11.16.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:34 by lnxwalt
Fire is destructive, at least it can become destructive when it gets out of control. Yet, it is a necessary part of the cycle of existence here on the earth.
When the fires erupted in Southern California, it wasn’t unexpected. We who live in the drier parts of SoCal are well aware of the potential for wildfires. You can see me in the Spring when I’m home, out with a hoe, chopping up vegetation growing near the house and fence.
I rarely even try to watch television, so I had no concept of just how large an area burned, or how many homes were affected by this event.
I’m starting to see some of the photos of the flames towering in the sky.
It brings to mind some of the lessons people learned in earlier natural and man-made disasters:
* Once an event reaches a certain scale, no amount of planning and pre-allocated resources will be enough to deal with the loss. In your network infrastructure, as in the rest of your life and business, you need to go for resiliency. When something happens, you may be able to mitigate the effects, but you may not. Resiliency is the ability to bounce back after the event and regain your balance, so you can begin the journey back to where you were.
* If you are safe, but your neighbors are not, you are not safe after all. Whatever the event: fire, flood, earthquake, or UFO invasion, your response must also help your neighbor. Likewise, your network infrastructure’s ability to render assistance to nearby families and businesses whose connectivity is lost may be key to your family’s and your business’s recovery later on.
* If your network is based upon one vendor’s proprietary products and protocols, and not amenable to carrying traffic or attaching devices and software that is not made by that same vendor, your network is insanely vulnerable. That’s why every network needs to be based around open standard file formats and protocols (and arguably, libre / open source implementations of those standard file formats and protocols). If you cannot drop in another vendor’s product and be almost fully functional within 24 to 72 hours, you are sunk.
* A disastrous event such as the fires affects a wide variety of people, communities, and businesses. After the event, recovery depends upon these same people, communities, and businesses pulling together to help one another recover and rebuild. Outside help can only get you so far. Likewise, local families’ and businesses’ networks may need to start out with piggy-backing applications (software) on one business’s machines, and / or moving their network traffic across one business’s network.
* The fires were devastating in patches across Southern California, much of which covered areas that were not inhabited. The after-effects, including flooding and mudslides, will likely affect more of the inhabited areas. Still, this is quite a bit different from having most of a major city buried under thirty feet of water. It won’t be long until the fires (and the following flooding and mud / land slides) here are forgotten. The storm that flooded New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast, Katrina, will be remembered far longer. California’s recovery will be long over before Louisiana’s effort winds down.
* Insurance companies, upstanding citizens that they are, will deny or limit payouts for legitimate claims on policies upon which they were happy to collect premiums for so many years. A number of other policy-holders will find their policies canceled as the companies realize that continuing to collect premiums could put them on the hook in the next big disastrous event.
* At some point, the “no strings attached” aid from outside will go away, and whatever recovery efforts continue must be self-generated and self-funded.
As always, this is solely the opinion of the author, and in no way represents the ideas of any employer, company, or government agency.
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11.02.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 6:19 by lnxwalt
Here in Southern California, where we are starting to get a handle on the fires that forced up to half a million people to flee their homes, it is curious to see how the decisions that our politicians make (and the developers that pay for their campaigns carry out) affect our lives.
Many of these fires are believed to have been caused by downed power lines in areas that are prone to regular doses of fast-moving winds. You have to wonder why these wires are suspended in the air in such areas. Surely it is less than the cost of the 2003 and 2007 fires to bury the wires in the most dangerous areas, perhaps running them through non-conductive, moisture-resistant piping in order to minimize power losses due to contact with the ground. Likewise, it is foolhardy to ignore the need to put solar and wind generation capability right there in those areas, near the housing that necessitates their existence. (In fact, I’d say that each home should have the ability to generate at least half of its annual consumption from non-polluting sources.)
Just as surely, turning down some requests to build in "edge" areas most prone to fire and to unwanted wildlife interactions and requiring non-flamable building materialswhen permits are granted is just common sense.
California is reaping the consequences of the land-use choices of its local communities. Rather than deciding to integrate multiple types of housing and multiple employers and industries into common neighborhoods where there is less need to spend hours on the freeway each day, there are sometimes completely separate municipalities for industrial, commercial, and residential uses. For the residential cities, known as "bedroom communities", the way to increase the tax base is to build more housing, as newer and more expensive homes generate more taxes than older homes built when prices were lower.
I am currently about seventy miles from home, near the coordination center for the disaster-relief efforts. It took meover an hour to drive the twenty miles to work today. Over an hour! That is difficult to imagine, so let me put it into perspective. Most of us can ride a bicycle twenty miles per hour. Why does it take so long to travel such a short distance? Because local governmental leaders throughout Southern California are not willing to be honest with their constituents and tell us that we will have to sacrifice for a while in order to avoid a soon-coming hardship that could end our way of life.
I guess we get the leadership we deserve. If we required honest, forward-looking leadership, we would not be in this situation. Since we do not require it, we do not and will not get it.
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10.23.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 9:35 by lnxwalt
When I bought this domain and started these blogs, it was part of an initiative meant to bring the true freedom of FLOSS to smaller businesses, especially in the Mojave Desert of California.
I quickly found that my target market was not willing to take the time for a vendor to put together a customized solution, but instead wants to sign papers today and be online within a few days. So it will take us a little longer to build out our offerings with a focus on turnkey or nearly turnkey solutions.
In the mean time, we are working slowly on a couple of internal projects. Watch this space and both our Free and Open Technologies and Owner-Managed Business blogs for updates.
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09.26.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 15:49 by lnxwalt
I am not an anti-immigration person. I believe that a carefully thought out policy, especially in regard to our neighbor Mexico, is an essential part of maintaining our security. Indeed, Mexico’s own social and economic stresses, if not relieved through emigration to the United States, threaten to spark another revolution right on our border.
However, the Governor of California, along with the governors of some other states, recently wrote a letter requesting an increase in the quota of H1B work visas. In technology fields, at least, this is not used to fill in places where there are no qualified Americans who can do the job. Instead, this program is used to dislodge highly-paid American workers and replace them with underpaid foreign workers.
The letter, which states, “businesses should be able to find the world’s best educated workers,” ignores the fact that thousands of the “best educated workers” who already live in the U.S. have difficulty finding work. The letter also repeats the myth that there is a “critical shortage of highly skilled professionals in math and science.” This myth has long ago been debunked by a Duke University study published five months ago.
A recent case shows that there is some limited recourse to those imported workers, but who (on a temporary visa sponsored by the employer) has the resources to try to fight the pay discrimination? Especially since that is the entire reason why employers bring these guys over here.
From Visa Law Blog, We often receive calls from frustrated employees on H1B visas complaining that employers are not paying them the required wages. Many are about to loose their jobs and want to learn more abot their rights.
Honestly, do you think there are not enough programmers already here waiting for an employer to see their resumes on Dice or Sologig? What about technical support? System and network administrators? Low-level supervisors and middle-level managers, including those with MBA degrees?
What is H1B being used for? When a corporation has some technical work, but does not want to pay the wages that workers in that field require. They import people from third-world countries on visas that give those employees little recourse against any actions that the company takes.
Shame on you, Governor Schwazenegger. Shame on the large companies that were behind this, but shame on the governor for failing to inform himself about the issues affecting California’s workforce and California’s smaller businesses that are trying to compete while following the law.
Let’s make this clear: H1B gives large corporations advantages over competing smaller businesses (including small, locally-owned businesses [SLOBs]) because the SLOBs are forced to pay workers the legal and prevailing rates, while corporations can import lower-pay workers. This cost advantage can be used to lower prices long enough to drive competitors out of business, or to inflate the compensation awarded to the CEO of that corporation.
H1B is a weapon against locally-owned small businesses, the kind of business that is the engine of the economy. I urge California readers to write our governor and ask him to withdraw his letter, instead asking for a level playing field: ZERO H1B visas until all legal residents working in the particular job field are employed in the field. This makes it fair for all of us, instead of just padding the pockets of corporate CEOs.
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09.04.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:28 by lnxwalt
I went to work today, but there was a power outage, so I left. When you work with servers and networks and VPNs, you are not going to get much done if nothing runs.
I was thinking about why we celebrate Labor Day. A century or two ago, there were no protections. Industrial age factories sprung up, led by men who would do anything to make more money, or so it seems. Labor built this country, and skilled, intelligent labor, enabled the “robber barons” who owned and ran the factories to quickly build unprecedented fortunes. See the MSN Encarta article about the industrial age.
Remember the child labor that we like to chide third world countries about? We had children working full days in dangerous jobs without safety equipment here.
Thanks to the labor movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, much of that kind of abusive mistreatment has been banished from our shores. Wage increases and benefits raised the standard of living for the common person, which is true economic growth.
My question today is how do we prevent it from coming back? As employee wages stagnate and skilled technical jobs move overseas where people will work for quite a bit less than local residents can afford to work, how do we prevent our corporations from becoming bless-me clubs for CEOs?
CNN/Money reported that CEOs make 364 times more than workers. It is a fascinating article, because it shows pretty clearly that our rewards are skewed. Fund-shufflers are even more highly paid than CEOs, according to the article.
I believe that the obscene compensation at the top of corporations could not happen if our smaller businesses were a stronger and more influential part of the economy. It is time for smaller businesses to look at large companies in our localities and determine how we can beat them. When small locally-owned businesses (SLOBs) and Owner-Managed Businesses (OMBs) are regularly beating their larger out-of-the area competitors for sales and contracts, and on issues of local significance, suddenly, those larger out-of-the-area competitors will have to cut pay at the very top, because they will not be able to squeeze their laborers any further.
SLOBs and OMBs are the hope for American business, for communities all over the country, and for the individuals in each community that need jobs that won’t turn tail and run the first time that sales go down in an area. SLOBs and OMBs do not get the $1 land contracts, because they do not promise to produce 500 minimum wage jobs (and cause the loss of 350 fairly decent-paying jobs in the process). SLOBs and OMBs also tend not to suck money from towns and cities all over the country into a headquarters building that is quite remote from most of the field locations.
Let us make it clear: if America wants its employees to be fairly compensated, then America needs to focus on building and strengthening the small businesses that will do the job. As this happens, however, small business owners need to be aware that it is not “your” business as much as it is “your community’s business” held in trust by you. In times of profit, don’t be afraid to throw in bonuses for your employees and contributions to community-based non-profits. In times of hardship, don’t be afraid to sacrifice and to ask your employees and community to join you in sacrifice.
America is a mess. Corporations helped put us in this condition. Small, locally-owned businesses and owner-managed businesses can help every community to develop its own solutions that work for that community.
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08.27.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:38 by lnxwalt
Earlier today, I was browsing the Town’s site and came across a survey. One of the questions asked whether it was important for the town’s residents to have jobs locally instead of having to commute outside the area.
I have to ask. How can you NOT KNOW that local jobs is one of the top issues for Apple Valley residents? Where have you been if you do not know the most basic things about the people you serve?
Apple Valley’s residents tend to drive down the Cajon Pass to get to employment. Why? Because local job openings are few, and most of the jobs that are available are retail and fast food restaurant jobs. Certainly there are a number of construction and real estate related jobs (at least they for now), but not enough to sustain the local economy.
Elected officials and employees of the Town of Apple Valley, wake up! Focus your attention on helping local residents to start and grow local businesses, since local residents have an incentive to try to make our local communities the best that they can be. After all, we live here too. In fact, many of us are renters. Why not help some of us become owners as the market prices for real estate head toward a realistic level? What a marvelous way to help stabilize the local economy.
But if you are not paying attention, it will never happen. You will continue to throw away our hard-earned money on hare-brained schemes to attract out-of-the-area businesses to move here. “We’ll pay your property taxes, your sewer assessments, and refund a portion of the sales tax revenue if you’ll just open a Gree-C-Burger here in our fine city.” You’ll continue to build homes in an area where there are no jobs to offer the residents.
The path you are on has not worked in the twenty-plus years I have lived in the area. Why would you expect it to suddenly work now? It is time to change.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: localgovernment, economic development
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Posted in Uncategorized at 1:58 by lnxwalt
This could easily become Basic Economics or Introduction To Organizational Management. However, each of those subjects is far greater than I can cover in a short little blog article. We will attempt to give a very basic idea of what and how. If you need more, contact your nearby community college or state university. In my area, that would be Victor Valley Community College or California State University, San Bernardino.
Resource Allocation
Limits On Resources
Even though it may sometimes seem as though there is no limit on resources, there is indeed a limit. Humans generally live into the area of seventy years of age. Some may live an extra fifty years, while some may die fifty years earlier than seventy. But the median in the United States is somewhere in the seventies. This serves as a hard limit. Everything you are going to do or say or think or experience has to occur before your life ends. After that, it is too late and you just miss out on whatever you have not experienced. Ignoring issues of eternity for the time being, this puts an upper cap on your life and the time resource that you can invest in any particular task.
There are other limits as well. If you desire to accomplish any particular task, assuming that you have the basic skills and abilities that are required, there are limits on the amount of time you can invest in achieving that goal. For example, if you are sleeping, you are probably not learning to speak Italian. If you are watching Numb3rs, you are probably not practicing to win the Tour de France. With only 24 hours in a day, how you choose to use your time weighs heavily on what you can accomplish.
Mozilla gets promotional funding from Google for Firefox. A good portion of Mozilla’s paid development effort therefore goes into the browser, despite the fact that Mozilla has several other worthy projects that also need resources. For example, the Thunderbird e-mail client, the Sunbird & Lightning calendaring solutions, the Camino Macintosh browser and the Minimo mobile browser. A recent discussion about resource allocation pointed out that T-bird has a better chance of getting resources allocated if it goes into its own organization.
The reasons are probably many, but the number of current and the number of potential users for T-bird in its current state is far smaller than the number of current and the number of potential users for Firefox.
Sometimes in larger companies, it seems like no idea goes unfunded. That is when a company winds up with dozens of completely unrelated divisions that the senior management cannot summarize into a comprehensive “this is what we do and why we do it” statement. In SLOBs (Small, Locally-Owned Businesses) and OMBs (Owner-Managed Businesses), there aren’t that many unneeded staff members or unused funds available for such empire-building.
In smaller businesses, as in Mozilla, we have to make choices as to what our limited resources will be spent upon.
It isn’t just in our business lives—we have to use the same principles in our personal and family lives, too. You can imagine my surprise when I get a call from home that starts this way: kid: “Can you send me $600? The camera that I want is on sale.” Now consider this in the context that I just bought a camera (a $99 digital snapshot camera with 4X zoom, the same model I bought myself, but still a camera). In all the years that digital cameras have been out, I just bought for the first time in June. Now in August, I’m being asked for double what I’ve spent on digital cameras in my lifetime for one camera!
Do I spend more on project A, which brings in most of my revenue and growth? Do I invest some funds in project B, which will bring in less revenue than project A for the foreseeable future? Do I invest in a project C, which will start out slowly, but is expected to grow rapidly?
If you have a product that suddenly takes off the way Twitter has, but which has no sustainable business model (yet), do you give it all the resources it wants and hope the revenue issue works itself out later?
The only way that makes sense is to evaluate each competing alternative use of your resources according to your estimate of the value of the expected return from investing in that alternative, with the variability of return factored in. This is freshman business administration, but it is something that even experienced managers may fail to do. In the corporate world, with all the back-stabbing that goes on, a manager may resort to patronage, rewarding those who support him and his projects and punishing the opposition. The business may have enough resources to survive such activities, whereas in a smaller business, mis-allocation may be the end of the company.
Begin by heading over to Amazon or Barnes & Noble to pick up a couple of business and economics books. You want to understand the practical and theoretical implications of resource allocation, you really do. This can be the difference between writing a book that tells how you made it and writing to your old friends from high school asking them to send you enough money so you don’t have to live in your car.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: resourceallocation, small business management
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07.21.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 0:27 by lnxwalt
With all of the new emphasis on DRM, otherwise known as Technological Usage Restrictions, in Windows Vista, how can Microsoft claim the product is more secure? If you swap out your hard drive, for example, you could fail “activation” and show up as “stolen software” on Microsoft’s radar. Once that happens, Windows will limit your use of the system.
One important question to ask yourself: Since we know that Vista is designed to enable “content providers” to remotely disable the use of said content, and we know that it is also designed to enable Microsoft to remotely disable functionality of Vista (which could be understood as retroactively canceling your purchase without refunding your money), why doesn’t anyone think that one of the bad guys (crackers) out there will discover how to usurp that built-in functionality to limit or stop computer users from enjoying what they bought? I’m guessing that some of the highly-skilled and financially-motivated gangs in Russia or China are hard at work on the problem now.
If they succeed, watch for widespread attacks that trigger Microsoft’s anti-theft TUR.
This is brought to us by the same kind of situation that made OPEC so damaging to Western economies: concentration of economic power in a key industry into the hands of an “opoly”. With oil, it was an oligopoly, in which a small number of large petroleum companies controlled the world market for extraction, refining, distribution, and marketing of oil products. In the client computer operating systems market, it is a monopoly, in which a single company controls the world market for creation, sales, and distribution of client operating systems for both consumer and business markets.
With oil, once the countries where the extraction took place rose up and choked off the supply for the existing oil cartel, OPEC was able to do substantial damage to the economy. Ask your nearest 45 year-old (or older) about the gas lines and the odd / even days. We can only imagine the horrible consequences if Vista is widely deployed and China decides to shut down our information technology systems.
Radio station chains rely upon computers to select their playlists–this gives them a distinct cost advantage over “mom & pop” stations that have to pay someone to be there on the air at all times–suddenly, radio stations may be off the air. And that is just the beginning. Computerization has enabled companies to do more with fewer employees. Can you imagine a scenario in which every company in America was trying to hire people with the skills to compose business documents by hand (or using the old typewriter in the basement) and do math without reliance upon (Windows-powered) cash registers? Can you imagine banks having to hire and train tellers again and extend their hours because the (Windows-powered) ATMs don’t work?
Most of us do not grow any substantial portion of our food supply, so any large-scale disruption can quickly affect us. Vista’s focus on anti-theft technological usage restrictions presents a very inviting target for bad guys like the foreign Internet criminal gangs that use networks of “bots” (compromised computers) for such nefarious purposes as filling our inboxes with spam messages and obtaining bank and credit card information.
I contend that Windows Vista is inherently insecure and unfit for deployment by the majority of American consumers, businesses, and government agencies. Instead, get a Mac or even better, get a Linux computer. Above all, avoid allowing any single company or small group of companies in any industry to become an “opoly” and gain enough market share to control the market. Buying the products and services produced by smaller, locally-owned businesses is the way to do that in most industries.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: tur, drm, vista, mac, linux
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07.07.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:50 by lnxwalt
We all know that television as a medium for entertainment and advertising has some specific advantages and disadvantages.
- Major networks still tend to attract mass audiences that reach across demographic profiles. This generates incredibly large audiences for hit shows and makes television advertising more expensive than most competitors.
- Smaller networks and channels often specialize, carrying a particular type of programming. Sports, for example, or food and cooking. Within that type, there may be even more specialization, such as a channel focusing on one particular sport.
- Special events may generate even higher audiences, which in turn makes them more attractive to advertisers and more expensive for advertisers.
The interesting thing is that it seems to me that some people are starting to abandon television the same way that people have been abandoning their landline telephones in favor of mobile telephones.
I originally found that there were very few programs I actually liked–the television might be on, but I was not interested in what was playing. When I found a few programs that I liked, the networks would preempt the shows I wanted to watch for awards shows, political debates, and sporting events.
I currently have three programs that I enjoy, Numb3rs being far and away the most enjoyable, although it is distinctly less enjoyable now than it was when it started. Because of the volume games that broadcasters play (commercials loud, program quiet), it becomes too irritating to sit through very often. It reminds me of the dancing cowboys (and now dancing green aliens) in the banner ads for a certain mortgage lending company that are frequently found on Yahoo! and MSN sites. I’m sure you’ve seen them–they are so animated that they distract from the actual content that was the reason you visited the site.
There are some shows that are being carried on the Web, Numb3rs being one of them, but the Web presents other challenges for television programming. Like the rest of the Internet, the Web is designed for interaction and two-way communication. Although much of the dynamic content that characterizes modern Web applications is something that was added on after-the-fact, the fact remains that from the beginning the Internet and the Web were seen as a two-way medium. Television, on the other hand, by its very nature, is one-way. Several programs have utilized out-of-band communications to add some two-way interaction–talk forum telephone call-in programs are one example, and the reality shows where users call a number to vote for retaining or ejecting a specific cast member are another. The thing is, it feels fake, like a politician’s smile and greeting.
On the Web, there are various social networking sites, blogs, and other ways to actually conduct conversations with other people. I would include the network-enabled games in this category as well. It seems to me that people are rediscovering the ability to communicate with other people rather than passively taking in whatever comes from a chosen media outlet. Those of us that are watching this are quietly humming the song “Convoy”, the 1970s song that helped launch the CB radio craze. As with CBs, the Internet is a tool that is helping people connect in ways that were previously unknown.
Since the whole business model of the television broadcasters is based on getting relatively large numbers of people to passively watch their programming (and to convince advertisers to pay to promote their products & services to those large numbers of people), it seems to me that they are about to follow the newspaper and music industries circling the drain.
Let me clarify this: I don’t expect TV to go away. I do expect it to be more and more marginalized, the way that radio was for so many years.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: media
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06.12.07
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:03 by lnxwalt
One thing that we often see in the IT field is someone starting to obsess about network security. They then want to layer firewall on top of firewall, anti-virus on top of anti-spyware, with plenty of pop-ups warning about pings and other network traffic directed toward the user’s computer.
I certainly do not advocate that someone allow their systems to go unprotected. There is a place for automated defenses–anywhere that human intervention would be ineffective, such as rapid-response situations or frequent but minor events–but the truth is, motivated humans acting upon knowledge are the best defense against malicious activities against the system and network.
I talked about this somewhat on my personal advocacy blog. We have to take reasonable precautions, but at some point, we need to accept some responsibility for our choices.
Already we have people who advocate going to extreme lengths to prevent even the most unlikely scenarios from occurring. Personally, I believe that we can never achieve perfect safety. At some point, we have to give up too much–in terms of freedom, in terms of happiness, in terms of concentrating power in the hands of our defenders–with only minimal improvements coming as a result.
You can tell that you’ve gone too far when your users willingly give their passwords to the I.T. guy, because he’s the hero. Your I.T. guy’s job is very simple: he must enable the rest of your employees to do their jobs productively. He’s a servant to the others. (Yes, I know that your “I.T. guy” may be female.)
As far as I.T. security goes, your I.T. staffers are just like any other employees. In many organizations, I.T. security is permission based. I am not talking about automated permissions granted through network roles. I am talking about “you can not print to the plotter without getting approvals from this list of people first.” That describes a permission-based network, which means you can not do anything that you are not explicitly authorized to do. In such a network, you must be careful not to treat your I.T. staff members like they are special and exempt from some of the restrictions that everyone else faces.
Beware of making certain people ultra-trusted and powerful, while others (just as vital to your organization) are looked at with suspicion and have their system rights restricted as though they are malicious. Does the CEO have a computer he takes home that can get through the VPN to access data on your main file server? Although you want most of your employees to relax and enjoy their time off, they will occasionally have an idea that they wish to work on before they forget.
“But what if they log in and steal data?”
A wrongly-motivated employee can steal data with flash drives, floppies, CDs, printouts, e-mail, FTP servers, or even old fashioned methods like rote memorization. You can never prevent a wrongly-motivated insider from finding a way to leak information. Once again, if you distrust your rank & file that much, you should also distrust your executives–after all, the CxOs are the ones most likely to commit the kind of large-scale fraud that brings regulators after the company itself.
So you see, it is sheer idiocy to arbitrarily label some employees as trusted and others as untrusted. Does it improve security? Of course not, because the trusted ones now have far greater leeway and access, enabling a wrongly-motivated employee to cause much more damage.
As on my personal blog, this is going to be a series of articles (blog postings).
Next time, I hope to look at the idea that computer and network security is completely different from physical security.
MANDATORY DISCLAIMER:
Let me note that I am not a security guru or security consultant. I read news and articles about I.T. security, but this does not give me that background to offer a substitute for obtaining a real security guru’s advice. I recommend that your business should at some point look into ways to make your network more secure.
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