Social media has created a new scary norm where that "nationwide media frenzy" (mob mentality) is the prosecutor, jury, and judge and your employer's fear of reputational risk is the executioner.
It doesn't matter if you are right or wrong. Logic doesn't apply - only perception management.
The new, widely-embraced form of discrimination is having an opinion different than that of the mob. Our laws need to adjust to form adequate civil protections.
I was traveling from the US. Here are a few things I learned that I don't see already mentioned above:
-Wireless is everywhere and advertised as "free," but typically requires that you have a cell account with either "Orange" or "O2," the two major cell players there. After struggling to find truly free wifi I went ahead and paid for a one month subscription with Boingo. I was actually using my iphone (sim password protected to prevent cell usage) so the cost was $7.99, but for a laptop the charge is $9.99 for one month. Even if you won't be there for a month this is a relatively small amount to pay for wireless access all over London. There is no contract and I canceled the account as soon as I got home.
-If you want to call back to the US I suggest Skype. For under $3 you can make unlimited phone calls back to the US for a month. Again, you can cancel this subscription once you return home.
-Get Tube and Bus Maps! Despite popular opinion the tube system is clean and safe and the double-decker buses are fun to tour around in. You can go to a bus or tube ticket counter and get day passes for $20US (You pay in British Pounds, but I'm converting) that let you use the mass transit system in the downtown London area all day. Check with the ticket agent to find out if there are cheaper or extended offers for multi-day passes.
- Be wary of paying for a "London Bus Tour" I took one of these for 20BP and didn't realize the buses stop running at 4:30 PM. I ended up getting stranded outside of Buckingham Palace and had to pay tube fare back to where I started. These tours aren't a bad idea if you don't know where everything is or don't want to have to worry about navigating the public transit system to see all of the sights.
As for things to do, well, I think I either did or saw everything worth seeing. If you are a history buff you can spend literally months reading all of the historical markers throughout the city. For reference my list of must-see locations can be found here (via a facebook photo album) where I took pictures of my daughter's toy giraffe everywhere I went: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/album.php?aid=30617&id=1629570049
In this day and age there is no excuse for this. I work for a company that has over 300,000 Exchange 2003 mailboxes. We ran into this problem back in the Exchnge 5.5 days, but squashed it post E2K by setting a relatively low threshold for the maximum number of recipients allowed in a single email (I think we have it at 50). For legitimate mass mailings we use an internal isolated app that routes its email to the Exchange org via SMTP. Only a very few people have access to use it and all recipients are BCC'd.
...and I love it. I've been in IT for 12 years and became an official manager for the first time a couple of months ago. I can pass the aforementioned test which definitely makes my life easier. I don't have to micro-manage my team to know if they are doing what they're supposed to be doing and I am in tune enough with the challenges they face to know how to properly manage expectations up the food chain. My knowledge also allows me to take input/requirements from the non technical groups within my company and lead all of the deep-dive planning sessions with my team. I also act as the buffer for my team... it's amazing how many non-techies (i.e. my customers) will not only give you a problem to solve, but include their input on how they think you should solve it. Amazingly they tend to get pissed if you don't listen to their suggestions. I've found that things at work run a lot smoother if I take the brunt of the scope definition with our customers work and just allow my team to figure out the best way to accomplish the task. In the end my job is two-fold. 1) Keep peripheral noise out of my teams' hair so they can do their work and 2) Be the keeper/driver of the larger vision and let my team shine by allowing them to be their own people by catering to their individual strenghts by respecting what each of them brings to the table.
If I didn't have a heavy background in IT I don't think doing those things would be so easy for me.
HTTPS is not protection against an intelligent network appliance. I know this because my company employs an appliance that sits in stream that identifies the originating HTTPS connection and intercepts the key that is supposed to be passed back to the client. Instead what happens is the network app creates a bogus key that it passes back to the client and maintains the encrypted relationship with the target website directly. What the client gets back is NOT the encryption from the website... it's spoofed encryption. That allows the appliance to read everything it wants that is being communicated between the two points.
The concept of network security is about as effective as the concept of airport security.
Your argument completely ignores the fact that both the healthcare and financial industries have government oversight that requires that companies actively monitor emails. Not monitoring messages in those sectors isn't even an option on the table. If they don't do it the government fines them.
The Government in notorious for telling you that you need to comply with regulations without telling you how to comply. This sounds great at first, but this also leaves you open for penalties later if they determine that the methods you chose were insufficient. There is nothing in Sarbanes-Oxley that restricts the use of any specific sort of software to comply.... as long as if/when they investigate you they determine that you are/were in compliance.
I work for a fortune 100 company in the financial industry. We support ~180K mailboxes internationally on an Exchange 2003 infrastructure. Currently we have a default mailbox limit of 100MB, but there are always exceptions for people with legitimate business reasons (usually people who regularly receive large emails concerning topics that involve financial gain). As of now we require that everyone else either clean out their mailboxes or archive their emails to PST. This poses another problem because for legal reasons we also have a 90-day retention policy that requires that all emails over 90 days old be deleted.
In order to regain control of all corporate email we are actively researching a solution that will allow users to automatically or manually have their emails moved from their Exchange store to a system that will act as an extension of our mail stores. Ideally users would be able to store their emails for much longer (say a year or two years) and we would be able to manually force a deletion at that time. Through extensive research we've been able to comfortably say that greater than 85-90% of emails that have been in someone's mailbox for 30+ days are not touched again, and that number increases to >99% after 60 days, thus making the overhead on such a system much less taxing than the overhead on an active Exchange server. The major hardware cost would be in the form of disk space, which is a relatively cheap commodity these days. We would also have a policy in place that restricts the creation of PSTs.
There are a few companies like NetApp and Computer Associates who have products available, but the technology (and theory for that matter) is in its infancy. TBC...
I don't get it. Websites already pay a premium to have their content load faster than other sites. It's called an Optical-Carrier or T-Carrier line and get this: The more you pay the more of this crazy "bandwidth" thing you get and the more "priority" you have in reaching people who are requesting data from your site over a competitor who purchased a smaller carrier line.
Bellsouth can try this if they want, but if I were somebody like Slashdot, CNN, or Google I would tell them to screw themselves. The already well established websites won't have to do a thing because the thousands of Bellsouth ISP customers who want to reach those sites on a regular basis will leave in droves for another ISP.
Exchange 2003 is the best option because of available support and scalability, BUT it must be correctly implemented. The company I work for has ~200,000 mailboxes that used to stretch across several Exchange 5.5 environments, TAO mail, Lotus Notes and GroupWise. We started a consolidation effort four years ago that is in its final stages (mostly because we've acquired other companies during that time that had to be migrated.) This was accomplished by building a brand new native mode Win2K infrastructure along with Exchange 2000 then migrating clone user accounts then mailboxes in phases. We went from a problematic patchwork of mail platforms with diverse support to one large Exchange 2000 (since upgraded to Exchange 2003 in preparation for Win 2K3) environment spread out all over the globe that is highly available, clustered and 99% up time. If you're planning this you definitely need Exchange 2003 installed from scratch and involve Microsoft. I've seen it work first hand.
Slashdot Mirror
...to school and back. Both ways!
...and their non-drinkable internet access!
KHAAAAAANNNNN!
Social media has created a new scary norm where that "nationwide media frenzy" (mob mentality) is the prosecutor, jury, and judge and your employer's fear of reputational risk is the executioner.
It doesn't matter if you are right or wrong. Logic doesn't apply - only perception management.
The new, widely-embraced form of discrimination is having an opinion different than that of the mob. Our laws need to adjust to form adequate civil protections.
I was traveling from the US. Here are a few things I learned that I don't see already mentioned above:
-Wireless is everywhere and advertised as "free," but typically requires that you have a cell account with either "Orange" or "O2," the two major cell players there. After struggling to find truly free wifi I went ahead and paid for a one month subscription with Boingo. I was actually using my iphone (sim password protected to prevent cell usage) so the cost was $7.99, but for a laptop the charge is $9.99 for one month. Even if you won't be there for a month this is a relatively small amount to pay for wireless access all over London. There is no contract and I canceled the account as soon as I got home.
-If you want to call back to the US I suggest Skype. For under $3 you can make unlimited phone calls back to the US for a month. Again, you can cancel this subscription once you return home.
-Get Tube and Bus Maps! Despite popular opinion the tube system is clean and safe and the double-decker buses are fun to tour around in. You can go to a bus or tube ticket counter and get day passes for $20US (You pay in British Pounds, but I'm converting) that let you use the mass transit system in the downtown London area all day. Check with the ticket agent to find out if there are cheaper or extended offers for multi-day passes.
- Be wary of paying for a "London Bus Tour" I took one of these for 20BP and didn't realize the buses stop running at 4:30 PM. I ended up getting stranded outside of Buckingham Palace and had to pay tube fare back to where I started. These tours aren't a bad idea if you don't know where everything is or don't want to have to worry about navigating the public transit system to see all of the sights.
As for things to do, well, I think I either did or saw everything worth seeing. If you are a history buff you can spend literally months reading all of the historical markers throughout the city. For reference my list of must-see locations can be found here (via a facebook photo album) where I took pictures of my daughter's toy giraffe everywhere I went: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/album.php?aid=30617&id=1629570049
A medium that can store internet porn for posterity's sake!
...and thanks for all the fish.
They've built a perchlorate percolator?
Damn skin jobs!
In this day and age there is no excuse for this. I work for a company that has over 300,000 Exchange 2003 mailboxes. We ran into this problem back in the Exchnge 5.5 days, but squashed it post E2K by setting a relatively low threshold for the maximum number of recipients allowed in a single email (I think we have it at 50). For legitimate mass mailings we use an internal isolated app that routes its email to the Exchange org via SMTP. Only a very few people have access to use it and all recipients are BCC'd.
STOP!!!!!
Is anyone listening?
...and I love it. I've been in IT for 12 years and became an official manager for the first time a couple of months ago. I can pass the aforementioned test which definitely makes my life easier. I don't have to micro-manage my team to know if they are doing what they're supposed to be doing and I am in tune enough with the challenges they face to know how to properly manage expectations up the food chain. My knowledge also allows me to take input/requirements from the non technical groups within my company and lead all of the deep-dive planning sessions with my team. I also act as the buffer for my team... it's amazing how many non-techies (i.e. my customers) will not only give you a problem to solve, but include their input on how they think you should solve it. Amazingly they tend to get pissed if you don't listen to their suggestions. I've found that things at work run a lot smoother if I take the brunt of the scope definition with our customers work and just allow my team to figure out the best way to accomplish the task. In the end my job is two-fold. 1) Keep peripheral noise out of my teams' hair so they can do their work and 2) Be the keeper/driver of the larger vision and let my team shine by allowing them to be their own people by catering to their individual strenghts by respecting what each of them brings to the table.
If I didn't have a heavy background in IT I don't think doing those things would be so easy for me.
This is no different than if Microsoft were to only allow IE as a browser on their OS. Sound familiar?
HTTPS is not protection against an intelligent network appliance. I know this because my company employs an appliance that sits in stream that identifies the originating HTTPS connection and intercepts the key that is supposed to be passed back to the client. Instead what happens is the network app creates a bogus key that it passes back to the client and maintains the encrypted relationship with the target website directly. What the client gets back is NOT the encryption from the website... it's spoofed encryption. That allows the appliance to read everything it wants that is being communicated between the two points.
The concept of network security is about as effective as the concept of airport security.
Your argument completely ignores the fact that both the healthcare and financial industries have government oversight that requires that companies actively monitor emails. Not monitoring messages in those sectors isn't even an option on the table. If they don't do it the government fines them.
Just shoot the explosives.
BBBBBBBBRRRRRRRRRRRRZZZZZZZZZZZZZTTTTTTTTTTTT!
I'm sorry, you didn't phrase your answer in the form of a question.
A GWB aka Junior
Q Who isn't a working class man who started out with nothing in life but two strong hands and a brain, and now has to make due with just the hands?
The Government in notorious for telling you that you need to comply with regulations without telling you how to comply. This sounds great at first, but this also leaves you open for penalties later if they determine that the methods you chose were insufficient. There is nothing in Sarbanes-Oxley that restricts the use of any specific sort of software to comply.... as long as if/when they investigate you they determine that you are/were in compliance.
I work for a fortune 100 company in the financial industry. We support ~180K mailboxes internationally on an Exchange 2003 infrastructure. Currently we have a default mailbox limit of 100MB, but there are always exceptions for people with legitimate business reasons (usually people who regularly receive large emails concerning topics that involve financial gain). As of now we require that everyone else either clean out their mailboxes or archive their emails to PST. This poses another problem because for legal reasons we also have a 90-day retention policy that requires that all emails over 90 days old be deleted.
In order to regain control of all corporate email we are actively researching a solution that will allow users to automatically or manually have their emails moved from their Exchange store to a system that will act as an extension of our mail stores. Ideally users would be able to store their emails for much longer (say a year or two years) and we would be able to manually force a deletion at that time. Through extensive research we've been able to comfortably say that greater than 85-90% of emails that have been in someone's mailbox for 30+ days are not touched again, and that number increases to >99% after 60 days, thus making the overhead on such a system much less taxing than the overhead on an active Exchange server. The major hardware cost would be in the form of disk space, which is a relatively cheap commodity these days. We would also have a policy in place that restricts the creation of PSTs.
There are a few companies like NetApp and Computer Associates who have products available, but the technology (and theory for that matter) is in its infancy. TBC...
I don't get it. Websites already pay a premium to have their content load faster than other sites. It's called an Optical-Carrier or T-Carrier line and get this: The more you pay the more of this crazy "bandwidth" thing you get and the more "priority" you have in reaching people who are requesting data from your site over a competitor who purchased a smaller carrier line.
Bellsouth can try this if they want, but if I were somebody like Slashdot, CNN, or Google I would tell them to screw themselves. The already well established websites won't have to do a thing because the thousands of Bellsouth ISP customers who want to reach those sites on a regular basis will leave in droves for another ISP.
Exchange 2003 is the best option because of available support and scalability, BUT it must be correctly implemented. The company I work for has ~200,000 mailboxes that used to stretch across several Exchange 5.5 environments, TAO mail, Lotus Notes and GroupWise. We started a consolidation effort four years ago that is in its final stages (mostly because we've acquired other companies during that time that had to be migrated.) This was accomplished by building a brand new native mode Win2K infrastructure along with Exchange 2000 then migrating clone user accounts then mailboxes in phases. We went from a problematic patchwork of mail platforms with diverse support to one large Exchange 2000 (since upgraded to Exchange 2003 in preparation for Win 2K3) environment spread out all over the globe that is highly available, clustered and 99% up time. If you're planning this you definitely need Exchange 2003 installed from scratch and involve Microsoft. I've seen it work first hand.