Tag Archives: security

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Banker’s Hours. Let me start off by saying I general like my credit union, except for one little thing. When they upgraded their website a few weeks ago they required everyone to create about a dozen “challenge” question/answer combinations for security purposes. Fine. Good. Whatever. The problem, of course, is that I apparently don’t have a clue what the answer to at least one of those questions is. And that’s the one I got on Sunday morning when I logged in to pay the week’s bills. Instead of asking me an alternate question from the list, the site promptly locks me out and tells me to call customer support. Which is also fine. Except there is no customer support at 7AM Sunday morning (or any other time on Sunday for that matter). I appreciate network security, but it would be nice if it weren’t so secure that I can’t get into my own account. Like the universe, it’s my fondest hope that they will find a way to seek balance.

2. Scheduling. I get that schedules are hectic. The higher you get on the food chain, the more hectic they are. If I can offer any bit of unsolicited advice, it’s that out of respect for the host of people gathered together awaiting your presence rescheduling a meeting thrice before settling in a final-ish time is just bad form. If your schedule is so jam packed with very important things to do, maybe you could go ahead and delegate to an underling or just put it in a concisely worded memo. When you make it impossible for anyone else to schedule something because of inevitable changes, where you could have looked knowing and decisive, you look like a tool. Don’t look like a tool.

3. Going overboard. I set a lot of posts about car seats, the armada of safety gear that today’s kids are expected to wear out in public, and generally how fragile small humans apparently have become in the second decade of the new millennium. In that spirit, I’d urge all of us to remember that we grew up in a simpler time. For me, riding in the open bed of a pickup truck was a rite of summer. I clocked more time behind the wheel on the back roads at age 13 than most kids do today by the time they’re eligible for the draft. None of us wore bike helmets, knee pads, or “safety gear” thicker than denim. It wasn’t uncommon for us to run unsupervised through the woods using pointy sticks as guns and rocks as grenades. I broke my arm three times and still have the scrapes and scars of childhood to mark the memories. I survived. So did we all… and in a world that surrounded it’s children in far less bubble wrap.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. CVS. They’re getting great acclaim for making the decision to stop selling cigarettes. It’s their business, I say God bless if that’s what they want to do. I’m left wondering if they’re also planning to stop selling Coke, Doritos, Snickers bars, and all the other items on their shelves that have been identified as cancer causing, bad for you, or just socially “inappropriate.” Let’s be honest with ourselves at least. CVS is a drug store. Their whole raison d’être is selling medications, many of which themselves can cause untold amounts of harm even when taken as directed. Call me cynical, but I don’t see them taking a principled stand in the name of public health so much as I see them making a public relations and marketing move.

2. Bugs. No, not the kind of creepy crawlies that sneak into the house and needs dispatched with the closest available newspaper, magazine, or shoe. I’m more agitated by the kind that live in apps and cause mysterious and damned near impossible to track down battery drain on my phone. Thanks to these gremlins, I get to spend a few hours backing up everything I have on my phone, tricking the thing into believing it’s once again fresh out of the box, and then reinstalling each app one by one so I don’t accidentally reintroduce whatever power hungry gremlin resided in the old version. For a device that “just works,” I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time poking around under the hood to keep things humming along without the need to recharge it every four hours.

3. Passwords. It took me five attempts to log into my own damned website today. That’s mostly because two days ago the site forced me to create a new one. It couldn’t be any old password, of course, but one that was at least eight characters included upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, special characters, hieroglyphics, quadratic equations, and the square root of pi rounded to the nearest non-repeating decimal. I get it. Internet security is important. It’s so important that apparently the best way we can manage not to lose all our secrets to the Chinese, or the Russians, or the NSA is creating the illusion of a random string of characters. If security is as important as the internet thinks it is, can someone please explain to me why we’re not using retina scanners, fingerprint readers, blood samples, or something, anything that would be more convenient than needing to remember a new 742 character password every third day?

The nightmare scenario…

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Here in ‘Murica, we have a tendency to think in terms of big disasters: earthquakes, hurricanes, pandemic flu, and briefcase nukes. Those are the kind of events that get big attention and the corresponding big dollars poured into planning what to do when one of those things happens. For years, the nightmare scenario has been a hurricane slamming into the Big Easy (been there, done that), a mid-west earthquake that cripples transportation across swath of the country from Chicago to Memphis, or a non-descript dirty bomb left at Union Station our outside the Smithsonian. Those are still the official nightmare scenarios, but they’re not my personal nightmare.

Compared to radiological bombs and the weather, my personal nightmare is decidedly low tech. It’s ten suicide bombers in ten separate cities walking into ten coffee shops at 8:30 in the morning of a random Tuesday and blowing themselves to hell. It’s the kind of improvised devices we saw in Boston – easy enough that just about anyone can manufacture one with stuff they already have around the house. It’s not the kind of terror that’s going to bring down entire buildings, but let them start going off in shopping malls and restaurants across downtown America, and watch how fast the public clamors for something, anything that ratchets down the body count. How long would it be before we nationally agree to be searched at any time for any reason or to having our cars inspected before being allowed into a parking garage or to give up any number of our essential freedoms?

Suicide bombs and improvised explosives have become a way of life in places like Israel, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adopting a bunker mentality when you spend every day under threat is a perfectly natural response to those outside forces acting on you, but I don’t want that for America. I don’t want to live in a garrison town where I’ve traded a lot of personal freedom for a nominal amount of safety. That’s my real nightmare scenario and one that we can only avoid through eternal vigilance. That’s the price we’re going to have to pay – the price we’ve always paid – for liberty.

Keys to the kingdom…

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Day after day, we sit at the same terminal behind the same guarded doors, inside a secure compound. Aside from the usual path to the coffee bar or to tend to nature’s call, our professional world is mostly made up of what’s happening in one or two rooms and whatever happens to make it across our computer screens. Other than what’s immediately in front of us, we’re remarkably insulated even though we’re “trusted agents.” Personally, I’m fine with that. The less I know in detail, the less I may have to testify about at some point in the future. I’m happy to leave the firewalls right where they are.

It occurs to me, though, that the people who have the best eyes and ears for what’s going on probably aren’t the ones manning the computer terminals. They’re the ones emptying our garbage. Every day they make their rounds through the building. Into and out of every office on every floor and able to hear whatever conversations are taking place and what everyone has on their monitor. 250-odd days a year. I wonder if they pay attention or if it all become background noise at some point. Since there’s no solitaire, I wonder how many times a day they see Facebook and USAjobs. The voyeuristic part of me would love to walk the rounds just once out of sheer curiosity at seeing how the rest of the cubicle dwellers spend their time.

The way I’ve got it figured, the janitorial staff holds the keys to the kingdom somewhere in their trash cart. Just think on that the next time they wander by to gather up your recycling or run the vacuum.

To blog or not to blog…

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I was asked this morning for some insight into the mechanics of starting a blog. I wouldn’t say any of this is definitive, but if anyone out there is thinking about taking a stab at becoming an unpaid and overworked writer, here are some initial bits to ponder.

The first real decision you’re going to face is picking your platform. There are a million of them, but the two biggest are http://www.wordpress.com and http://www.blogger.com. I’ve used both and they both have their strengths and weaknesses. For pure ease of use, I’d recommend starting out with Blogger. It’s easy to use and doesn’t have too many bells and whistles to make things confusing at the start. If you decide you want to go at it in a big way, you can always export your work there to another platform. Usually the web address for a Blogger blog is something like http://www.myblog.blogspot.com. Again, if you really get into it and want to manage the minutia of your site, you can purchase your own domain later. For instance, my blog started out on MySpace (God forbid), migrated to Blogger, migrated to WordPress, and finally now lives at http://www.jeffreytharp.com. The important thing though, is the writing at first, so in my opinion it’s better to focus on that and let the tech people focus on doing all the behind the scenes stuff.

As far as anonymity goes, is anything really private on the internet? The easiest way to preserve some semblance of privacy, of course, is to set up an email account with Google under a pen name and then register your Blogger blog using that name and email address. There are still ways you can be found out, but it’s a nice basic level of discretion for most purposes. As you move into hosting your own domain name, there are more sophisticated methods of safeguarding your identity. You’ll find though, that the real issue with security to the average blogger is self policing what you write. Stay away from events that can be traced back to only a small number of people and if you must write about those, change enough of the details, names, etc. to make it a bit more general. The bottom line with security is that once it’s on the internet, there is always the possibility of someone finding out that it’s you regardless of how many layers of security you put in place, so write with that in mind.

Choosing a name can be a madding experience, if you think of something smart and witty, there’s a fair chance someone beat you to it. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong with that. At the entry level, the chance of your two groups of readers ever intersecting is pretty slim. A good rule of thumb when it comes to branding is that easy is better – you want to pick something that people will remember. There are a laundry list of sites out there that have great advice about website and blog branding and the good news is that it’s something you can change over time if you find you aren’t thrilled with the name you started out with. Bounce ideas off people you trust to give you a sense of whether the names you like make sense to a broader audience.

I’m no authority on any of this and lord knows there are many, many blogs that are put together better than this one, but for the casual writer, this should help get you started. Reading a lot of other blogs, taking copious notes, and writing more than you ever thought you would are what will keep you fresh and open your eyes to new ideas.