siliconpizza.com

There is a lot of hype in the media of late about privacy, big brother state, Google street view, state owned data base on phone calls and internet use. There has also been some on social networks and gate crashing parties. But on closer examination there is more in common between state / corporate privacy issues and social networking that you might think.

Let’s talk about something we all understand first. If a young college student is doing child care studies, with the goal of becoming a child minder or nursery nurse, goes out and gets very drunk, falls over into someone else and a fight breaks out, a drunk and disorderly (or even GBH) charge may result. She will now fail the CRB check required to work with children. Mind you in extreme circumstance putting you bin out in the wrong day could also cause you to fail future CRB check!

Now apply this to social networking like Facebook, or ANY photo sharing service which allows tagging , naming and comments on photos, Flickr, Picasa Twitpic to name a few..

Now let’s re-visits the above scenario. A young college student is doing child care studies, with the goal of becoming a child minder or nursery nurse, goes out and gets very drunk, falls over, and is then sat in a pool of her own vomit with her underwear on show to everyone. Out pops all the camera phones, and with-in minutes that photo, she would rather forget, is posted ALL over the internet. Add some powerful internet search engine and you have a personal brand problem which is much harder to deal with than any official or corporate database will ever be.

Oh and just to make it worse, you have just been stitched up by your mates, not some organisation out to make money…..

You have been warned !!

Shame it arrive late and i missed it, Due to the reliable delivery system that is “pupil post” , but the local Jnr School ran a “ICT information evening for parents” this week

The note went on to say this….

“A true story which happened in Gloucestershire during the February holiday..

A 10 year old girl was attending her aunt’s wedding, by the time of the reception she was board and her aunt [an IT consultant] spotted her sitting quietly in a corner with her hand-held games console. The aunt enquired what she was playing to which the girl replied ‘don’t tell Mum or Dad, but someone round here has a wireless network and I’ve logged onto the internet’ “

Unfortunately I missed the event to see what stance they presenter took on children and the internet, but I recently had a similar discussion with an English teacher from a local secondary school and was pleased to hear their personal view point was the same as mine.

Over recent years I have too much negative press about the Internet being a dangerous place. The real world is a dangerous place, but you instinctively know NOT to walk done a dark alleyway. That same level of self preservation needs to be instilled into today’s internet users. The internet is a community, and like any community (physical or virtual) it has places you would rather not go. With this in mind I believe you should not try and stop your children from using the internet, but instead encourage safe, knowledgeable and managed used of the internet.

My son for example was not only made to sign an internet use agreement when he started his secondary school, but also, in his first week was not made to read a leaflet on internet safety, but had to produce one. For me that was a fantastic approach, just reading a leaflet would may have gone in one side and out the other, but i am fairly sure some of it actually sank in.

At the end of the day the Internet, Mobile phones, Media player are here to stay, we must embrace the new technology and educate accordingly.

Just found a .NET twitter api class, i can feel some automated twittering comming on http://is.gd/3a9X

Well this is one very embarrassing day. Given my day job

The brand new Wordpress 2.7 (may of had so,me 2.6.5 hanging around) instance I setup for my wife, got hacked
Still not sure how, the access logs are not very conclusive, but someone managed to edit every header.php file under the themes folder and inject a trojan “exploit-iframe.gen.c”

I found a similar story hear. http://photocritic.org/wordpress-exploit-iframe-gen-c/

Yes, I admit I allowed apache write access to the themes folder. which i have now fixed

The Code also included a reference to “search_bot111″

Needless to say i am VERY annoyed

Been pondering the use of hi tech stuff including open source in the enterprise and had a bizzare thought

May be it is not to do with the Tech but the People

Top 5-10% of people do the clever stuff, but clever people move on and dont always want to supoprt what they have build
To make somethiing truly enterprise class it needs to be more than clever, but simple and supportable too. Supportable by those people not in the top 5-10%

The Latest tech only works if it is understood by the masses. Education and training helps But true understanding is limited to a select few

This philosyphy is a contribution to Google’s success. A search engine that just just that “search”
No more no less

This site uses WP MU, (multiuser) and i have just upgraded to 2.6.3

At a School event recently I was shown a a very powerfull video which puts the challenges that schools and society face today into perspective and is a real eye opener.

One thing in particulare stood out to me
“We are currenlty preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist… in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet”
Think about it. The WEB did not exists when many of todays WEB designer left school …………….

The Video is here http://is.gd/t1T

I went to a school meeting last night where where there was a presentation on “Virtual Learning Environment” Collaboration to you and I

The teacher doing the talk was saying how kids use IT, is very different to adults

20% of his Year9 class has had a online chat with someone in a different countrty this week
20% had posted to youtube this year
80 % had watched a youtube this week
Then he said, i want make a comparision
Everyone to stand up, (Parents and governors, 50 ish total )
He then Said

Sit down if you Don’t use email? No one sat down !
Sit down if you are not carrying a mobile phone, Three sat down
Sit down if you Don’t use MSN? A few more sit down.
Sit down if you Don’t use facebook/myspace? A few more sit down.
Sit down if you Don’t have a blog

Hmmmm, only TWO left standing, Me and a Teacher…..

Recently I have been involved in a few projects where for a long time I was bogged down by huge amounts of what appeared to be useless paper work, High level design, Service Definition, Service Description, Detailed design, Support documnetation, CMDB requirements, bulid documenst, architecture review etc, etc, etc . All of which seemed to be just a painfull, civil service mentality excercise designed to slow things down.

However having now come out of the other side, the penny finaly dropped. No one man can think of everything from every point of view at once. So the during the process of writing up and author review, peer review etc  almost all of the assumptions, mistakes and missing bits get sorted out. In particular reviews by non technical people, seemed to serve the most benefit, as they will make totall different assumptions from a completely different view point.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe there has to be a better way and I am certainly not looking forward to the next project, but I am sure I won’t complain so much

Over the past five years I have built several Highly available microsoft web hosting farms , hosted web apps, and associated database servers and supporting services, each one slight better than the last.

Web farms
No 1. IIS5, NLB base load balancing, every web site usesing same process identity, many sites is shared pool
No 2. IIS6, Cisco CSM load balanced, 2 Node Physcial, unique ID for every site / application
No 3, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site / application
No 4, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site / application, second site
No 5, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site,  Internet facing with SSL
No 6, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site,  Intranet facing with SSL
No 7, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site,  Intranet facing with SSL
No 8, IIS6, Cisco ACE Load Balanced, 4 Node Virutal, unique ID for every site,  Intranet facing with SSL, for UAT use.

FTP, centralise FTP gateway providing a single FTP solution to every windows / Sambe wen server inside the enterprise

Wordpress MU, enterprise blog solution

Now Finally I get to build an IIS7 one and FTP7 with FTP over SSL, watch this space