Rain!

On may way into work, NPR told me about a historic event today in San Francisco.

For the first time in recorded history it has rained on July 18. How fabulous. I move from Holland to escape the Dutch weather, and it follows me here! It is even causing power outages in the East Bay (Berkeley, Oakland.)
One day of rain in the summer isn't nearly as bad as back home though. They had the wettest month of June in a long time, I heard, and July isn't all that much better. The last rain we had here was probably late April. (And a sprinkle today, no power outage yet in my area.)

Harry Potter vs DLP

At McAfee I hear a lot about Data Loss Prevention. It is one of those hot new areas in the security space, technology designed to help organizations keep their data secure. Information is your biggest asset, so it makes sense to protect it.

McAfee is the only big-name security company to sell DLP products, the others are still catching up. But while it may help a business prevent leakage via a USB drive or Web-based e-mail, I don't think a DLP product can help prevent the kind of leak being reported today: photographing every single page of a book and posting those pictures to the Internet.

Talk about a low-tech hack! That's what reportedly happened to the latest Harry Potter book. (Reportedly, because I have not downloaded the images myself, I am waiting for my Amazon.com shipment on Saturday.) It has to have been an inside job, since the book isn't out yet. No matter how tightly controlled the books are though, the circle of insiders has grown significantly as the book was shipped worldwide to retailers to sell to the Potter fans, who no doubt will be lining up starting on Friday. No DLP product will shield you against this kind of leakage. There won't be too much harm done though, I am sure the great majority of Hogwarts fans will still buy a hard copy of the seventh and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Toll

Shortly after moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2003 I signed up for FasTrak. That's the electronic toll tag for the bridges around the Bay. With FasTrak in your car--it comes with a piece of Velcro to attach to your windshield--you never have to wait for the toll booths at the bridges and you even get discounted toll at times. I still don't understand why not every single driver has signed up, FasTrak is free, you just have to prepay a certain amount of toll ($25) and it replenishes from a bank account or credit card after you go below $15.
That's what just prompted me to write about it though. Apparently the credit card I enrolled expired, so now FasTrak is threatening with penalties if I don't update my information. For that, I needed to go online and remember a PIN code I gave four years ago, YIKES! But with the help of my paper archive and some old FasTrak mailings I found out what the standard PIN is. I won't tell you, but it is pretty obvious and one may even see it as a security breach. Standard PINs like that aren't a good idea. I am happy though that nobody knows my FasTrak account number, even though the PIN is pretty easy to guess :-)

Delayed!

If I had a camera on me, I'd show you the long line of people in front of the United Airlines customer service desk here at San Francisco International Airport. It is nearly 10 pm on Tuesday night. I should have been up in the sky right now, on my way to Denver, but instead I, like all the people in that line, am still here.

My flight has been delayed. It was supposed to leave at 08.39 pm. Now it is predicted to leave just before midnight and I won't arrive until about 3 in the morning. Yuck! United decided to take the plane that was originally scheduled to fly to Denver out of service.

I have an idea why: the large plane was only about a quarter full, I could see that on the seat map when checking in. With that kind of load, it probably pays for them to wait for a smaller craft to be available or for a plane that needs to be in Denver anyway. So I and a bunch of other passengers get to wait. How wonderful.

This is the latest in my United delay experiences. Really, I have had it now. Next time I am booking Continental, American or Alaska Airlines. The last time I flew United was in late May, to Dallas Fort Worth. The flight was delayed three hours on the way in, and again I didn't arrive until about 2.00 a.m., the flight back to SFO also was delayed.

In early May I flew to Boston from SFO and back from Newark. Both flights were delayed at least two hours.

I am tired of sitting at airports wasting away hours that could be spent much better, like at a gym, on the tennis court, in front of the tv, in bed, or even at the office. Today, for example, I rushed to get a presentation done and printed this afternoon so I could bring it to Denver. If I had known about these long delays, I could have spent more time tweaking the presentation and printing it. Also, I wouldn't have had to race home from work, pack like a maniac and hop in a cab to the airport. All that stress, for nothing!

Thanks for ruining another couple of hours of my life United and for messing up my day tomorrow, since I will be half-asleep due to another unplanned middle-of-the-night arrival. I may have flown nearly half a million miles one United in my lifetime, I am choosing to fly other airlines from now on.

On CNET again!

Okay, this is really the last one.

On Tuesday CNET News.com published a Q&A that I did several months ago with Raimund Genes, the CTO of Trend Micro. It is a bit odd that the Q&A got published now, since I am currently employed by McAfee, one of Trend's rivals.

However, this article was a leftover of my time at CNET and the former colleagues there liked it so much that they decided to run it instead of discard it, and they gave me the byline.

The piece is doing well, it looks like it was the hottest story on the site today. Another case for a full time security reporter at CNET. Security is a hot topic and deserves at least one, if not two or more, full time writers at a tech heavy site like News.com.

Sanctuaire

My friends Declan & Milana rented a fairytale type house on 29 acres of land in the middle of nowhere and invited me to enjoy it with them. I jumped at the opportunity. I am not one to skip on a weekend away. So, I am typing this using a satellite Internet connection, because this house is very well equipped, albeit far away from civilization.

To make the trip up a little more fun, I rented a red Mazda Miata convertible. (Great deal from Hertz, so I am not squandering money.) In the little red car I raced up 101 and through Sebastopol, past Guerneville (of Russian River fame) and to Cazadero. Then it is another 3.6 miles on a narrow, winding road, to get to this retreat.

Today (Sunday) is a relax day and we're staying close to home. The sun is out in force and the temperature is climbing. Soon it will be too hot to sit out here on the deck. The property has a hot tub (I am not going to be using that) and a creek down a hill (which has nice cold water, so maybe wading there is an option later today.)

On Saturday (yesterday) we headed to the beach at Jenner, a cute town on the Sonoma Coast on gorgeous Highway 1. While it was hot slightly inland, the coast was a frigid 60 degrees and windy. We chased some waves on Goat Rock Beach and had a mini picnic in the dunes, out of the wind, with banana bread and beer from Whole Foods.

At night I grilled some salmon, asparagus and baked some potatoes for dinner. Everyone also enjoyed the Thomas Fogarty Merlot, which I bought at the winery in the Sante Cruz mountains a couple of weeks back. All in all, another perfect weekend in California. Now I just need to do some work, instead of blog.

Wardens of the Web

No, I have not returned to CNET. That's a statement I had to make several times a few weeks ago when News.com ran a series I had written just before leaving. The pieces were part of a week-long special report called "Wardens of the Web." In it, I profiled the three top security guys at Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, the three biggest Web companies.

The Special Report was my farewell gift to CNET, so to speak. It was very fun to report and write, though I have to give a shout out to the editors at CNET who did a great job at making the pieces shine.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft gave unprecedented access to me to report this piece. Their security heads typically shun the spotlight, but I was able to win their trust and get them to share their stories. While some folks have told me that I should have been tougher on the men and take them to task for not doing enough when it comes to security, I feel the purpose of these pieces was to profile them and show a piece of their world, rather than being critical. However, in the podcast that is also part of the series I do critically review the three big Web companies with a trio of security experts.


I recommend you read it and also take a listen to the podcast and also the podcast recorded by Robert Vamosi where he interviews me as a guest on Security Bites, our old show :-)