Bringing in part of the electronic herd

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Who today doesn’t find themselves swimming in an ocean of information dotted with established islands reached by only some of the waves of content? We all find ourselves being swamped by the waves of email, websites, RSS feeds, tweets, nugdes, pokes, invites, etc.. My own personal routine involves an overly customized fat-client RSS reader, Facebook, Twhirl, Yammer, Outlook, Blackbird and WordPress (freebie version)…each day, often all day long. If that environment doesn’t make me ADD, nothing will. I’m always on the lookout for ways to aggregate content/information/sources. I’ve enjoyed the convenience of some the Facebook integration. I’ve enjoyed more the ability to take my FeedReader client and ingest all my favorite RSS feeds (news, blogs, etc.) and also add in semantic search feeds from a host of sources to include a custom .osrc file for Twitter that allows me to filter through public Twitter to pull tweets from select people or tweets on defined search parameters. That is quickly becoming one of my vital cowhands in wrangling up the electronic herd.

Today, our team began the work for piping our online news RSS feeds through TwitterFeed to custom-created bots on Twitter. Don’t yell at me…I’m not creating spam engines. Twitter users already know they have to follow somebody to get any tweets, so a person would have to make the choice of following one of the Gazette Communications Twitter bots.

I have to end with a great, but not entirely unrelated quote from our High Priest of Webism, the Earl of Electrons, the Duke of WWW, Mr. Tom Altman, “I get really dumb when the Internet goes down.” Thanks, Tom.

Core compentencies

This weekend provided a neatly packaged scenario of exactly why an organization must understand those things that are core competencies and control those capabilities. This is not a sly way to start talking about horribly bad officiating and how the refs completely blew the fumble call on Kurt Warner at the end of the Super Bowl. I digress…

The web site for the city of Cedar Rapids was hacked this weekend. In the process of working a comment on Steve Buttry’s blog, I wanted to pass along a link for contacting our local elected public servants. What I found was every non-document page below the main page had been replaced with a tagged page from a hack. I saved a screen capture of it on my Facebook wall. This kind of stuff happens at times, so I thought it would be good to extend a professional courtesy to the city’s IT staff and make sure they knew of the hack. After multiple numbers and repeatedly ending up talking to an out-sourced message taking service who was either unable of unwilling to put me in contact with an on-call member of the city IT staff, I decided it was Sunday, I had other things to do and they could discover their own problem. I did take time to fire off some ticklers to the Gazette and KCRG about the hack and went about my day. In the end, I have no idea when they were actually alerted to the problem or by whom, but the problem existed for at least 24 hours.
There are some lessons from this real-life scenario. Why invest in an after-hours/weekends/holidays message service that only takes messages for delivery to the person on the next business day? From the capabilities I saw demonstrated, an answering machine from WalMart would fully replace the message service. Please give that one a couple seconds to sink in: the message center folks told me all they could do is take the message and make sure it was waiting for the IT folks first thing on Monday. See, just like an answering machine. Let’s move on to a bit of forensics. I was curious as to the nature of the hack and did some quick research based on the tag page left behind by the hackers. 2006. That was the year this attack was first documented on the internet. Some of the reports even indicated the vulnerabilities exploited in the attacks were old operating systems (e.g. NT) and old versions of IIS. I sure hope our city IT infrastructure isn’t running anything on NT! NT is basically a free range chicken on the IT prairie. Microsoft doesn’t even support it anymore and it is not subject to patches or hot fixes. In short, NT is the figurative red badge of courage for those who like to gamble with their organizations network security.
Here’s the summary for those aren’t already bored of hearing something that is common-sense for 99% of IT professionals:
- If you consider customer service a core competency, don’t out-source it to a note taker. If all you need are phone messages on the next business day, buy an answering machine.
- If you consider network and data security a core competency, don’t rely on old, tired and unsupported technologies.