P2P Protection

What happens when you deliberately put a real debit card and pre-paid phone card out on a peer file sharing service and measure how it long before someone tries to access the cards and drain them of any value? About a week, according to an experiment conducted by Tiversa, a company who sells P2P protective software.

The results were reported in congressional testimony today.

The researchers put a file called "credit card and phone card numbers.doc" on a PC running Limewire inside a shared directory, as part of a test earlier this year. Within a few days, dozens of downloads were tracked, and soon the total value stored on both cards was depleted.

This is a very real scenario. While I won't get into whether P2P file sharing is legit, plenty of people are running this software on their PCs, and they may easily place files in the shareable folder that contain equally sensitive information. The problem is compounded if these services are being run from corporate-owned PCs, too.

So let's try something out. If you are running a sharing service on your PC, take a moment now and see if you have made yourself an inadvertent target:

Have you set up your entirely hard drive as shareable? Not a good idea. At least change the setting to just the folder where your media files are located.

Is your hard disk not very organized, and you don't pay much attention to where you store your files? Now is the time to look. The Tiversa researchers found dozens of copies of passports and birth certificates, hundreds of copies of tax returns, and federal student aid applications when they did a quick search of the Gnutella network. It didn't take them very long to find this stuff, and when they downloaded a few samples they seemed like the real McCoy.

Did the file sharing software add other folders besides the one where you knowingly store your music and videos? They are good at finding all of your media files elsewhere, and if you have an MP3 in the same place where you have your Quicken data, you could be in trouble. Spend some time cleaning house now.

Do you do work on a PC that is also used by your teenagers? You could have saved a work document in a shareable folder by mistake, or not realized that later on the folder became shareable. In a recent study by Osterman Research, 71% of employees answering the survey have checked work-related email from home on a non-work owned computer. Work is being done away from the office more often all the time.

You have been warned.

LinkedIn and Facebook

The press loves a food fight, good vs. evil, Microsoft vs. Netscape (Netscape? Remember them?), Microsoft vs. Linux, Microsoft vs. Google. Okay, enough already. The one I'll talk about today is LinkedIn vs. Facebook.

For those of you that have been living under a rock and use neither, LinkedIn is a social networking site where people can post their online resumes and search for jobs or business connections. I have been a member for several years and have several hundred people whom I have met over my career. I have used LinkedIn for doing research on companies and finding sources to interview for stories or leads to new story ideas, as well as a place where I can collect references for previous work that I have done for my consulting clients. It is also a great place to keep track of people when they change jobs, or about to. (The recent CMP layoffs were presaged by a flurry of connect requests, for example.)

Facebook is a social networking site that formerly was the exclusive domain of college students, and seems like the successor for MySpace when kids want something more grown-up. Its scope has been expanded twice recently: first to allow members from the general population to join, and most recently with a series of REST interfaces that developers could build applications on. It is one of the quickest growing sites around – according to the WSJ, they have added three million users since this latest development. I was one of them and joined a few weeks ago and now have 100 or so "friends." One of my motivations for joining was to communicate with my daughter, who used the site to do research and figure out where she wanted to go to college this fall by joining several groups and messaging people that eventually formed a group of entering freshman in her particular dorm.

Both services have their own messaging system so you never have to leave the service and use your regular email identity and you can also get info about your correspondents by clicking on their picture. This seems less useful to me – but then I already do too much email anyway. I see my daughter using email less and less because she lives in Facebook and doesn't want to check her email box.

The Facebook open application ploy is a smart one, and there are now close to a 1,000 different applications that people have put together. As the Journal points out, a popular music sharing app called iLike gets more revenues from Facebook users than from its own home page. I am sure that there are others that will be moneymakers in the near future too. What is interesting about the applications is that you can see what your friend network is using and this way get a lead on the more interesting ones that you might want to fool around with.

Up until now, LinkedIn was its own closed universe. They offered several different plans from free to several hundred dollars per month to make use of their services. I know a few people who have coughed up the cash but most are satisfied with the free service. They have begun their own developer program too, at least according to Techcrunch, but I couldn't find any details on their site. The details on the Facebook API are easy to find and seem well thought out.

Facebook is easier to build networks, easier than LinkedIn to set up your own groups (see if you can find my group called frosh dads), and easier than LinkedIn to customize your own home page with a lot of silly applications. There is even a group for LinkedIn users, where I got a lot of useful information and links to write this column. [And there is a discussion thread on LinkedIn about Facebook here.] But more importantly, it seems the people on Facebook you ask to be your "friend" are choosier and have somewhat of a higher threshold than on LinkedIn. I took the easy way of bulk uploading about 200 of my Gmail contacts to get started on Facebook, and I should have been more selective: Several people messaged me basically saying who the heck are you and why should I want to be your friend. That brought me back to thoughts of junior high and I don't want to get into that period of my life, believe me.

One person that sent me a "who are you" request turned out to be someone that I exchanged emails with 12 years ago and haven't heard from since. At least, he kept better records than I did, but it was nice to reconnect.

With LinkedIn, I get all sorts of requests to be connected with people that I honestly don't know and don't think I ever met or corresponded with. I mean no offense if you are one of those. When you write a weekly newsletter, you the reader know a lot more about me than I about you. Depending on my mood, I have either accepted them or denied them, with no real rationale.

Granted, the two networks serve vastly different audiences and purposes: I don't have any incentive to hide my true identity on LinkedIn, indeed, I want to be as specific as possible about my credentials and professional affiliations, because you never know what work might come in as a result. That is the opposite on Facebook, where you don't want unknown stalkers coming by, and where you might want to have multiple identities (if you are a teenager or college student) to see how to take your "friends" to "friends with benefits" level.

Alex Iskold has done an excellent analysis back in January about the two sites, showing traffic stats and their different approaches to their networks and content:

A more recent post by Ed Sim on this blog talks about the different rationales and audiences and has some insightful comments by his readers.

I'd be interested in your comments about both services. You can either send me an email directly, post a comment on my Strominator.blog, or message me from within Facebook or LinkedIn. I'll tally all the replies and let you know across the board what happens.

MS Home Server review

Here is a question for you: when was the last time you backed up your home's digital files? Maybe never? Bad answer.

Microsoft has been working on a solution, and it went into its final production throes this past week. The product is called Windows Home Server, and it is a stripped-down version of its Windows Server 2003 that normally costs a thousand bucks or so. For the time being, you can download a timed-version (it will work until December) freely from this link. You do need to sign up and answer a few questions to join the Connect service, which also has other pre-release software from Microsoft.

You need to install the software on a new machine: it will wipe your disk clean and boot up automatically with the Home Server running. The software is designed to run "headless" which means that you don't need to attach a monitor or a keyboard, once you get beyond certain basics that I will talk about in a moment. It will install the operating system, split your hard disk into two partitions (one for system files, one for data), and set up a bunch of shared drives for pictures, videos, files, and so forth. Think of this as layering a simple set of controls on top of the standard Windows server platform.

To access these shares, you will need to run another piece of software called Home Server Connector Software from each computer to set up the network connection. There are basically two different levels of access – "remote control" for the administrators that gives them access to the server control console, and ordinary file and printer shares for everyone else.

I tried it out on my home office network to mixed results. I liked a few things:

First, getting to the reason for this column, it is very easy to backup your PCs with this product, provided you have a big enough disk on the server's PC. You can choose what you want to backup, and it automagically does it in the middle of the night, when traffic is lightest (and presumably your PC that is to be backed up is still powered on). You can set up a different schedule if you are pickier.

Second, Home Server can also automatically synchronize its shared folders with ones on your local PC – that is a neat trick and something you might consider for say sharing your pictures or videos across the network, and something that has been standard with the Windows server line for some time.

Finally, you can control the server from outside your home, if it can figure out how to open up your home gateway ports. It uses UPnP to do this. Sadly, my 2Wire DSL gateway doesn't support this (it doesn't support a lot of other things, but that discussion will have to wait for another day). It would be nice if there were another alternative to UPnP, but there isn't.

Here are some things that I didn't like about the software.

First, you initially need complex passwords to set the darn thing up, meaning something with seven characters, upper and lower case and numbers too. That seems a bit onerous for the average home network. This can be loosened up once you get the first user going.

Second, when the install was done, it didn't recognize the Intel network adapter that was in a fairly recent Dell. Once I installed the right driver, I was good to go. Third, despite its headless installation, you will still need to be sitting in front of the server to set up a shared printer. Next, the only clients for this server are Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Vista – if you have got anything older on your home network, and chances are good you do – then don't even bother with the product.

Is this a good deal? It is hard to tell until Microsoft sets pricing. There is still talk that it will be available both as a bundled piece of hardware from the usual suspects and as a software download, but we'll see.

If it does come as low-cost software and you have an older PC and can upgrade the storage, it might be worth it. But if you have older Windows and Macs, then no: you are better off buying either a Mac mini or a network-attached storage box and saving yourself the trouble.

How to do your next teleconference

If you are like me, you probably spend a lot of time on teleconference calls. And like it or not, these calls rarely have everyone joining at the same time, so you end up spending a lot of time waiting at the beginning of the call for everyone to dial in. A new Web-based service is trying to fix that and make these calls more useful.

The service is called Gaboogie.com, and while it isn’t cheap, the productivity gains could pay for the cost of the calls. Here is how it works. You sign up on the company’s Web page with your email address, and you get an account with 100 free minutes to try out the service. You enter your participants names and phones numbers using your browser, and set up when the call is to begin. Then the service calls everyone and joins them together for the conference.

NOTE: As of 9/1/07, they are redoing the service and rebranding it under lypp.com. So not sure if it is still working at the moment.

Since the service is making outgoing calls, they charge you for each minute that everyone is connected. So if your call last ten minutes and has five people – including you – then that consumes 50 total minutes. You can buy minutes in bulk (250 minutes for $30, 1000 minutes for $80) to recharge your account when you run low.

There are a lot of Web-based free conference calling services out there that work the old-fashioned way: you email people a dial-in number and a password, and you have to wait for your parties to initiate the calls and connect in. (I have a list of them on http://yourpersonalgeek.tv if you are interested.) Gaboogie is the first one that I know that initiates the calls. You can create teleconferences in Skype, but it isn’t as simple and you are limited to a maximum of five participants.

So I like the idea behind Gaboogie, but the service still has some quirks. The Web control panel for the moderator is somewhat terse. If you want your conference call recorded, you can set this up ahead of time but then you have to listen to a recurring beep to indicate the recording during the call. That is somewhat annoying. Once the call is done, however, the recording can be downloaded as an mp3 file or as an RSS feed for others to listen to. (It would be nice if the mp3 file could remove the beep indicators from the recording, then these could easily become nice podcasts.) And the recording includes about a minute of music on hold at the beginning and about another minute at the end of the call.

All in all, Gaboogie is an interesting twist on an old idea. And maybe it will save some time on your next teleconference.

Email Koyaanisqatsi

When someone sends you an email, when should they expect a reply? Within an hour? A day? It is a simple question, but the answer (and you can send them to me via email if you'd like) isn't.

I think most of us try to respond within a business day, and if we get the email early enough, by the close of that day too. It is a pretty good rule of thumb.

But then some of us expect a response even quicker, and get annoyed or impatient of the delay. To me, this represents something out of balance, like some scenes from the movie Koyaanisqatsi. (Little ironies department: I now live about a mile from the former site of Pruitt-Igoe made famous in the movie.)

I was talking to a colleague yesterday about how she often replies to her emails late at night, after her husband has gone to sleep. It made me think about how often I reply to emails in the early morning, before my own wife awakes.

And how many of us can't leave the laptop home when we go on vacation for fear of the massive email pile-up that will await us upon our return? Or who can't help ourselves but "multitask" during meetings and clear our inboxes when we are supposed to be part of the meeting itself?

There are some that are hyperactive email responders, carrying BlackBerries and being reachable 24x7. You know who you are.

Is this healthy? I am beginning to wonder.

The irony is that I have come full circle on email responsiveness. Back in the early days of my own email use, I tried to respond to every email that I received within a few hours. This is the early 1980s, when the Internet was still a DoD science project, and few people had the ability to send messages between corporations, let alone across the world. It was still a novelty then.

In the early 1990s, I had an Internet-reachable email address, actually several. When I started Network Computing magazine, we were one of the first magazines to include email addresses of the authors for each article, which was also novel concept then. Now you can find them for the bylines in my local paper. I was also an early user of the BlackBerry precursor, called Radiomail. I remember one time pulling over at one toll plaza on the Garden State Parkway to answer some emails. A curious cop came over and was wondering what I was doing.

Back when Computer Associates (now called just CA) first implemented their email network, they actually turned the system off for several hours during the workday because they wanted their staff to get work done. This was before various executives were caught cooking the books, so I guess it worked too well. They eventually stopped doing this, and now email is available 24x7, just like everywhere else.

The email landscape sure has changed since then and what was novel is now de rigueur. Today most of us think nothing about emailing people that are halfway around the world, and of course now I get spam in about a dozen different languages, if I could figure out the character sets that come into my inbox.

The trick to being successful with email can be summed up with one word: balance. Or getting back into email balance.

"I do however still get a chuckle by those who complain they can’t get work done at the office, yet are sending personal emails out all day long," says Rich DiGirolamo, who writes a very amusing email newsletter and is a professional keynote speaker. "Some of us make every effort to answer every email within twenty-four hours, but at times we need to prioritize them. Yours just may not be as important to me as you think it is. But it will get answered, I promise."

I think that is a great strategy. I recommend setting aside some time every day to read your emails, and perhaps a separate time to write replies. But don't let it bleed into the entire day.

Maybe we need an email rehab center in Malibu to help those that need to get their lives back into balance.

My top ten ways to promote yourself on Web 2.0

After reading about how various indie musicians promote themselves in a NY Times magazine article this past weekend, and meeting Scott Ginsberg for the first time, I have a series of Web 2.0 epiphanies.

Ginsberg is the Nametag Guy, a smart young man who wears "Hello, my name is Scott" nametag on his shirt all day, every day, for the past several years. He has a blog, a podcast, a Squidoo "lens", an email listserv, an RSS feed, Digg and Technorati references, Myspace and Facebook entries, YouTube snippets, and probably one or two other things too. In between updating all these things, he writes books and is a professional speaker. He totally gets how to promote himself using the latest tools.

People and businesses that will succeed in this brave new world have a lot of work to do to. The old days of putting together a few pages (or a few hundred) of static HTML are so over. The good news is that most of the tools are free for the downloading. All it will take is your time. The bad news is that the time investment is non-trivial. You can't farm this out to someone to just do it for you. It has to become part of your own online psyche and daily activities. Like the Katie Couric ghost-blog debacle, it isn't something you want to delegate.

Here are my top ten tips that I have learned along the way:

1. Email is still the best way for anyone to enter your ecosystem. I have been doing these essays for more than 10 years, and many of you are still reading them and responding. Email is the best way for people between 30 – 50 years old to contact you and stay in touch. Why not younger than 30? Because these people are using IM, Facebook, Myspace, and probably 13 other "social network" sites. They certainly have email addresses and spend time with email, but probably not to the extent that you would want to count on this form of communication. Why not older than 50? Well, I am just putting an arbitrary age here, but eventually, you are getting to the non-typing pre-war generation that doesn't want to communicate via email – until all of their friends or grandkids get on it. These are still people that have their assistants print out their corporate emails – don’t laugh, I have seen too many situations.

2. You don't just want to focus on email, you still need to be approachable in Web 2.0-space. List all of your electronic coordinates in one place on your Web site, and include a phone number for good measure, because that makes it all real. Don't do a "contact form" that hides your email address – that is so old school and off-putting, and anyone worth their HTML code can figure out what the embedded email address is anyway.

3. Give something away for free. Really. You do this to build credibility and also to give people a taste of what you will charge them for. Ginsberg is giving away his latest book on his blog, and he is so comfortable with doing that because he knows this will build word-of-mouth and drive sales. The indie musicians profiled in the Times are giving away MP3s. Some have taken this a step further and are even experimenting with demand-based pricing that turns out to net them more than the 99-cent download standard at iTunes.

4. Think about lists of useful stuff that you can offer others. I have a page of links to various Web conferencing tools on my site that used to be in the top four sites when you searched on Google (today is down to #13, I guess I am slipping up). I have had this page on my site for about a decade, and started it on a whim. Now I get vendors who want me to list their stuff there. Squidoo has institutionalized this with their "lens" approach, and Pageflakes has something similar with their shared pages (You can see my RSS feeds and sites that I frequent here). Each of these approaches takes something that you know, and filters that you apply to the Wide World, and puts a very small amount of your own stamp and value to it.

5. Remember the Web is all about short attention spans. Call it the 4-4-4 rule: The average person spends less than four seconds looking at a Web page. They abandon a site if they can't find something in four clicks. Any video should be shorter than four minutes, or people won't bother watching it.

6. Video matters more. Speaking of videos, start to think about ways that you can put more content into (short) video segments on your site, and then post them to YouTube and other video-sharing places.

7. Don't just Digg. Sites like Digg.com and Technorati.com that point people to your content are terrific ways to spread the word, but need care and feeding as you post new content – you have to add the entries on their sites to point to your new stuff. But also consider other places such as EzineArticles.com that will promote your content. If you post enough content on these other sites, you can leverage them better too.

8. Titles and keywords matter. When you add content to these pages, think of snappy headlines and catchy keywords. Because that is what people are going to be searching for and seeing when they scroll around.

9. Exploit your readers/fans/listeners/viewers. Everyone is big these days on "user-generated content" but there is much more to this than meets the eye. The people that consume your content are your best promoters. Leverage them, take care of them, and they will make you rich and famous. Or at least amongst your own ecosystem. The NYT article mentions how the musicians have cleverly used their fans to generate tracks on their songs, schedule concert dates in particular cities, and other activities. I try to answer every email that you send me, even if it is just to acknowledge receipt. Part of this is respecting your readers, part of it is a new way of interacting with them. I remember when we started Network Computing magazine back in 1990 and put our author's email addresses at the end of the articles. We were fearless! But we got some great feedback.

10. Think about all the communities you belong to. Does each one have its own equivalent of an A-list blogger? Someone who has a page a mile long of MySpace "friends" or LinkedIn "connections? A common calendar of events that is easy to subscribe to via RSS? A list of recommended books/videos/music?

There is so much more to do with Web 2.0. I have to run, and post this article on the various places mentioned here, and get the emails out.

Web site construction woes

I've heard lots of woes from people trying to work with their Web site consultants this week. You know the type: they promise that your site is "just about finished" and the pages "just need some tweaking" and yet nothing gets done. I have had to suffer through whiney rants about delays, bad programming decisions, tools that malfunction, missing logins and content wrecks.

Have we reached the point where building a Web site is a lot like building a new freeway? It takes far too many people, time, and dollars, upsets the people who have to live near it, and in the end is obsolete by the time the first people try to use it.

I remember the good ole days of the Web, say 12 years ago, when one person (like me) could build a site in an afternoon, without any really specialized tools or knowledge beyond knowing a few tags and reading a Laura Lemay book.

I am coming to the conclusion that we need to return to those simple days where one person can still build their site, without the heavy lifting of a Web Site Designer and a Web Programming Consultant and an Internet Search Specialist and a Web Marketing Person. (Capital letters deliberately intended to reflect the title's self-importance.)

At one site, a simple database was taking months to webify. I ended up talking to the site's graphic designer, who was the only one who had any project management skills and could reign in the wayward development staff. Said staff has trouble configuring something that my high school networking students could do in their sleep. Someone else was complaining to me that their copy of Dreamweaver had started behaving badly, and all I could do was recommend a clean uninstall of every Adobe product on her disk, short of buying a new computer. These are just a couple of the stories I could tell you this week alone.

So in the 15 or so years of the Web we have better tools, but they still suck. Better sites, but they are still annoying with pop-ups and dead-end links and overblown graphic frippery. Better site statistics, but still no insights into who comes where and why they leave our sites. Better traffic, but still a lot of mythology about how the search engines point our way. And speaking of search, why is it that we still can't do better there on deploying good internal site search algorithms?

There is a simple answer: rebel, resist, and reclaim the Web as your own personal place. Avoid the consultantization of the Web. Fire your designers and programmers.

Start afresh with a blogging tool like Wordpress or Blogger and build your site around that. Or pick up a couple of widgets and components, or use dabbleDB or Pageflakes or stuff from Google or Yahoo. You don’t need a passel of programmers to work this Web.

Since moving over to Wordpress and posting these simultaneously to the blog and my email listserv, I have noticed that I don't do any site maintenance over on good ole' strom.com anymore. Why bother? The old archive of prehistoric articles is still there, and maybe even a few of the links still get people to the original places. A few pages are in the top ten category on Google, not through any forethought or planning of my own, and I am grateful for that traffic.

As Thoreau said, simplify. Part of being all Web 2.0 is never having to hear the sorry tales of your programmers that are behind schedule, over budget, and full of excuses why the dog ate their APIs. Forget about them, and build a simple, quick site that can deliver some value the same day you start the project.