Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: cloud computing

  • So you thought you quit working for a boss

    So you thought you quit working for a boss

    One of the weirdest things about the Internet’s free culture is how services that make money out of reselling people’s donated labour tie their contributors up with rules.

    Many of the people contributing for free have given up their day jobs to do so. If you asked them why, I’m sure many would say they were sick of restrictive rules, anal retentive bosses and generally feeling suffocated by a big organisation.

    Yet now they are subject to a bunch of rules arbitrarily enforced by anonymous and unaccountable bureaucrats running social media or cloud computing services.

    So why on Earth are you doing the same thing for free? At least when you’re in a cubicle you’re getting paid for dealing with idiots.

    Similar posts:

  • The importance of logging off

    The importance of logging off

    English Labour MP Tom Watson today learned why logging off your computer is important when his office intern cracked what she thought a joke on his behalf.

    What appeared to be a mis-step by the Member of Parliament bought predictable criticism from his enemies in politics and media, particularly given his role as a critic of News International.

    The biggest risk in computer security are your staff and co-workers; they have access to your systems and the data saved on them.

    In Tom’s case – like most business security breaches – the intern wasn’t being malicious, she was making a very valid point about a serious topic, it was her unfortunate choice of words that caused a problem.

    Luckily for her, the boss has taken a mature attitude towards the problem – there’s many bosses who wouldn’t. So the intern seems safe unless the media can beat the story up further.

    The moral for all of us is to log off or shut down our computers whenever we step away from them.

    If we’re using public terminals in flight lounges, Internet cafes or hotels, then we should make sure we’ve logged out of our email, social media or banking services before the session ends.

    Should someone leap on your system when you turn your back, you could find anything from your social media or email account used to send out fake messages about you being robbed through to your online bank balance being pillaged.

    We often worry about evil, sophisticated hackers breaking into our accounts but often it’s these simple mistakes that let opportunistic thieves get our details.

    Often it’s the simple things that bring us unstuck, so logging off is a good habit to get into. Tom’s intern is right.

    Similar posts:

  • The Internet’s cold war

    The Internet’s cold war

    “We’re designing exclusively for Android devices,” the software developer confided over a beer, “we don’t like the idea of giving Apple 30% of our income.”

    That one business owner is making a choice that software developers, newpaper chains, school text book publishers and many other fields are going to have to make in the next year – which camp are they going to join in the Internet’s cold war.

    As the web matures, we’re seeing four big empires develop – Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon which are going to demand organisations and consumers make a choice on who they will align with.

    That decision is going to be painful for a lot of business; each empire is going to take a cut in one way or another with Apple’s iStore charges being the most obvious.

    For those who choose to go the non-aligned path – develop in HTML5 and other open web standards things will be rocky and sometimes tough. At least those on the open net won’t have to contend with a “business partner” whose objectives may often be different to their own.

    Over time, we’ll see the winners and losers but for the moment businesses, particularly big corporations and publishers should have no doubt that the choices they make today on things as seemingly trivial things like reader comments may have serious ramifications in a few years time.

    Consumers aren’t immune from this either; those purchases through iTunes, Amazon or Google are often locked to that service for a reason.

    Probably the development that we should watch closest right now is Apple’s push into education publishing; those governments, universities and schools that lock into the iPad platform are making a commitment on behalf of tax payers, faculty and students that will affect all of them for many years.

    For many, it might be worthwhile hedging the bets and sticking to open standards. A decision to join one or two of the big Internet empires is something that shouldn’t be made lightly.

    Similar posts:

  • Megaupload, cloud computing and trust

    Megaupload, cloud computing and trust

    The closing down of file sharing site Megaupload has raised the question of trust in the cloud; “It has made cloud services look that much less legitimate” one daily paper quotes futurist Mark Pesce as saying.

    For those of us advocating cloud services and advising businesses on using them, this trust issue isn’t anything new. All of us have to be careful about who we trust with our data and Kim Dotcom, the founder of Megaupload, doesn’t come to mind as someone who would stand a great deal of due diligence.

    Like investments – another area where trust is essential – we have to spread our risk around. Saving copies of data to your own computer and making sure the information you save on the cloud is in a form easily read by different systems is important, as is not trusting any one service for critical services.

    The taking down of Megaupload also raises other questions – as privacy advocate Lauren Weinstein points out;

    “But the Megaupload case is more akin to the government seizing every safe deposit box in a bank because the bank owners (and possibly some percentage of the safe deposit box users) were simply accused — not yet convicted — of engaging in a crime.

    What of the little old lady with her life savings in her box, or the person who needs to access important documents, all legitimate, all honest, no crimes of any sort involved.

    They are — to use the vernacular — screwed.”

    It’s this over-reaction by government agencies which is the real concern and the co-operation of large corporations in shutting down services – as we saw with the shutting down of Wikileaks – probably does more to damage trust in all online services, not just cloud computing.

    Cloud services are no less trustworthy than our computer systems, all of which can breakdown, catch viruses or be compromised by staff making mistakes. We have to understand that all technologies carry some degree of risk.

    For businesses and home users, we need to spread the risks around – don’t just trust one service or technology to deliver your products or services and have a fall back plan if things go wrong.

    Similar posts:

  • Password blues

    Password blues

    “Johnny down the street hacked my Minecraft account!” is something almost every parent today has heard in one way or another.

    If you believed the kids, the schools are full of 12 year old hacking geniuses that can unravel passwords faster than a CIA super computer.

    Usually it turns out the “evil hacker” in Grade 5 had the password all along as the kids share their login details with all their friends.

    The New York Times recently pulled together story showing how teenagers are sharing passwords to show their affection. One wonders how many abusive relationships see the dominant partner control the other’s social media and online accounts.

    It isn’t just kids and teenagers who find themselves in trouble though, businesses make the same mistakes. Commonly sharing a password to important files and tech functions across the organisation.

    Thinking this is just a small business problem would be a mistake; Australia’s Vodafone made all their entire customer base available on the Internet thanks to single logins and shared passwords for each of their dealers.

    Over the years this caused major problems for customers and the honest Vodafone dealers as their unscrupulous competitors hijacked accounts and churned clients to new plans. The cost to Vodafone Australia must have been huge but impossible to quantify given they apparently had no tracking mechanism to figure out who had accessed accounts.

    In households and business, the main reason we share passwords is convenience – security by nature is always inconvenient. It’s convenient not to bother locking your front door or leaving your keys in the car.

    When you really value something, you lock it up and you don’t give a key to everyone in your neighbourhood. It should be the same with passwords, keep them strong and keep them secret.

    Our kids learn this the hard way, we shouldn’t have to.

    Similar posts: