Book review: Detecting Malice by Robert Hansen

In his ebook Detecting Malice, Robert Hansen has a difficult task. To compile in one place a variety of attack descriptions and forensic methods for various Internet intrusions. He does a great job of covering the landscape, talking in plain language without a lot of technical jargon and with many clear examples. If you have never read packet captures this book will be an eye opener, and if you have some exposure to hacking tools and Web traces then you will do fine with the examples that he portrays.

Think that your Web site is immune from these exploits? Think again. Just about everyone has some kind of exposure, and part of understanding exactly what that is is being able to get into the bad guys’ mindset and see how they can penetrate your servers.

I highly recommend this book, well worth the time and money. It will stimulate your thinking and certainly raise your level of paranoia, and perhaps level of motivation, to lock things down.

Behind the scenes at the Cisco AXP Contest

Today Cisco announced the winners of its AXP contest. If you haven’t heard of the contest before, you aren’t alone. It was an interesting combination of people, places and events. The goal was to design an application for a relatively new add-on module to Cisco routers called Application eXtension Platform (AXP), a Linux “blade” that allows third-party applications to be integrated with Cisco’s IOS router operating system and network applications. It has its own CPU and can store from 1 GB to 160 GB of data, depending on the model. Here is a more details Q&A about the AXP.

Earlier this year, Cisco announced the contest and a $100,000 prize purse. They received 100 submissions from teams around the world, and the three finalists were announced this week. Check out the winning entry from MAD Network here – it is a very clever use of a variety of materials to explain their innovation, and I am sure one of the reasons why they won.

Brian Profitt, one of the judges in the contest, wrote about his experiences in a blog post here. When I spoke to him, he was very upbeat about his participation. “Initially, I was skeptical that we needed apps there on the AXP, but after seeing the apps from the contestants, I realized that it is a good thing and they made a believer out of me. It is definitely a platform that you can build something that is useful for businesses. Cisco could have kept this all to themselves and developed all of their apps in house. By having this contest, they opened the door for people that probably wouldn’t have gotten to otherwise. They asked people to play with it, and certainly the prize was a big motivation, but this was a very significant move. I am hugely surprised and pleased by the number of international entrants. We had teams from all over the place – South American, Europe, elsewhere. I think this is a product of Cisco’s strength and how well they are known globally. I saw a number of women in the demo videos, which also was good too and runs counter to the notion that all coders are men.”

Profitt, who is the community manager for Linux.com, think that this is a very viable model for how you can really get developers into your enviroment. It also was his first time working with Cisco too.

Some good news on Iran’s net connectivity

With all the reports about blocked connections and such, the folks at Renesys have done their usual good and clear-headed analysis about what is working in terms of Internet routing into Iran in their post here. Unlike what has been reported in the general press, things aren’t as simple as a complete blackout, and there could be other reasons (such as a greater interest from the rest of the world) that is affecting the traffic patterns observed. 

Top talkers on Twitter research

Research from the Harvard Business school has found that “the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue – Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.”

I would like to see research that shows the relative utility of Twitter vs. social networks as the size of your followers/followed network increases. My thesis is that the bigger your Twittersphere, the less utility it has — the reverse I would think would be true of social networks.

When to defriend and defollow

When I was growing up as a nerdy teen on Long Island, needless to say I wasn’t one of the Popular Kids. Back then we called it Junior High rather than the current appellation Middle School and now nerds are now the new cool kids. In my youth, we didn’t have reality shows where beauties met their geeks, Bill Gates hadn’t yet gone to, let alone dropped out of college, and the Steves were still eating fruits rather than making Macs. We didn’t even have computers, phones still had dials on them, and we all watched one of three network TV channels and read newspapers that came in the afternoon. And all of our parents bought American-made cars.

Ok, enough nostalgia. I give this as background, to explain my own behavior when I started getting involved in social networks. My first thought was to collect as many “friends” as I could, to grow my network quickly and add just about everyone that I had an email address for. Now that I have accumulated a bunch of people on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Plaxo, I have a different strategy.

I want quality rather than quantity. As my networks have grown – and they still aren’t as large as my college-age daughter (see, it is that underdog feeling again) – I have seen the “feed” streams that are produced from all these people just burying me in the details and status updates of their lives. I try to dip into this vast, deep flow of information on a daily basis, but it quickly overwhelms me. I run back to the relative comfort of my email inbox, where at least I can hit the delete key and pare things down to a reasonable single screen of to-do and action items and people that I have to return messages to.

Burger King ran a promotion not too long ago where they asked people to defriend 10 Facebook friends in order to get a coupon for a free burger. They were swamped with thousands of requests, thereby establishing the value of a friend at somewhere around a quarter. That is pretty depressing. I always thought a friend was worth at least a couple of bucks, if not more.

I also want to grow my networks slower, because like anything else on the Internet, I am concerned about customer retention and my networks are my customers. You are the people that will (hopefully soon, puh-lease) pay me money to speak at a conference, write an article or white paper, produce a screencast video, or do some custom product consulting. So I don’t want to just spam you with needless updates about what I had for breakfast or insights about my pets or family vacations, although I did get some interesting feedback when I mention the books that I read in my last missive.

So I have gotten pickier about who I add to my various networks. And while I don’t want to be as snobby as that Jr. High clique of popular kids, I do think we all need to take a step back and consider what our friending – and more importantly defriending –policies will be going forward.

Over at Twitter (where my network is still “just” a few hundred followers), there is a lot of activity around third-party apps that will automatically increase your network with all sorts of tricks. This is a bad thing, because those networks become less valuable as their feeds become larger. You will be adding more noise to the signal, and as a result, miss out on the important stuff.

I am still figuring out Twitter, to say the least. But I can tell you that my Twitter activities have saved me a grand total of $140, which is the overdraft fee that Bank of America initially charged me when I deposited a check to the wrong account. Through the miracle of social networks, I was able to tweet my bank, email them the information and get them to call me and correct the problem, and probably keep me as a customer.

Now, I don’t have all the answers here. Or even some of them. And I am glad that I don’t have to deal with the hyper social strata that are Middle School today. But I can take some small comfort that none of my 20-something children have Twitter accounts, at least not yet.

PC World: Sharing spreadsheets

If you are part of a business, sooner or later you want to be able to collaborate on a database with a colleague or customer. In the past, the easiest way to share a small database was to create a spreadsheet and email it to your collaborators. While this isn’t the best method, it has withstood more sophisticated competition.

I talk about why and ways that you can share spreadsheets and simple databases in this feature for PC World here.

PC World: Better ways to share documents

One of the easiest ways to collaborate with a business partner or colleague is to e-mail a document to them, but it is also one of the hardest habits to break too. And while e-mail is so pervasive and nearly instantaneous, the notion of serial collaboration–I work on the document, send it to you and you work on it and send it back–is clumsy. The attached documents can clog up e-mail systems or get rejected by filters. If more than two people are working on it, someone has to be in charge of resolving conflicts.

There are better ways and I will show you a few alternatives in my column this week in PC World.

PC World: Keep up with the news with personalized Web portal pages

If you are like me you want to keep track of what various Web sites are posting about your field, your competition, and just general technology news that is specific to your business. As the number of online sources for information continues to spiral upwards – one place quotes more than 20 million Americans post at least weekly to their blogs – you want to have an organized plan of attack so you aren’t buried in data. And as you can imagine there are dozens of different Web-based services that you can use to filter and organize things.

I mention a few of the potential alternatives, such as Pageflakes, Bloglines and Google Reader, in my latest column for PC World. 

Understanding how innovation and collaboration happen in organizations

I am attending the Gateway to Innovation conference today in St. Louis, put on by a variety of local IT-oriented organizations and sponsored by some of the larger IT shops like Scottrade. The opening speech was by Mark Showers, the former CIO of Monsanto, and Peter Gray, a professor at the University of Virginia. They talked about understanding the structure of your internal personnel networks, and how information flows both inside and among workgroups. They survey people within particular organizations and match what data they collect with the formal org charts and team reporting relationships that are supposed to be there.

In one oil exploration company, they investigated why one drilling team was much more efficient than their peers and found that one guy way down the food chain was the glue that held things together. He worked closely with all the different stakeholders and pushed for better collaboration between departments, something that the company eventually implemented with the other teams to improve their productivity. Part of the problem they found was the overall boss wasn’t trying to connect the teams and didn’t really communicate with anyone outside of his direct reports, who primarily communicated just with the boss and not each other. They also found that if companies invest in improving the connections and collaboration abilities of their less effective employees, and just bringing them up to average can have big impacts on overall productivity.

Questions that were going through my mind during his talk:
• How dong does it take your boss to respond to your email asking for help?
• When you need to schedule a meeting with the boss, does it take longer than 24 hours to get on their calendar? The teams that are better at collaborating cut down these latencies.
• How many direct reports are there to the boss, and do they talk to each other or just to the boss?
• Are you empowered to make your own decisions? The less often that you have to escalate things up the management food chain, the better.
• How many outward-focusing projects (standards committees, community orgs, etc) are you involved in where people can get to know you and add to your network? These are the key people to watch because they spread their knowledge and influence outside the organization.

Five useful social networking tools

In preparation for a keynote speech that I am giving next month, I took some time to look at a variety of social media consolidation and notification services. You might find one or more of them useful for your purposes, even for those of you that still don’t poke, tweet, or know what RSS really stands for.

First is Ping.fm that can post to multiple social networks at once. You sign up, give them your login credentials at Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, WordPress and many others. When you want to update your social networking universe, you send one message to your Ping.fm account via an email, a text message, or a Web form, and it goes out to everyone.  This can be a big time-saver if you post across different networks and don’t mind sending the same information to all these places. I haven’t used it as much because I tend to post different things to LinkedIn vs. Facebook, as an example.

Friendfeed.com works in reverse. It consolidates your entire social network “feeds” together in one place, so that your network can follow your posts across your blogs, your social networks, and other sites. You set everything up using the various RSS feeds that these services create, which is pretty clever when you think about it. The downside to Friendfeed is that your adoring public has to sign up separately for this service, which means Yet Another Social Network Request to fulfill. Still, I have been surprised at how many people are following me in this fashion, and how many of them are the A-list blogger types that you want to engage and be at top of mind in any event. Clearly, this is one service to pay attention to if you are trying to get the word out about your products and services.

Twitter is certainly all the rage these days, and a number of services have taken some of the best notification-style pieces out of it in interesting ways. If you like the way Twitter works but don’t want to share your updates with the public, such as just with your work colleagues or a special task force, then take a look at Presentlyapp.com. You can use the free Web service or pay to install it behind your own firewall for the ultimate private group. They even make use of the same kind of scrolling interface that Twitter has made popular.

Another take on private discussion forums is from Yammer.com. They cost $1 a person a month. Think of this as one of those old-school BBS’s that has been updated for the Gen-T and Web 2.0. I think if you want something quick and dirty and need to have a group discussion to knit your project team together, this is worth a closer look.

Buzzable.com can be used to create groups of Twitter users if you want to send out notifications to all of your partners or customers at once. LinkedIn is finally implementing this feature on their groups, but that is probably too much work to get the initial group assembled, given their still draconian triple opt-in rules.

So these are just five services that I have found that have something going for them. Whether any of these companies will be around next year is hard to tell. And I can guarantee that none of them have received any TARP funds from the US Government. If you have other suggestions, email them or post a comment here.