The Spread Firefox community created a call to the masses in helping them set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in a 24 hour period. As of now there are 3,616,856 counted downloads of the newly released Firefox 3.0 browser. The new release became available at 10:00 a.m. PDT and after a rocky start, in which their servers were overloaded with all the influx of requests, the official 24 hour period began at 11:16 a.m. PDT. If you are reading this before the time period runs up, you can help set the record by going to the World Record Download Day 2008 site here.

What lessons can be learned from the Spread Firefox communities’ success in gathering so much interest and support in their cause?

Anticipation

Mozilla and the Spread Firefox community combined a strong effort, at the end of May, of mass marketing of the upcoming plan to try to set the World Record. Popular new media sites such as Lifehacker and TechCrunch wrote about this announcement and reached a broad audience. On the Download Day Headquarters page, a Pledge Now button was added, along with a global map, that showed how many pledges have been made per country as well as the total pledges.

People like to see results. Although at the point many decided to Pledge Now, they knew they would have to wait, it didn’t matter, because the idea that you could participate in a community effort to set a World Record seems cool, and interesting. On top of that seeing the tangible totals of other pledgers increases the allure.

Clarity

The mission is simple. Get as many downloads in a 24 hour period as possible, and see if Guinness World Records will accept the results and label it a World Record.

Many communities and groups over complicate marketing. Marketing is complex, I do realize that, however, many people often make it harder than it needs to be.

Basic rules: People like a clear mission, people like a sense of accomplishment and especially when they can make a difference

Loot to Fill the Boot

When someone offers you loot, especially something you like or are apt to liking, then you typically will accept, gladly. Offering a quality, useful, and valuable product or service generates high interest.

The Mozilla team has been working hard on Firefox 3.0, and know it to be a quality product. Offering it as a pledged download with a clear mission behind it has made the success of the Download Day possible.

At the close of this writing the amount of downloads is up to 4,128,306. If you haven’t, I’d encourage you to download Firefox 3.0 here.

Update: Wow the community really did an excellent job! The final download number is over 8 million. via

Recall back 10 years ago when floppy disks were still heavily used for day to day portable storage needs. If you are were working on a document that needed to be ‘on your person’ for portability and ease of access, floppy disks, 10 years ago were the thing. Flash forward a few years and although USB Flash drives existed for a few years, they start making a stronger appearance as they become more affordable and more readily accepted. I can still remember the marketing pointing out that the standard 64 MB USB Flash drive was similar to carrying 60+ floppy disks in your pocket!

That being said… we currently are living in interesting times.

• MacBook Air
• Everex Cloudbook
• Increasing Wireless LAN density
• Google Docs
• Zoho

It is easy to find a wireless hotspot. Even rural communities are participating. Mobile devices and networks are also becoming increasingly sophisticated.

Our lives have changed forever. Floppy disks, while they rest in peace, are a good reminder of the humbler beginnings of most technology. The point where we are now, is far from where we will be 1, 2 or 5 years from now.

You are welcome to download the presentation and distribute or use as desired.

Cloud Computing Presentation (.PDF)

Email is not secure. Unless you explicitly encrypt your email message and attachments, the content of your email will bounce across servers and the Internet unencrypted, and in readable text.

Most people have a false sense of security when it comes to email. It is common for emails containing sensitive information, to be quickly drafted and sent to the destination address. It serves well to think of an unencrypted email as a postcard being sent through the postal mail. Each letter carrier can potentially read the contents of the postcard. With email, the same basic concept applies because the message, once sent and received, is likely to exist on at least two email servers, after passing through multiple network segments which could be prone to network sniffing. The origin and the destination.

What Sensitive Information?

In context of what would be considered sensitive in an email, and knowing that this definition can be interpreted differently for various purposes, here are a few things to consider.

• Social Security Number - Simply put, don’t put this in an email. Find a better and secure way to communicate the information.
• Passwords
• Financial Account Numbers - When communicating on financial matters, avoid the temptation to use email as a means of relaying Account Numbers.
• Sensitive Personal Information - This is variable, however to give a brief example, sending an email with medical record information exposes a risk.
• Confidential Business Data - Government or business entity that may be dealing with confidential and secret information likely would avoid using email for Classified information.

Who is Responsible and What Can Be Done?

“53% of all executives and messaging professionals surveyed indicated that they feel their IT department is the primary department responsible for communications security and compliance. Only 18% of survey participants felt that security and compliance accountability rests equally with IT as well as end-users.” (2008 Annual Google Communication Intelligence Report, February 2008)

It is clear by the statistics shared by Google in their Intelligence Report favors the view that the IT Professional is expected to have a strong part in mitigating risk for a organization, but ensuring the proper system is in place to handle sensitive email messaging. The complex job of doing this is often done with the use of complicated email gateways. These are typically host yourself solutions and handle the content rules and disclaimers on an in house server. Of course, Google with their Google Message Security (re-branding of Postini) offering would like to see organizations outsource their complex systems in favor of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Business entities need to weigh the pros and cons with approaching a SaaS model, asking questions such as, Do we trust this vendor to hand hold with our sensitive information? In the eyes of a compliance and legal viewpoint, and smart ethical logic anyway, the best way to protect your information is to do it yourself. This does often come with a price attached to it as hosting it yourself solutions take a higher overhead, obviously, and requires more time and resources. In the end depending on the sensitivity and demand, this may be the only solution.

Begin Increasing Email Security Now

Email encryption is mature and has a plethora of options and methods to achieve relatively “safe” email messaging. Besides the SaaS model, a company will benefit from looking at ways they can achieve this with the software they already use daily. Microsoft Outlook has built in email encryption capabilities, by making use of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology. Mozilla Thunderbird has Enigmail , to utilize OpenPGP encryption. Encryption of a file, before being attached to an email, can easily be achieved using public keys and OpenPGP encryption. For useful command line capability look to GnuPG, for a useful GUI in a Windows environment, try Gpg4Win. PGP Corporation has corporate enterprise software that can be deployed throughout a firm to utilize PGP encryption on a larger scale.

Although these are not the only options to encrypt email messages and attachments, they are the basic “standards”.

What Does the Future Hold?

It will be interesting to see what the future holds for email in general. Will it be used in 5 years the same way we all use it now? Likely not. As for the focus of this article on email security, the good is that organizations are beginning to see the light on taking email security serious. Government regulations and laws, as described in a Postini sponsored research document available here (.PDF), will keep businesses in check. On the other hand, daily it is still abused and exploited. Creative but firm policies are needed by organizations to keep their employees on top of the dos and do nots of the email lifestyle, all at the same time the IT Professionals will keep doing their job fighting the good fight.

Most of our data is stored on local networks with servers that may be clustered and sharing storage. This approach has had time to be developed into stable architecture, and provide decent redundancy when deployed right. A newer emerging technology, cloud computing, has shown up demanding attention and quickly is changing the direction of the technology landscape. Whether it is Google’s unique and scalable Google File System, or Amazon’s robust Amazon S3 cloud storage model, it is clear that cloud computing has arrived with much to be gleaned from.

In dealing with the abstract term, “the cloud”, it is easy to misunderstand what makes up the structure and function. The basic function is what comes from “the cloud”. This is primarily output, however, not only. Input is what makes the cloud tick.

Do not confuse cloud computing with the term data center, as it typically sits on top of the latter. Viewing the cloud as logical rather than a physical, you can see it object describes it better. (Diagram 1 gives a basic visual example)

(Diagram 1 - credit ICT Watch)

The proposed benefits of using cloud architecture to build applications on top of, are immense. SmugMug, a successful photography community, saved an estimated $2 $1 Million dollars (edit per this link) in 2007 by using Amazon S3 cloud storage. Organizations and individuals can benefit from mass computing and storage, provided by large companies with stable and strong cloud architectures. On the other hand, companies that desire to build massive, scalable environments, utilizing virtualization and cloud computing will increase their future margin of success greatly.

As new technologies emerge, they often tend to build on the success of previous developments. Cloud computing and storage, benefit from years of development and testing of large scale infrastructure. The most important take away is cloud storage is for everyone and every organization. From big to small, groups to individual, the use of grid infrastructure can be deployed for maximum return and efficiency.

Further Reading:

• The Information Factories
• Cloud computing - Wikipedia
• Amazon S3: Show me the money
• Google Research Publication: The Google File System

Weigh-In for Subscriptions

The most useful part of Google Reader Trends, is that it allows you to truly see what subscriptions you pay attention to, via Reading Trends. More often than not many feeds get neglected and ignored. Reading Trends help evaluate whether or not to remain subscribed. If you lost interest or no longer read it, why subscribe?

(Image Courtesy of Josh Bancroft)

Ease of Use

The nice thing about this feature is that you do not have to activate it or do anything special to get statistics. It is built right in and easily accessible in Google Reader. It can be accessed via the “Trends” link in the left sidebar, or press “g then (Shift) + t” on your keyboard to open the Trends page.

Additional Points to Consider

• Timeline of Reading - Not only does Google Reader Trends offer insight into your reading habit percentages, it also gives you a timeline where you can see statistically what time of the day and days of the week you are doing the most and least reading.
• Subscription Trends - What sites update the most? What about the least?
• Starred and Shared Items - What sites do I consistently share items from?

New Question Mark (?) Keyboard Shortcut

Google announced a subtle, but useful, new feature on their Gmail Blog in December. They describe how you can now hold down the Shift key and then press ? key (Shift + ?) to bring up a Keyboard shortcuts legend. Check out the screenshot below to get a glimpse. (Screenshot provided by Google)

Turn Shortcuts On

If you are reading this and asking yourself what are Gmail shortcuts, or if you have an interest in turning them on, its easy. In the Gmail interface, go to Settings and select Keyboard shortcuts on, then Save settings. (Note: You need to have Keyboard shortcuts on before you are able to use the new (Shift + ?) legend feature.

Bonus Tip

The Gmail team also announced recently that they added a new email archive keyboard shortcut. For those that have used the “y” shortcut in the past, well a new archiving shortcut “e” works “every time” and in every area, even while in labels. The Gmail team describes it in more detail here.

Easily Block Adult Websites on Your Network

Whether using OpenDNS at home or in an office environment, and adult site blocking is needed, OpenDNS’ Adult Site Blocking feature is an excellent choice. It is easy to get started and implement, and as an optional feature it certainly does not skimp on functionality.

After turning Adult Site Blocking on you are able to customize settings and rules to block adult sites. They offer different “levels” or categories of blocking, ranging from lingerie/bikini to pornography. You pick the level of granularity you want to block. You can also customize the message and logo seen seen upon visiting a blocked site.

No Software or Hardware

One of the major advantages to using this service is that there is no software or hardware needed to install. The easy to use web interface is all that is needed.

All in An Hours Work

The time you spend setting this up, when needed, is minimal and you can instantly start seeing the results. For the curious, if you have Statistics turned on, you can view the latest activity and see what has been blocked.

I’d recommend this service to anyone looking for a free, reliable, and simple way to implement adult site blocking for your home, office, or organization.

Anyone using a networked device (computer, smart phone) on a local network or Internet rely on DNS (Domain Name System) to make life a lot easier, whether they know it or not! Could you imagine memorizing hundreds of numbers like 64.233.167.99 ? Not much fun. Well you don’t have to. You can thank those who designed and created DNS. To put it simply, “The URLs you type are translated into computer-readable numbers that take you to websites.” (OpenDNS, “How it Works“)

So, how can OpenDNS benefit you? Allow me to show you.

OpenDNS is out to serve you safe, fast, smart and more reliable recursive DNS. They know DNS and they know it well. This benefits you. The founder, David Ulevitch has lots of experience with DNS and formed OpenDNS in July 2006, with a passionate, knowledgeable team.

What Makes OpenDNS Worthwhile?

A few of OpenDNS’ most notable features are the adult site blocking, domain blocking, phishing protection (see below note) and statistics.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide recursive DNS service to their customers by default, but are typically unable to offer features like OpenDNS.

Note: I feel it is important to note any recursive DNS servers, if attacked, could potentially answer a DNS request with false information and point to a malicious site. For more detailed information on this potential see the article titled, “Hacking a New DNS Attack“.

How To Get Started

In simple terms you can begin using OpenDNS right away, without installing any software. Point to and begin using their DNS servers, 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220. Signing up for a free account is optional, but I highly recommend it as it will allow you to take full advantage of all the features. To get the best guidance how to begin using OpenDNS visit their, Get Started page.