How Secure Are You Online? The Checklist | Lifehacker Australia

This is a very handy security resource and I recommend you read and understand the ideas in here to keep yourself safe online - How Secure Are You Online? The Checklist | Lifehacker Australia

One great tip in here is to use the web site Should I change my password?. This monitors the sites such as Pastebin, that hackers use to dump username and password lists when a site gets hacked. If your email address shows up, it will alert you so you can go and change your password. Excellent!

Who owns your digital life?

In times gone by, families would collect books, records and other items over the course of a lifetime. These items would sometimes be passed down from generation to generation, becoming a family legacy. But these days, we consume more and more books, magazines, movies and music digitally. What happens to those when you're gone?

Well if you read the terms & conditions for a lot of the kinds of web sites we buy these things from - Kindle books from Amazon.com, music and videos from iTunes, etc, you don't actually own the content you have paid for. In most cases, you are granted licence to consume this media under a single account. OK, it's not overly difficult to circumvent some of these 'protections' but legally, that stuff just doesn't belong to you.

So as the WSJ asked recently Who inherits your iTunes library?. This stuff in theory could just get lost in the sands of time. There are two takeaways that immediately spring to mind from this:

1 - Should you leave your account passwords with your will so that somebody else can enjoy your collection after you are gone? Maybe there is something in the t's & c's to stop you doing this but it wouldn't be enforceable I wouldn't imagine.

2 - In the case of 'the classics' - in terms of books, at least - most people would probably want a physical copy anyway. The same may well not be true of movies and music, though.

There are a few other important discussions arising from this too. Not least 'ownership' of digital content (as opposed to 'licensing' that we seem to have been duped into), Digital Rights Management (DRM), your digital life in social media, and the question of just who reads those t's & c's anyway?

World IPv6 Day

I wrote about the 'new' IPv6 protocol a few months back - Time for IPv6 - saying that with IPv4 addresses rapidly running out, network admins needed to get themselves ready for IPv6. Well it looks like some of the big boys are getting themselves ready, and giving you and me the chance to test our own systems too on World IPv6 Day on June 8th.

Some of the big web players such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo! will be configuring their sites and services to operate over IPv6, so you can test your own readiness. Google also have a simple test available here. This test will tell you if your systems are ready for IPv6 but sadly doesn't give you any information on what to do if they are not. Watch this space ....

Working Together > Competing?

IT may be one of the few industries where competing companies can work together to become more than the sum of their parts. We work with several local and national companies in order to spread our coverage and widen the skill set available to our customers. We participate in several industry groups where we share ideas with our 'competition' rather than hiding behind our own IP and shooing away anyone who dare ask about how we do things. The power of sharing and working together certainly does seem stronger than the need to compete sometimes. We find that we rarely end up competing for a prospect with the guys we site beside in these groups, which means there are customers our there for all of us. We just need to make sure we find the ones that are the best fit for our specific areas of expertise.

I enjoy reading Arlin Sorensen's blog Peer Power. He recently wrote about the Lessons from Peers (part 1 and part 2). Have a read!

The Merits of Jailbreaking

A while ago I wrote about jailbreaking your iDevice. Now one of the biggest proponents of jailbreaking, and the king of Cydia, Saurik gives you reasons why you should jailbreak your iPhone. Well worth a read!

Service Level Agreements

How do you define an acceptable service level agreement (SLA) when negotiating service contracts with customers? There may be many factors that you want to manage and measure (remember: if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it), including things like maximum response and resolution time and a number of fixed metrics, such as priority levels.

There is a school of thought that as a service provider, you shouldn’t give anything away in an SLA unless it is specifically asked for. Though in a competitive market you will certainly want to offer something different to ‘the other guys’. Whether that is guarantees of quicker response times or a lower percentage of missed SLA targets before penalties apply is up to you. A missed SLA target for example may be where you have a target response time of <1hr for a priority one incident and it takes your 70 minutes to respond. Most SLAs will allow for a small percentage of targets to be missed, so long as some defined average measurement remains within targeted limits.

When defining SLAs, one thing that is often overlooked is how your supplier agreements and even internal (inter-departmental) agreements compare with the SLA your offer customers. Think about it. If you guarantee to replace a server hard disk within 24hrs but your supplier has a 2-day lead time for delivery, how can you meet the SLA? Or maybe your supplier is not a problem but your Accounts team has a policy to only pay invoices when they reach their terms? That hard drive you ordered may not be delivered until after the bill is paid, which could be 30 days down the track.

Other factors may come into play. Maybe you have a standard SLA response time for priority 1 that says you will have an engineer on site within 1 hour. If you have the same terms across multiple customers, then you are going to have to make sure that you always have engineers on standby, or at least in the office doing work they can drop if the need arises. How you schedule your engineers is key in this scenario. Keep an eye on the number of short-response SLAs you put out there and make sure that you actually have the staff to cover them, otherwise you might end up paying the penalty. Literally.

I’ve mentioned priorities a couple of times, so we really have to make sure that we have defined how we come to decide on the priority of a job. Otherwise you know what happens: The customer sets the priority of the job and it is always priority 1! How you define your priorities will be different depending on the services you are offering but just make sure that you do define them clearly. You will most likely define priorities based on the number of users or services affected in an incident, the business impact of an incident or some other arbitrary measurement. Like if the CEO’s PA calls, it is priority 1 every time!!

Lastly, make sure you define the scope of your SLA. Maybe you cover servers and routers but don’t cover printers - make sure that is clear.

SLAs tend to be full of legal jargon. Unfortunately they have to be but the key points I’ve mentioned have to be spelled out unambiguously in plain English for all to understand. For me, that is the key to executing an SLA that keeps all parties happy.

FT won't give up subscriber relationship to Apple | Reuters

I wrote about Apple's new subscription policy a little while back (Apple's Publication Subscription Strategy - good business or magazine-killer?) saying that publishers would be motivated to provide a better solution. Well it seems that the Financial Times is the first to take a stand with Apple. Apparently the media giant is 'in talks' with Apple to avoid paying them the 30% they demand for all electronic subscriptions.

Watch this space, it could get interesting .....