Mike Schorah

Mountain rescue teams express concern at ill-prepared groups entering the wilds with just a phone and no map or compass, unprepared for the technology to let them down when out of cell tower range. And incapable of independent thought. As my daughter's team prepared for a Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme expedition over the weekend I became aware of a rule that they could only take one mobile phone, which had to be kept in a sealed bag for emergency use only. I don't think a single expedition group kept to the rule: pressure came from kids who've grown up always connected, permanently entertained, able to deal with difficulty by withdrawing for a season into a world dominated by input from headphones and screen; or by making a Google search; or an SMS for an SOS. But rebellion came, too, from parents - so used to the potential for contact at any time for any reason. When the kids were small we let them toddle along in a harness, attached to us by reins: a deft flick ...

Problem: Network Attached Storage (NAS) is great for keeping backup copies of vital data, or sharing files and folders between users. But how do you secure it, especially if (like me) you want access to your company server over the Internet, while keeping the bad guys out? Solution: Use operating system capabilities to make your life easier. The options are pretty well hidden, but here's what worked for me: Use the control panel software that comes with your NAS to secure a user's folder with a username and password combination. You can probably set a quota for how much disk space each user gets; and set up sharing groups so departments have shared storage; and more... NAS devices like the World Book Series II from Western Digital or similar devices from Iomega are aimed at the SoHo market, but are actually mini-servers. They probably run a version of Linux, but hopefully your supplier has hidden that complexity from you! I'm using a Windows 7 Pro. computer to acc...

Some fascinating statistics in the Schumpeter column from this week's edition of The Economist . The columnist is drawing on research from the McKinsey Global Institute that I also came across earlier this week. Schumpeter writes: In 2010 the world stored enough data to fill 60,000 Libraries of Congress.  There are more than 4 billion mobile-phone users (12% of them smartphones). YouTube claims to receive 24 hours of video every minute.  Manufacturers have embedded 30m sensors into their products, converting passive objects into data-generating nodes in the internet of things.  The number of smartphones is increasing by 20% a year and the number of sensors by 30%. Tesco, a British retailer, collects 1.5 billion nuggets of data every month and uses them to adjust prices and promotions.  Williams-Sonoma, an American retailer, uses its knowledge of its 60m customers (which includes such details as their income and the value of their houses) to produce di...

We've been thinking this week about  how to make life easier for our customers. The bottom line, for us, is what I believe they call 'empathy' which I take to mean putting myself in another's shoes. By thinking through the experience from the other's perspective, we hope to design what makes sense to a user rather than to the engineer who built it! In practice, this means a number of things: No one likes reading manuals, for anything. So we're recording bit-size, function-specific videos. Engineers hate having to re-work stuff so our product design and implementation makes it easy to change the Help content without requiring any time or input from the engineers. As business manager I hate anything that increases costs, so a solution that enables self-service and community support is great! With strategies like these we can adopt and adapt to the increasing pace of change in the world while giving great service! Get more like this

The British media is filled with news over this weekend about the 'stupid' laws that allow the wealthy and influential to obtain a 'super-injunction' to guard their privacy in public media outlets such as newpaper, radio and TV; while new media such as Twitter seem to get away with breaking/leaking news items with impunity... In an update of the 'Streisand effect ' one footballer's attempts to use legal force to extract information about Twitter users re-publishing information of his alleged affair, seems to have had the predictable outcome of raising the visibility of his situation with many who might not have known, or cared, before... But, in other news (as they say), the Washington Post  is warning that proposed data protection laws in India may be 'too strict for some US companies .' The article makes the point that requirements such as obtaining written consent from each customer before collecting and using personal data will make it hard ...

Thanks to @MarkDansie for drawing my attention to a further concern about storing our business data in the cloud: Mark Dansie    Should IT managers be concerned about DC security in the UK following theft at O2 yesterday  http://tinyurl.com/3348627 I was already attuned to the need to protect against software intrusions: news of the recent loss of personal details of approaching 100m Sony Playstation Network users is a wake-up call to many businesses trusting their operational data to cloud computing. But the article Mark referred to lists a catalogue of physical break-ins to data centres across the western world ... the resultant theft of hardware has brought major disruption to Vodafone and O2 cell phone networks; high profile and mundane web sites alike and more... The bottom line is that we shouldn't trust all our eggs to any one basket. Just as I keep a spare PC in case my main one fails, and I have multiple copies of key files on various backup media, so we n...

Increasingly it seems that users are concerned about the safety and privacy of their data stored online in "the cloud." The recent widely-publicised leak of name, address and possibly credit card details for around 100m users of Sony's Playstation Network is just the latest in a series of data breaches. Multi-national companies and governments on both sides of the Atlantic are just as vulnerable as small companies and individuals. But what to do about it? As a matter of principle, we have set out to put user data under user control, stored safely in an encrypted database that can be securely backed up. We let the user choose what to share, and with whom; and we know only the absolute number of users, not who they are - the link between their 200-digit UserID number and their real name is made only on their local machine... Our goal is to make user data anonymous. But this is harder said than done and it's almost impossible to ensure that all user data is utterl...