadn’t even become a key stakeholder
group back then.

In another RWW article asking about how often you are on Facebook, the
number of people who check their Facebook pages hourly surprised me,
meaning that it was too low an estimate.

In my experience, it is almost continuous monitoring for the
20-somethings that I know. It is now de rigueur to place your phones
on the table when you go out to eat, so they can be available at a
moment’s notice. This indicates to me that someone would rather not be
present, no matter where they are.

Back in the olden times when we didn’t have cell phones, restaurants
brought landline phones over to your table when you were expecting an
important call. Only movie moguls did this, however.

So here are some suggestions for taking a holiday break. Close the
laptop. Set your phone on vibrate. Go read a book and enjoy the
solitude. Or go someplace new with a friend, and just focus on each
other. Watch a movie and really focus on what is going on with it.
Live in the moment and enjoy what you are doing. Even for just a few
minutes each day.

Call it a FOMO break. But before you do, please take a moment to add a
comment or thought here.
Best wishes for a happy and healthy holiday season.

Finding the right MSP

I am quoted in this month’s Entrepreneur magazine about what to do when evaluating managed service providers. You can read the article and my suggestions here.

MSPtv Webinar: How the Private Cloud Can Be More Secure

Security concerns remain one of the biggest obstacles to cloud computing adoption, even as spending on cloud-based solutions accelerates. Users welcome the affordability and scalability of cloud offerings, but many remain fearful about the potential for network breaches and leaks. These fears typically focus on public cloud offerings, and as such, they open opportunities for IT service providers to extol the virtues of secure private cloud environments.

Today I will be doing a webinar for MSPtv on this subject. You can tune in here.

You can download my slides here.

What We’ve Got Here is a Failure to Communicate

Fans of Paul Newman will recognize his character’s famous line in Cool Hand Luke. Never in the history of electronic communications do we have so many choices and yet experience so many communication failures. This was made clear to me recently when I tried to get in touch with a “friend” of mine. I put the word in quotes because I mean it in Facebook terms: someone that I may or may not have met f2f, but want to stay in touch. Let’s call this friend Bob for simplicity.

My go-to communication method is email, so I first tried to send Bob a quick email to answer a question. Sadly, I have 9,000 contacts in my Gmail but Bob is one of the many of them who have moved on to another email address. The mail came back undeliverable. That wasn’t a good sign. But even if it got through, it doesn’t mean anything these days: there are lots of folks that ignore their emails, or have bad spam filters, so sometimes they don’t see them even if the address is correct.

Then I thought, perhaps I have Bob under my contacts at LinkedIn, which is my second place that I can usually track someone down. Strike two: LinkedIn knows about Bob with the outdated email that I had. Apparently, Bob hasn’t been too diligent about his updates. Yes I could try Plaxo but didn’t bother.

Bob’s phone is listed as his work number in my database, and of course he no longer works at this company anyway. Sometimes you can get the main number of the company or press 0 for a receptionist and they can be quite helpful. But this firm got rid of their receptionists long ago (chalk it up to progress) and just has a dial-by-name directory so that doesn’t help things. Once I got someone else’s replacement and they were quite helpful, pointing me to the new (or at least next) employer, but still, that doesn’t happen all too often these days.

Besides, even with a phone number or several numbers, that doesn’t mean anything. I have plenty of family members who are very hard to track down, and I have multiple numbers for them. People don’t like to answer their phones anymore. (Or maybe just not answer my calls. Hmm.)

Facebook? Bob and I aren’t connected there. And Bob has a common name, so trying to track him down and befriend him is an exercise in frustration. Do I remember any mutual friends of Bob that can connect me? I can’t remember how we first met: this isn’t unusual, as my memory isn’t what it used to be these days.

Even if we were Facebook “friends” that still doesn’t mean I am out of the woods. Yes, I could try Facebook messaging or IM, but if Bob isn’t online or doesn’t check his account all that frequently, that may or may not pan out.

Maybe Bob is on AOL or Skype or MSN IM? Nope, or at least I don’t think so. I have a lot of people on various IM lists, some that I have identified with their real names and others that have puzzling screen names with no clue as to who they are. Most of my IMs are to people that I work with (or did work with) on a daily basis: my AOL IM list for example, is frozen in time back to 2004 when I last worked at CMP (now UBM) and that was our main corporate communications channel. One of these days I am going to weed these out. In the meantime, there isn’t any real way to find someone on IM, unless you know of his or her ID to begin with. The same goes for Twitter.

There are some people that have turned Twitter into their go-to communications platform, but I am not even close there. Maybe that will motivate me to start.

I guess I could Google Bob, that might work, but for common names it is unlikely.

So yes, electronic communications has made us incredibly productive. But sometimes I do miss the olden times; back when real people answered their phones and tracked folks down when they didn’t.

So, as Newman says.

I welcome your thoughts and suggestions, please post to my story on ReadWriteWeb here.

 

Check your DNS, now!

Being the author of a mostly unknown home networking how-to book means that I have lots of insights into how people run their home networks. And even though the book is ten years old, things that I wrote about then that are still very much current, such as keeping your computers secure from infection.

I was reminded of this situation this week with the news that the FBI has taken down one of the largest botnets in history. The crime ring, based in Estonia, managed to steal somewhere north of $14 million by infecting millions of computers. I wrote the story this morning for ReadWriteWeb and you can click on the link at the end of this piece and read more details as well as navigate to links where you can find out whether your computers are infected.

While it is great that the bad guys were apprehended, it was somewhat bittersweet victory. Computer security vendors actually knew of their nefarious activities five years ago, when the DNSChanger exploit was first observed. And while you can fix a part of the problem, there is still no single simple method to disinfect your computers and routers from this scourge.

DNS refers to the Domain Name System, which was invented by Paul Mockapetris back in 1983, and he is still actively involved in selling DNS solutions today. (Paul and I served for several years together on the Interop conference advisory board, where I got to appreciate his rapier wit.) Every thing on the Internet, whether it is a computer, a mobile phone, a router, or some mundane embedded device, uses DNS to translate the alphabetical domain address, like strom.com into its numeric IP address, the collection of digits that we have run out of assigning earlier this year.

The nasty brilliance of the Estonian DNSChanger exploit was that it replaced the DNS settings of your computers – both Macs and Windows – along with common home routers. This meant that when you tried to go to certain Web destinations you would be directed instead to a phony one, or served up phony ads on legit sites. That is how they collected so much money, one click at a time.

If you bough a Linksys or Dlink or Netgear router and didn’t change its default password when you set it up, you should stop reading right now and rectify that situation.

Over 100 servers were located in data centers in New York and Chicago to handle the phony DNS queries. (So much for that shortage of IP addresses.) The FBI has published a list of these IP addresses, and you can check against that list (or use a Web form that they have set up) to see if your network has been compromised.

If you are mucking about with your network’s DNS, now would also be a good time to use a more secure DNS provider, such as OpenDNS.org. It is free and will also speed up your Web browsing too.

As I said, you can get more details, as well as the links to some of the stuff I mentioned, here.

Feel free to post comments on my RWW story too if you are so moved.

From the front lines of Internet school censorship

Back when I was in high school, the only thing we had to worry about was wearing armbands and whether our faculty advisor would heavily edit our articles in the school newspaper. Now things are a lot more complex, and this week we saw our legal cannon start to catch up with how school officials can censor social media.

The issues evolve around whether a Facebook Wall post is considered a public forum, and whether posting to Facebook or other social media sites is considered part of school property when it concerns school officials and employees. These are the things our lawyers worry about to be sure.

I put up a post on ReadWriteWeb this morning that is chock full o’ links that can take you to more interesting places if you want to read more.

But here I want to cover some additional thoughts that didn’t make it into my article.

The classic case law on this is Tinker v. Des Moines, which dates back to those armband-laden 1960s. Tinker is cited many times as the decision that says a school can censor speech if it interferes or materially disrupts the learning environment, and by “environment” it refers to the actual physical school campus. Thus, Tinker needs, well, some tinkering.

That is the rub: those pesky Internets aren’t “on” school property. But they can impact the school process, as anyone who has sat in on a class in the last decade can attest. So to handle this situation, several cases are making their way to the US Supreme Court. One was decided on this week: the Supremes left the lower court decision stand in a case involving censoring a high school girl who called her school administrators a bad name on her blog. There are three other cases that will be decided on later this month, all involving students who either were bullying other students or who were mocking their administrators on MySpace. (Yes, apparently MySpace still has a function in this world that doesn’t involve music promotion. Nice to know.)

But is the Facebook Wall or other pages school property, even if it is “owned” by the school itself? There is some debate about that too, and sadly a university near here took down comments on its page involving a labor dispute. Were they right to do this? I don’t think so, and so far no actual legal action has been filed, but it is still early in this game.

Our legal system moves at a crawl: the Supreme Court cases that were on the docket began their life with activities as early as 2005. So expect these issues to be with us a long time. But the simple days of armbands seem so quaint, don’t they?

MarkMonitor: Brandjacking Tablet PCs

When you buy tablet PCs online, there are many low-priced bargains to tempt you and it can be hard to be a discerning consumer. The Internet provides instantaneous sales and promotion channels for legitimate manufacturers, as well as less than scrupulous manufacturers, who can represent hidden competition to legitimate manufacturers. These online brandjackers pay close attention to market trends, especially those involving well-known brands, and are quick to line their own pockets at the expense of legitimate brands.

In my latest whitepaper for MarkMonitor here, (registration required) I examine how over the course of a single day this summer they found more than 23,000 listings for suspicious tablets. Of course, given that many of them are sold at 70% discount, it isn’t surprising that many consumers are tempted.