Always scan an extra finger
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Christmas, Identity, Hardware, Laptop, Security on
I had to revert to typing in a password on my notebook the other day.
I usually brush my finger over the fingerprint scanner and as I let the security software store passwords and login details for as many sites as possible I don’t have to remember many passwords at all now. Roll on CardSpace - when I can store my details on an InfoCard and present that instead of typing in whatever random selection of information a site demands to let me download trial software or white papers, I shall feel a lot more productive.
I always scan at least two fingers when I set up a biometric system, because the software insists. I usually scan a thumb as well but with a minimum of three scans to do per finger and me in a hurry to try out a new system, that’s usually enough. Perhaps I won’t mention which fingers I usually scan, just in case, but I scan a thumb
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Are you a Santa or a Scrooge? Try Simon and Mary
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Christmas, Server on
The holiday break means more unusual transactions, in stressful circumstances, with fewer support staff around. We know what it’s like, as we spent
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Cisco 3.0
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Business, Networking on
One of the themes at last week’s CScape event was the re-invention of Cisco as a collaborative service oriented organisation.
This is one of the issues I’ve been thinking about for some time. How do we build businesses that focus on process, on collaboration and on dealing with a global organisation? The service orientated enterprise is on its way, and we need to consider how we structure businesses to operate in a world where IT is no longer hierarchical, where users can define their own applications, and Web 2.0-style tools bring social networking to the desktop.
I’ve written about the architecture council movement before, as an approach to aligning business and IT goals. Cisco has taken this approach to heart, and has taken it further, using the idea of stakeholder councils as a structure for managing a business that’s too global and too large for the traditional hands-on C-level management structure we’re familiar with.
Councils of interest are a new way of working that really couldn’t have existed a few years ago. To work effectively they need to be part of a networked organisation that has tools to enable deep collaboration.
That’s more than just emailing documents around an intranet - it’s about collaborative document creation, video conferencing, expert identification, and distributed decision making. There need to be tools to help teams build their own enterprise mashups, bringing information together from multiple sources and finding appropriate ways of visualising the resulting data set without distorting the information it contains.
These are complex tasks, and Cisco has a big job ahead as it reengineers its business model. However the rewards are great, and Cisco’s CEO John Chambers says it has already seen benefits - allowing the company to substantially increase its number of key goals from two or three to more than ten. That’s a change that allows Cisco to increase its risk of project failure, as an expanded portfolio can be expected to contain projects that fail - in the certainty that there will be many projects that succeed.
It’s a brave new world out there - and it’s one that traditionally hierarchical businesses like Microsoft need to embrace. There’s no point in being conservative for comfort’s sake, especially when you’ve got thousands of experts you can draw on when making a decision. The networked business should be able to make decisions far more quickly than the slow hierarchical organisation tree, as messages pass from synapse to synapse directly, rather than up and down the slow chain of command.
So, are you a dinosaur or a shrew? If the pundits are to believed, there’s a big asteroid of a recession on the way, and one way to survive is to be nimble and fast. If you can respond to your customers needs faster than the competition, well, then you’ve just proved Darwin right. Evolution is for businesses and IT too.
It’ll be interesting to see if Cisco 3.0 is an example of the next stage in business evolution. I suspect it is.
–Simon
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Claiming blog on Technorati
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
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Mobile with your mobile
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in USB, Windows Mobile, Networking, Wireless, Mobile, Internet, Microsoft on
My shiny laptop is so shiny and new it doesn’t have a PC Card slot. That’s a bit of a problem, when the only 3G mobile data cards we have in the office are PC Cards. It’s even more of a problem when you’re in the car park at Costco and need to get a file from your home PC…
Express Card slots are great - if you’ve got an express card.
Built in antennae for WAN modules are even better - if you’ve got a module fittted.
It took me a while to get around the problem, but the solution turned out to be easier than I expected. All I needed was a Windows Mobile 6 device and its built in Internet connection sharing tool (the same feature is in Windows Mobile 5, but it’s hidden away in the file system).
I installed the Windows Mobile Device Center on my laptop so I’d have all the drivers I needed, and then plugged the phone in for an initial synchronisation.
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Prepare for a bandwidth explosion
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Futures, Networking on
I spent much of last week at Cisco’s CScape analyst event in San Jose. It was a fascinating few days, as it meant I got a very different look at a company that affects our online lives. I’ll write about the development of Cisco 3.0 as a collaborative company in another entry, but one thing caught my attention.
It was a simple slide in CEO John Chambers’ keynote presentation, one that showed that the amount of bandwidth that was going to be needed to deliver the next generation of internet services was going to quadruple by 2011, with the amount of data traveling over the global network measured in the tens of exabytes. That’s an awful lot of data - as one exabyte can be thought of as the total sum of human knowledge at the start of 2007.
I’m not sure if I agree with Chambers’ that most of this traffic will be streamed video (though friends of mine who run ISPs are looking at the video traffic on their networks with some concern), but there’s certainly going to be a lot of video traffic streaming through the networks. It’s probably not going to all be telepresence running at multiples of HD, but there’s certainly a place for high quality video conferencing.
Where I can see video coming in useful is in delivering snippets of explanatory content over mobile phones. There’s a lot to be said for a quick movie showing just what’s gone wrong and where if you’re debugging a business process. There’s even more to be said for a video showing just how to make something work that little bit better. Suddenly a snippet of video becomes a resource that needs to be seen by lots of people - and that needs to be stored and shifted around a network.
One of the speakers at the event, telepresenced in from London, was the BBC’s Erik Huggers, who heads up the future media team. He noted that the BBC is already pushing out 1.3 petabytes of data a month, much of it audio. However he’s expecting that to increase by 500 TB a month by the end of the year, with the iPlayer launching on December 25. That’s not the end of his predictions - he expects things to ramp up to 3PB a month very quickly, with the BBC delivering 5PB a month by the end of 2008, which is what the BBC is designing its network to support.
Understanding the requirements of your network a year from now may seem to be taking the belt and braces a little too far, but are you on top of your network traffic - and its growth rates? If video starts becoming more and more part of the way you work, is your network ready?
It’s time to get out the monitoring gear and start looking at just what traffic your network is carrying - and how its changing. You may get a shock…
–Simon
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Maybe Ask should give Facebook an award for privacy education
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Privacy, Identity, Security, Internet on
I’m not a big Facebook fan. Part of it is that I’ve seen a lot of online communities, from Usenet and the uniquely British CIX to AOL and Web forums and IRC and LiveJournal andLinked in - and the evolution of online behaviour that occurs in all of them is the same. Food fights and virtual flowers replace SIG files and ASCII art but a me-too meme is the same whether it’s plain text or fancy CSS (and don’t get me started on second life because that’s a whole ‘nother rant).
But I’m not an online Luddite. I live in email and IRC. Simon and I met online (in a virtual bar,
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Touch me - but touch me the right way
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Toys & gadgets, Hardware, Laptop, HP, Mobile on
I narrowly avoided having an argument with a friend about touch screens the other night. We were talking about the new OQO model e2, an adorably small and functional ultra-mobile PC. It’s available with the ordinary version of XP, the tablet version or with Vista Ultimate (which the CEO Dennis Moore tells me he prefers because he’s getting more battery life). All versions have the active digitizer touch screen, but only the ones with tablet software come with the active pen you need to use it.
If you’re not writing on screen, the mini joystick on the slide-out keyboard and the finger-sensitive strips beside and blow the screen let you scroll and move the mouse pointer as normal. My colleague hadn’t realized there was a touch screen at all until I lent him the pen from my HP 2710p tablet to try with it and then he started telling me he’d rather have it work with the standard stylus from his Palm PDA. Yes, but
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Internet Explorer has fewer security holes than Firefox
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Web browser, Firefox, Security, Internet, Microsoft on
You type most of your passwords into it - and you type your credit card details into it every time you shop online. It’s how you unlock an iPhone so you can install applications on it. It’s the home of many of your applications and it’s the first avenue of attack for most malware. Really, if you wanted to be secure, you might never use a Web browser again.
You don’t have to be a hacker in the criminal sense to want to get around some security lockdowns. The latest iPhone cracker uses an image security issue in the Safari browser to open the system up. If you have a Buffalo NAS box you can use a security hole in the Web administration interface to make yourself root to install Perl so you can run SlimServer and get music onto your Squeezebox. I’d like to run SlimServer on something other than our main server - but I’m not cracking the security on our backup and media store to do it.
I’ve never switched away from IE to Firefox; originally it was because I had to have IE on my system for work and didn’t want the hassle of managing two browsers. Since IE 7 came out and I found IE 7 Pro I just haven’t bothered. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough for me. Given that it took me five hours of browsing dubious sites and downloading known spyware to infect a machine running XP SP2 when I tried a few years ago, and given that everything that interested me in Firefox turned out to be Greasemonkey scripts (and I’m probably unfair to carry on thinking of that as a security problem waiting to happen, but I do), I’ve been assuming the security (dis)honours are about equal.
Jeff Jones at Microsoft has done another vulnerability survey, this time for IE and Firefox. Since Firefox 1.0 came out in November 2004, Mozilla has patched a total of 199 bugs: 75 high severity, 100 medium severity, 24 low severity. Microsoft has only patched 87 IE bugs in the same time (and we’re assuming fewer bugs patched is a good thing rather than avoiding the problem): 54 high, 28 medium and 5 low severity. Honours are more equal comparing just Firefox 2 and IE 7 for known bugs that haven’t been fixed: eight high severity bugs for Firefox versus ten for IE, 15 medium severity bugs
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