Mike Schorah

The news this week that “personal” information of 100m people, 20% of Facebook’s users, has been made available in a downloadable file on the Internet is interesting, but not surprising. Facebook is correct in responding that all of the information (Name, Username and URL) is already visible to Google and other search engines, as well as other Facebook users; and users have some degree of control over their privacy to make that information no longer public. However, the media hype and scare-mongering is part of a growing privacy concern with web-based applications as fears of data mining activities becomes more widespread. What could go wrong? User names and profile page URLs are available in the download, so by following them personal information (address, birth date, phone numbers, etc.) can be viewed. Along with a list of their online friends. And their picture. What's more, friends of all those users that have opted to keep their information private - can now be found by click...

"BlackBerrys present security risk" is the alarmist headline from the BBC, reporting that the government of the UAE is trying to crack down on data leaving their national boundaries to be stored on computer servers outside the country. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10761210) Last year the UAE tried to impose a software patch to BlackBerry devices in the country, sending a copy of the contents to in-country servers, accessible to government monitoring. Are we about to see the first moves away from fashionable "cloud computing?" On the one hand, governments are beginning to want to access and control the data within, and across, their Borders; on the other hand, users are becoming aware of this and increasingly unwilling to trust some of their data to a service in the cloud that they can't control. As I looked at the faded keys on my laptop, worn away through over use, I thought back to one of the "forensic computing" investigations I once perfor...

Knowing that one of our sales people was about to become a Dad for the first time, I stepped into a sales situation with one of our prospects in the public sector. (Congratulations, by the way, to Kevin and Wendy who had a little boy of 8lb 2oz this week!) What a depressing experience! Some years ago I worked for IBM, a huge computer company. Back in those days we were selling big-ticket systems to an IT department that had a vested interest in buying from us: they could guard their headcount, justify yet more staff and budget, and enhance their personal marketability by training on our systems. And we were selling 100k+ systems with training, support and annual maintenance charges as well as implementation services. So we could afford to put someone on site, free of charge, for several days as part of the sales process. If we didn't win the business, we'd apportion the cost of sale across rising annual maintenance figures spread across our customer base. The world has changed....

I often say that my surname's "scorer" but I've never won a sports match. But it's been a summer of sports - English embarrassment at the World Cup; now the British hope at Wimbledon over; and today I met with Kevin, a South African colleague who financed himself through university on a golf bursary. We were talking about the focus that's needed to excel. A golf game is never won on the first shot, though can be lost then. In a tournament, the truly great are the ones who focus on the end result and pace for what they need to achieve. Great golfers focus for the thirty seconds of each shot, then relax and move on to deal with the consequences of their last action. They take responsibility for their performance. They plan for what they have to do to get to their objective, quite literally in the shortest way possible.