Christopher Herot's Weblog

Be Careful What You Ask A Stranger to Do...

...especially on the Internet, as you never know who might see it.

In this case Todd Shriber, (former) aide to U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-Mont), emailed the security Web site attrition.org asking if someone there could hack into his alma mater, Texas Christian University, to alter his college grades.  Instead, they strung him along for a month - even getting him so send in a JPG of a squirrel, before posting the entire thread on their Going Postal section here.

More interesting is that the story made a brief appearance on Wikipedia before being deleted as "not notable."  The debate over whether to delete the article runs several times longer than the article itself and illustrates the level of commitment of the Wikipedians to protecting us from being drowned in unimportant information.

Where is the URL?

One of the most annoying things about the dead-tree media is how, when it reports on a particular site on the Internet, it omits the relevant URL.  Case in point:  In a recent article  in the New York Times about "dueling videos" on Network Neutrality posted on Youtube, there is no indication on how to find the videos in question.  After some Googling on my own, here is how the article should have appeared:

Dueling Videos A short video produced by the advocacy group Public Knowledge, available on YouTube, has won plaudits for its clear, concise explanation of “net neutrality:” the effort to prevent Internet service providers from offering “tiered service” to content providers, which critics say will make Web sites that pay extra more accessible than those that don’t. “This is a great explanation of net neutrality,” one YouTube user wrote. “I finally get it!” The video is so straightforward, in fact, that it might be called dull.

Another video, also on YouTube, is much better produced, complete with nerve-shaking music and a voiceover straight out of a political ad. But it never explains what net neutrality is — it merely describes it as “mumbo jumbo,” vaguely asserts that it’s “bad for consumers,” and takes a few potshots at Google (which favors net neutrality).

This second video, we learn from the tiny type at the end, was paid for by the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (youtube.com).

Watch both videos and make up your own mind.

Guidewire Group's Fall Leadership Forum

Chris Shipley and her colleagues at Guidewire Group, best known for producing the semi-annual DEMO conference, recently held a new event in Sonoma, California.  The Fall Leadership Forum brought together 90 executives, half of them techies and more than 75% from small companies.  This turned out to be a good size - large enough to ensure a diversity of viewpoints while small enough that people could get to know each other over the 2+ days of sessions and events, including a wine-blending contest.

The topics ranged from broad issues of leadership and innovation to specifics such as paying attention to baby boomers and the implications of consumer-generated media.

There was no press and the discussion was off-the-record, but with David Sifry's  permission, here is his list of Rules for Entrepreneurs from the lively session he conducted at the beginning of the conference:

 

• Find your passion
• Team, team, team
• Lead, don’t manage
• Develop leaders (spend 80% on top 20% of people)
• Prepare for scalability
• Back of the napkin it
• Missionaries vs. Mercenaries
• Vision is easy, Execution is Hard

He's given a version of this talk a few times and says that every time he gets different additions from the audience.  Some good ones from this time:

• Power = Responsibility & Accountablity
  
  • Need to support your people even if you disagree with them
• Jimmy Carter rule
  
  • Deal with the person, not the problem
• “I’ve never let anyone go to early”
• Anyone can be a leader
• Everyone must be a leader
• Everyone must be a salesperson.
• Praise in public.
• Design to last - a place you where you would always want to be.
• Create Opportunity
  .
• Communicate the vision of the outcome; don’t troubleshoot.
• Fear is the mind-killer.
• Foster risk taking - Never fear mistakes.
• Don’t make the same mistake twice.
• Breed hand raisers.
• When something goes awry, look at the process, not the person.
• Everyone is a support person.
• Embrace management at the right time.
• Platinum Rule “Do unto others as they would have done to them."

 

Other coverage of the event:

Jana Eggers
Chris Ronan
Pito Salas
Charlotte Ziems

YAAN: Craigsnumber

This week saw the introduction of Yet Another Anonymous Number service: Craigsnumber.  Trading rather blatantly on the success of Craigslist, Craigsnumber provides a very simple way to create an anonymous number that can be placed in an ad and which forwards to a specified real number.  The innovation here is that the user specifies the length of time (1 hour, 1 day, or 1 week) when setting up the number.

 

Callers to the number get the following script:

Please enter the extension number.
After the beep, record your introduction. When you are done, press pound.
[record your introduction]
Please wait while I connect you.
[Music]

At the recipient’s end, the caller’s number is displayed and the following script is followed:

Hi, this is Craigsnumber.
You have an incoming call with introduction. [plays]
To accept this call, press 1.  Otherwise, Just hang up.
[press 1]
[Beep]
[call legs are bridged]

If the recipient hangs up, the system hangs up on the caller without any explanation. I suspect this is a bug, because if the recipient does nothing (which is what happens if the call is intercepted by voice mail), the caller gets the message “The part you are calling is unable to take calls at the moment. Please call back again. Goodbye.”

 One thing that some people may find creepy is that while Craigsnumber's value proposition is that they keep your number anonymous, there is no corporate identifying information. The domain is registered through an anonymous proxy service. Their FAQ does have a brief privacy statement and there is a small privacy blurb that comes up if you mouse over the small asterix next to the place where you enter your phone number.

Last time I checked, there were at least 17 companies that provided some sort of anonymous calling capability at varying levels of sophistication.  My list:

Broadvox Direct, Cleveland, OH
Craigsnumber, ????
Hullo, Inc., Gatineau, Quebec
Jangl, Pleasanton, CA
Jaxtr, Palo Alto
My Ad Box, Inc., Baltimore, MD
MyPrivateLine (formerly PrivateTel), Network Enhanced Telecom, LLP, Dallas, TX
PrivatePhone, NetZero, United Online, Inc., Woodland Hills, CA
SafePhoneCalls, Tego Networks, LLC, Dallas
SpokenBuzz, LLC, Santa Anna, CA
Staysafe, Liquid11, Lowestoft Suffolk, UK
TalkPlus, Inc., San Mateo, CA
Talkster International Inc., Toronto
TalkTrust.com LLC, Palo Alto
Tossable Digits, Inc., Falls Church, Virginia
Verbdate, Verbster Corporation, West Vancouver, BC
Zogo, Wireless Introduction Network, Inc., New York

US Patent 7,149,288

Convoq has been granted its first patent, number 7,149,288, entitled Rules based real-time communication system.

Abstract

A rules-based real-time messaging system for groups of users, in which an availability status is maintained in association with each user. Clients are communicably coupled to a real-time messaging server, which maintains indications of the online/offline presence of each user, as well as other user attributes. Rules and a rules engine are maintained in the real-time messaging server for controlling the delivery of messages to the users, and for controlling how the availability of users is provided to other users. Based on the specific rules stored on the real-time messaging server, the rules engine determines the state of various relevant conditions such as the availability of users of the system, and detects the occurrence of various real-time events such as a user logging-on to or logging-off from the system for controlling the delivery of various types of messages and/or the performance of resulting actions.

Spying 2.0

The New York Times Magazine ran a long piece today by Clive Thompson on Open-Source Spying.  It described how the intelligence community  has started using open-source and off-the-shelf social software such as blogs and wikis to encourage sharing of information within and among intelligence agencies.  Under the traditional, hierarchical mode of operation, and analyst would shift through mountains of data and produce a report.  The data could be open source, such as newspaper articles, or classified information from operatives in the field, but getting information from other agencies was cumbersome.  Once the report was produced, its dissemination was at the whim of the analyst's supervisor.  The shortcomings of this system became apparent after 9/11 when it was revealed that no one had connected the dots among the many pieces of intelligence that would have exposed the plot.

The CIA and later the DNI set up a competition to find answers to the problem.   The winning paper “The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community,” by Calvin Andrus awakened the community to the potential of social software and led to the creation of the Intellipedia, a classified wiki.  It turns out that blogs and wikis are not just useful for disseminating information, but also for identifying what is important - as the number of internal links to an article grows, it rises in page rank and thus becomes more visible to other analysts and decision makers.

The very idea of sharing information in this way runs counter to a long tradition in intelligence circles which holds that intelligence sources and methods need to be protected by compartmentalizing clearances and distributing information only to people with a "need-to-know."  On the other hand, intelligence analysis today makes much more use of open source information, and important information about a terrorist or health threat may come from people who are not formally affiliated with any intelligence agency, such as doctors, aid workers, or security guards.

In any case, the Intellipedia already comprises 28,000 pages.

Further reading:

• Presentation by Calvin Andrus
• Jay Cross
• Eugene Kim
• Ross Mayfield
• David Weinberger