Drivers license info and images online??

I received this link, claiming that all US and many other driver licenses had their information as well as images available on online! Imagine how easy it would be to counterfeit a drivers license, and potential steal someone's identity, if your drivers license image is available online!

Of course there are also directions to remove or "opt out" of this government database. I'd suggest EVERYONE go and look at this.

BTW, mine wasn't current, and had a picture of me when I was younger and certainly much thinner!

Disaster strikes and Internet down, who you going to call?

When disaster strikes, for example Hurricane Katrina, normal communication channels fail. Certainly don't count on telephone systems, wired or wireless, to stay up.

The Internet, often thought of as unkillable, also can and does fail. Two weeks after Katrina, over 100 Internet networks were still down in Louisiana.

So who handled the emergency communication? Once again amateur radio operators. The call went out from my club for volunteers to carpool south to the disaster area to help, and if I was still single I might have gone. Several others did. Just like after 9/11

Excuse me while I go maintain my antennas - all 30+ of them. I'm serious - I putting on my climbing belt, and walking out to my radio towers as soon as I hit "Publish."

Partially from a PC Mag article by John C Dvorak.

Ethical Business Practices #3 and final

You know those great endorsements you see for products and services, both on and off the Internet? They are usually made up! The person the endorsement is attributed to rarely wrote it.

This sounds pretty sleazy, and sometimes it is, although sometimes it is legitimate. It is hard to write a great endorsement - one that is effective. Someone may think you have the best product, service, or whatever on the planet, but they can't necessarily express that easily, quickly, and effectively. You on the other hand, having a vested interest, can spend time coming up with great endorsements.

Now that you've written great endorsements, you need someone to "sign off" on them. You tell Amy, one of your best customers, "Hey Amy, I'd love an endorsement from you. Here are some examples you can choose from if appropriate or feel free to write your own."

Amy will now likely endorse your product as "Increased my profit by 33% in less than a week," instead of "I like Ted's stuff - I'm very happy." Which endorsement do you think will work better? This is a rhetorical question! Obviously the first one!

Now if your "stuff" didn't really increase Amy's profit by 33% in less than one week, then you are a slimebag!! If it did, and you simply helped Amy choose a very effective endorsement, and many people would say that's entirely OK.

I didn't write any of my endorsements - But my "stuff" is great! Actually my web guy says I need more endorsements. Hmmmm, I could have fun with this . . .

Promoting Books and Music

Books and Albums - need to be promoted by the authors and musicians

Publishers expect authors to take a very active role in promoting their books. Many would say publishers expect authors to do most if not all of the promotion. Basically, if you write a book, whether self published or with a pubishing house, it's your responsibility to make sure it sells. A good portion of Shel and my book proposal (Blogging for Business, Dearborn Trade Publishing, Jan 2006) was how we will promote the book. Fortunately, we both speak publically a lot, blog, have newsletters, are somewhat media savvy, etc. Shel has a great podcast too.

I was speaking with Shaggy of Shaggy and the Hackers, my backup band for the original Ted Rap. When he had a record contract years ago, he was expected to promote his album. The record company did very little to promote the album and expected him and the band (Vision Thing) to promote it, despite worldwide distribution. They ended up hiring a publicist to help.

In speaking with Wayne from Maine, childrens recording artist and all around great musician (hey, I listening to him even when the kids aren't around!), I hear the same things about promoting music - it's the musicians responsibility.

The similarities between having a book contract and a record contract are immense! The promotion is primarily the responsibility of the authors and musicians. Even the definition of "success" is similar. The average "successful" business book sells between 5,000-10,000 copies, and a music album from a small label needs the same amount of sales to make the record company happy. Of course I expect to sell far more copies of Blogging for Business - I'm an optimist! And having a great publisher will help a lot too . . .

Attack of the Killer Splogs

Spam Blogs - Splogs

Imagine getting a list of spam blogs returned from an Internet search

Splogs are "Spam Blogs": blogs that only exist to promote other sites, primarily by getting the attention of search engines who in turn pay attention to the links in the splog. They promote other websites via the links within the splog, and are often full of nonsense with many search engine attracting "keywords." Very often they promote online pharmacies, gambling and porno sites. Splogs are a major problem on free blog hosts such as Google's blogspot.com, and they also "pollute" search engine results.

In a somewhat new twist, many splogs are reusing free articles for content, available from sites such as EzineArticles. Using real content makes it more difficult to tell spam blogs from other blogs for both humans and search engines. With splogs increasingly showing up in search engine results, this helps them create revenue by getting users to click on links to products for sale. Users rarely spend any time on splogs full of absolute gibberish and nonsense, but quite well may stay and read interesting articles and perhaps click on a link or two.

Very recently there has been an enormous "attack" of splogs. Google has removed well over 10,000 recently created splogs from their blogspot.com service recently, and they haven't remotely gotten them all. Someone, perhaps many people, have created some kind of program or script that can autocreate splogs, and they are attacking!

In an amusing, at least to me, twist, splogs have started including my content! Here is an example.

Notice the entire lack of new content on this site, the somewhat random autogenerated title, and the nonsensical links. At least they gave me a link back to my site, as required by the EzineArticles terms of service!

New Blog Design, email interface, and more

Many of you have probably noticed my new 3 column blog design. I modified one by Thur Broeders, and with a bit of difficulty got it tweaked to my liking. Comments welcome!

The far right column, at least for now, features "resources." They include recent business and motivational books I love, with an Amazon link (I make a coin or two if you order), a link to my Phishing Survey Results (less than 1/3 of Internet users know what phishing is, and fewer seemed concerned, despite essentially all users being target by criminal phishing attacks), and who knows what else may end up there?

Many of you haven't noticed the new blog design because you subscribe via RSS or email - come check it out and send me your comments!!!

Speaking of email interfaces, I use the seemingly horribly unreliable as of late Bloglet. I'll be looking at other choices, as email subscribers have been missing quite a few posts lately! Can't complain - it's free!

My book manuscript for Blogging for Business: The Blog That Ate Memphis (tentative title, joke subtitle!) is done, so I've had some time to play. Actually, it's been more "play catchup," although I've managed the blog redesign.

Over and Out
Ted

Ethical Business Practices #2- Book Endorsements

Book Endorsements

Since my book "Blogging for Business" (with Shel Holtz, Dearborn Trade Publishing) is coming out soon, this is particularly timely for me.

Books often have quotes from famous authors and others endorsing them. Often the endorsements say something similar in tone to, "This book changed my life, is better than sliced bread, and made me look and feel 20 years younger."
Did you know that usually the endorser has never read the book, or even written the endorsement! Amazing - huhh!!

It's not as bad as it sounds however. Usually, the endorser is "sold" on the book (which may not even be written yet); that it's a good book, something they like, something they approve of. They are also given a list of "sample" endorsements. They can write their own book endorsement, but usually they just choose one of the pre-written ones.

I've endorsed exactly one book, and I read parts of it and choose to modify one of the sample endorsements to make it more accurate and in my style. The book? It's on Information Security, by Jeff Stanton and Kathryn Stam, called The Visible Employee: Using Workplace Monitoring and Surveillance to Protect Information Assets - Without Compromising Employee Privacy or Trust. Yes, I did like it! (due Spring 2006)

Some people seem to endorse a lot of books - for example the Chicken Soup guys. It's well known that they like books a lot, so that's not very surprising. Hey, they can endorse my book if they like it!

Understanding RSS - fixing Info Overload :)

My WatchIT video titled Understanding RSS is available, and can be viewed at WatchIT. You can sign up for free 24 hour access here. I'll also have a few demo multimedia CDs available - let me know.

Alright, maybe we can't "fix" information overload :), but RSS helps

WatchIT describes the video as well as anyone (hey, I think I wrote this description anyway):

Information overload is a common complaint among Internet users. There is simply too much information -- and too little time. But what if there was a way to quickly and conveniently see what'’s new on all the Web sites you'’re interested in, and you could click through to any particular item you wanted to examine in detail? Such utilities exist, called "‘feedreaders"’ or "‘newsreaders," or sometimes "news aggregators."’ They "‘read"’ what are known as RSS, or really simple syndication feeds, which you can subscribe to, and they show you what's new in those feeds. In this timely program, consultant Ted Demopoulos explains how RSS works and how you can get the most from it. He begins by explaining how ordinary Internet users can effectively benefit from RSS, and continues by showing how Internet content publishers can benefit from RSS as well. Next, Demopoulos examines RSS technical fundamentals, and considers what should go into an RSS feed.

New Netscape Browser - Yawn.

I hear there is a new and exciting Netscape browser out - I don't care.

After AOL bought Netscape and essentially abandoned the browser, the game was over. It's still over. Netscape had quite a few horrible buggy and close to unusable releases. They slowly lost their user base. I know - I may have been their last user!

I switched to Internet Explorer for a while - but it's too big a target for hackers as it's used so widely (and has quite a few security holes regularly popping up as well). Now I'm with Firefox and happy. Yes, it has security issues too, but since it's much more of a niche browser, it doesn't have a target painted on it's back.

Netscape has a new browser? I'd be more interested in watching reruns of the news, or maybe the Gong Show in Japanese.

Netscape used to have a great browser, I used to be thin, and my father was once young. Netscape is not news. Now a Google browser, that would be news! And a reasonable step in their road to world domination :)

Ethical Business Practices #1

Quotes in the media.

The following is widely considered to be an ethical practice. When you see an executive quoted in the media, e.g. "CEO Joseph Blowinski of New Hair Solutions said 'Baldness is a curse that can be cured by modern science,'" they usually NEVER said that. Someone in the company crafted the quote and got the CEO to sign off on it.

When I first heard this it sounded sleazy, but it's common practice. Many CEOs and other executives need help with appropriate quotes so they don't sound like bozos. They may be great at what they do, but they might not be great communicators.

This is considered the same as speech writing. George Bush, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, and the Pope don't write their own speeches. Someone else, with more experience and time, writes the speeches. That doesn't make them any more or less valid or sincere. An ethical person wouldn't give a speech they didn't agree with regardless of who wrote it. Similarly, an ethical executive wouldn't sign off on a quote they didn't agree with.

Make sense?

Microsoft - Mafiasoft

Thanks to Chris Jones of Ask On Consulting for sending me a link to Bambi and Terra's Mac360

Microsoft sells an operating system, Windows, that essentially REQUIRES anti virus and spyware programs. Now they are planning on selling anti virus and spyware protection for a monthly fee.

This is not like selling children's toys with "Batteries not included." This is closer to selling a car without brakes or a steering wheel! A somewhat dysfunctional product, at the very minimum.

The comparison is made to organized crime selling "protection" packages to small businesses. "You pay us and wezz make sure no onez messes with urr bizzzness. You no pay us and we break your legs" - or at least that's how it's portrayed in the movies.

I do not suspect that Microsoft is purposely releasing software riddled with security holes. I don't think anyone else. I do believe Microsoft needs to either:

A) Enormously improve the security of their products (I know, you're trying guys, and making progress too)
B) Bundle anti virus and spyware (that means for free!)

I do think that software has unnecessarily grown to a level of complexity where a big mess of security holes is all but assured, at least with the state of today's software engineering practices.

We need simpler software!!! Simpler is more secure. Simpler is easier to use. Simpler is more robust. Let's throw out 90% of the code of Windows and Office for starters!! 90% of users won't even notice the missing functionality, and the other 10% can learn to adapt!!

Makings Applications Hacker Resistant

"Application Security Principles, Making Applications Hacker Resistant" slides from my recent talk at Microsoft are available online now. It's not designed just for programmers, but for anyone who has any responsibility for Application Development. In fact programming is a small, yet very significant, part of developing secure apps.

It's a 1.5 hour talk, based on my longer class, and slides are in PowerPoint. I've stripped out any pretty colors and logos for speed of download!

Comments and feedback always appreciated as well.

Alfred Nobel, Prizes, and Dynamite

Alfred Nobel, a Swedish Chemist and Industrialist, is famous for establishing the Nobel Prizes, which consist of a medal, diploma, and a big pile of money (approximately US$ 1.3 Million). Even being nominated for a Nobel Prize is considered an incredible honor. The first prizes were awarded in 1901.

Alfred Nobel also invented dynamite in 1866, the first stable - and hence usable - explosive stronger than gunpowder. Dynamite's uses were primarily in construction and mining, for example for blasting away rock. Newer explosives are more popular today, but dynamite was widely used for 100+ years.

So, why is Nobel better known for the Nobel Prizes instead of inventing dynamite? Let's see: Giving away lots of money to people who, in Albert's words, "conferred the greatest benefit on mankind," versus inventing a very useful tool?

An open question - the answer may have to do with dynamite's bad image! In my mind, both great things. (yes, I know dynamite *can* be used as a weapon - so can water!)

Evil Spyware Company in my Backyard??

The Federal Trade commission is trying to shutdown nearby New Hampshire company Odysseus Marketing because they are evil - more specifically because their free Kazanon software is allegedly spyware, which redirects web searches to their search engine, tracks user's movements, and pops up annoying ads, according to Computer World.

Their software is supposedly for allowing users to share music anonymously over peer to peer networks while avoiding scrutiny and possible prosecution from the music and recording industry. Allegedly it doesn't work either!

Should these allegations prove to be true, I'd suggest estimating the sum all the time wasted by people whose computer's have been infected, adding a significant penalty, and then sentencing those responsible to that amount of jail time! A good Singaporean style caning might be satisfying too!

That said, they are innocent until proven guilty, and many innocent people are accused of crimes unfortunately. We'll be following this one.

Find a Human - Customer Service

How to get a customer service HUMAN on the Phone

Automated help systems have limits, as well as being extreme nuisances most of the time!

How do you get a human on the phone - or must you push endless buttons in non-friendly menu systems??

Find a Human is a great resource - listings for telcos, banks, credit cards, retails stores, and much much more.

I use them all the time!

Notice that nothing is listed for AT&T. I was a recent disgruntled customer - paid my last bill today. I terminated their service with extreme prejudice due to lack of customer service.

Dilbert Character Fired for Blogging

Fired for Blogging

In my second favorite comic strip, Dilbert, "Ted" (cool name, ehh?) is fired for blogging. See it here.
My favorite? Zippy - I've been a fan since way before syndication.