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When is password security not security?

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In a wondrous attempt to increase security, more and more vendors are now requiring me to choose passwords of many characters with mixed case, numbers and punctuation. My bank does one better, where I have five different question/answer combinations they ask, then once I’ve passed their quiz, they display an image that I’m supposed to recognize as the “right” image. Plus, everyone wants me to change my password every 30 days.

This is a great example of security professionals gone brain-dead. Yeah, if my bank were the only website in the world that I used, there’s a slim chance I might be able to remember all that. But they’re not the only one. Every credit card company, insurance company, and bank account has a web login. Not to mention commerce sites, Amazon, eBay, etc.

When you put all that together, it’s very quick to see that the only way a sane human can possibly cope with five challenge/responses plus a mixed-case password that changes monthly is to write the whole thing down and keep it around.

The result? Far less security than before! Because all a thief has to do is find someone’s 50-page notebook of current passwords and voila–all security gets compromised in one easy step.

Security geeks: chill out. You’re undermining your own cause by going for theoretical purity and ignoring the way real people behave in the real world. Let me choose something that’s hard to guess, but easy to remember. Like my mother’s favorite record album in French, spelled backwards. And let me keep the password long enough to memorize it.The current high-security practices, alas, fail miserably.

Marshall Goldsmith on Peer Coaching (part 2)

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Marshall Goldsmith is an amazing executive coach. He has worked with several Fortune 500 CEOs and is currently a best-selling author (#1 on Amazon.com in the Leading People category). He has developed a couple of peer coaching techniques that will let you and any supportive friend coach each other to superb results. In this podcast, Marshall explains the second technique.

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What if you had $1 billion to spend on a Presidential campaign?

I was reading reports that Michael Bloomberg was rumored to announce his candidacy for President. A friend mentioned that he had reportedly said he would spend up to $1 billion to get elected (no sources were cited).

I was thinking: what would you do if you were going to spend $1 bn on a Presidential campaign?

Rather than spend it on vapid attack ads, I might spend it revitalizing a community, or doing something to make a concrete difference in the lives of many people, and then saying, “That’s the kind of thing I want to see happen as President.”

Would it work? I don’t know. But I’d rather see the money directly creating good than going to yet another round of media buys so we can all be inundated with the meaningless drivel that is campaign advertising.

The world is what you make it; what are you making it?

Chris Matthews was just commenting that Benazir Bhutto’s assassination was “a reminder of the dangerous world we all live in.”

In that moment, it struck me: we all live in a world of our own making. Oh, I don’t mean literally, though fans of The Secret may disagree. But our experience of the world is so deeply tied to our interpretations that what most of us call “truth” is nothing more than our own made up stories.

I look at the world today and see more than 6 billion people surviving. Many don’t have enough water or health care, but they’re surviving. It fact population continues to rise. That doesn’t sound like a dangerous world to me; that sounds like a world that’s provided us pretty much everything we need to thrive. Heck, we’ve even exterminated or controlled all of our natural predators.

To the extent we live in a “dangerous” world, that danger comes from other humans. For example, investment bankers and financial managers who deal in collateralized debt obligations. And yes, the occasional human being kills others. Sometimes it’s in war, or for political reasons, or whatever. And the media focuses on those events precisely because the violent, dangerous events are the exception, rather than the rule.

Most Americans have never suffered pain worse than a stubbed toe. We’re surrounded on the east and west by oceans so broad that no one can cross them without ample warning. We have Mexico and Canada to the south and north. The greatest danger there comes from having too much cheap labor and better ice hockey teams, respectively. As for the rest of the world, we have more intercontinental warheads than everyone else put together and then some.

In short, we’re the most dangerous thing in the world, and in the absolute scale of things, even we aren’t doing much damage. (Except unintentionally, to the environment, but that’s not what Chris Matthews was talking about.)

So Chris lives in a dangerous world because he finds the danger and then calls the world dangerous. He could also look at all the good things and call the world safe, secure, and happy. His choice.

And what is your choice? Which world do you live in?

If you want to bring this into a business context, since this is a business BLOG, let me ask you: when you look at your competition, your industry, and your trends, what stories do you tell? How do you explain the actions of others? The actions of markets? Do you tell a story of luck? Of skill? Of timing? Are you a victim of the market (“the failure of our initiative was because of a bad economy”) or are you a driver of the market (“we did everything we could think of and found the combination that let us become market leader in a mature market”)?

Examine your stories. They’re only stories, and they dictate your every perception, your every decision, and your every action. Choose your stories well.

Just Flip a Coin Instead

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Sometimes decisions aren’t worth the cost of deciding

Click to hear the original Get-it-Done Guy podcast.

[Subscribe at iTunes (search for “Get It Done Guy”) or http://GetItDone.QuickAndDirtyTips.com]

This article is a reprint of an episode of my new podcast. You can visit the site of the original episode here.

Stever Robbins here. Welcome to the Get-It-Done Guy’s Quick and Dirty Tips to Work Less and Do More.

Today’s tip is about decisions. The bottom line? If it costs more to research and make a decision than the impact that decision will actually have, flip a coin instead.

In my first corporate job, we needed a laser printer for our programmers. The executives met to discuss it. After all, a $600 laser printer would only save twelve programmers hours worth of hassle. The marketing department had one, true, but then, they needed one. Otherwise, how could they print drafts of the billboard they erected, celebrating the company’s “Great Beginnings.”

In the end, they didn’t buy the printer. The programmers would just have to make do. And at night, I lay awake wondered: was this somehow my fault? In retrospect, perhaps I overestimated my own importance.

Decisions cost money

But I didn’t overestimate the decision’s importance. The decision not to buy the printer took four executives three one-hour meetings to make. The executives made about $100,000 a year, apiece, which is $50/hour. Multiply by four executives and three hours, and we’re talking $600 worth of management time to make that decision. They should have just spent the $600 on the darned printer.

This was the first time I saw that decisions cost money. And if it costs more to make a decision than the amount you’re deciding about, it’s more sensible to flip a coin or spend the money without further discussion. That’s why some businesses don’t even require receipts for small expenses when employees travel. It’s cheaper to reimburse $5 than handle the paperwork to document the expense.

Indirect costs can mount up

In my example, the cost was the executives’ salaries, but indirect costs can mount up, as well — costs of delays while the decision is being made, the cost of the distraction of having to make the decision, the cost of gathering information, and so on. And sometimes researching one decision leads you to expand the issue way, way too much.

For example (hypothetical, hah!), imagine the motor in your front- loading washing machine burns out for the sixth time, and you decide to buy a new washer. You call a saleswoman and she recommends an $800 model. But you want to be sure you’re making the right choice. So you demur and research begins.

You subscribe to ConsumerReports.org, you print descriptions of dozens of washers, and compare them feature by feature. You call the store and ask about delivery options and service plans. And you realize you can have your dryer venting cleaned as long as the workmen will be poking around. And, you know, since you’re moving the dryer to get at the duct, maybe you should just buy a new dryer to match the new washer.

Soon, your $800 purchase has become a major renovation. Your research gave you so many overspending opportunities that now you’re spending thousands on an extra appliance, delivery, and duct-cleaning. Oh, yeah–and during the project, you’ll be driving your laundry to the laundromat and spending two hours a week doing laundry in bad lighting.

You just spent hundreds of dollars, twelve hours of research time, six hours of laundromat duty, gas to drive there, and the self-esteem nightmare of laundromat lighting, all because you didn’t want to say “yes” to the saleswoman’s $800 suggestion. When you add it all up, you’d have been way better off just buying the dryer.

Non-monetary costs are important

Some decisions have a non-monetary cost. When you and your husband/ wife/transgendered partner or polyamorous family unit decide to go to dinner, you might want a sandwich whereas they want to try a new ethnic restaurant where the food still has eyeballs. Should you graciously say, “Yes,” firmly say “No,” or debate? If you debate, it could become an argument. If you smile brightly and say, “Yes, let’s be adventurous!”, you get major relationship brownie points. Maybe even extra snuggling. If you say, “No, let’s discuss it,” even if you settle on the food-with-a-face, you don’t get the points. With interpersonal decisions, sometimes saying “Yes, dear” and bypassing the decision can be worth way more than getting your way. And you can always order the rice as a safe backup dish.

If my first employers had just made decisions and spent money, instead of spending money to not-make decisions, they might have survived. You don’t need to make their mistake.

Today, put it to work. Review the major decisions you’re making about things to buy, places to go, people to see, and all that stuff. Notice how much work goes into each decision, and ask yourself how important each one really is. Then for the decisions that aren’t worth the cost of deciding, just flip a coin. You’ll free up your mind and you’ll move things forward, and all for less than it would take to make a decision.

[Subscribe at iTunes (search for “Get It Done Guy”) or http://GetItDone.QuickAndDirtyTips.com]

Marshall Goldsmith on Peer Coaching (part 1)

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Marshall Goldsmith is an amazing executive coach. He has worked with several Fortune 500 CEOs and is currently a best-selling author (#1 on Amazon.com in the Leading People category). He has developed a couple of peer coaching techniques that will let you and any supportive friend coach each other to superb results. In this podcast, Marshall explains the first technique.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Happy Sunset day! (It’s the day of the earliest sunset)

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Greetings, and happy Sunset Day to all!

This is the day of the earliest sunset of the year in mid-northern latitudes; after today, the sunsets begin, ever so slowly, to be later, according to clock time.If you aren’t familiar with this interesting phenomenon, you can read my personal take on it in my article on the subject.  (Article included below.)Some additional resources:

For a technical explanation at a nicely done web site (requires Java and Quicktime; be sure to keep going past on the second page — use the arrow at the page bottom):  http://www.analemma.com/Now, I know that this is somewhat latitude-chauvinistic.  Sunset Day is 8 December, or close enough, for 32N to 45N latitude.Empirically, it appears to be about 12 December at Cambridge, UK (52N) and perhaps 14 December at Edinburgh (57N).  (As for Australia, it’s irrelevant — you’ll have to make do with enjoying summer!)  But the principle mentioned in the article is at work in all the non-tropical north.

May all your sunsets be later!

Doug Dodds (dodds@pobox.com or dodds@csail.mit.edu)Cambridge, Mass., USA

Analemma, my Analemmaby Douglas Dodds

When I came to Boston from St. Louis, I first had to adjust to the trauma of the local climate.  A bit later, another environmental difference became evident: the hours of daylight and darkness.  Two memories of my first year at MIT epitomize the difference.  I remember seeing the red sun five minutes from setting at 4 pm on an early December afternoon; I realizied that it sure had been getting dark early.  And I remember staying up most of the night studying in late April, and being astonished that daylight was breaking in the east at 3:45 am!I soon understood that Boston’s more northerly latitude resulted in a larger excursion in length of daylight than I was used to (roughly between 9 hours and 15 hours); and that its position relatively far east in the Eastern Time Zone shifted the whole day toward the morning on the clock (local mean solar noon here occurs 16 minutes before noon, EST).  I love the long, light summer evenings here, but have always been depressed by the early darkness in winter.In recent years, I got a bit interested in astronomy, and discovered a subtler effect: the actual solar time cyclically speeds up and slows down relative to mean solar time over the course of the year!  During most of the year the deviation of actual from mean solar time is small and slow, but between November and February, sun time travels from its maximum “fastness” to its maximum “slowness”, a total excursion of 30 minutes!One result of the wintertime swing in relative solar time is that although, as everyone knows, December 21 (approximately) is the shortest day of the year, the day of the latest sunrise is almost two weeks later, on January 4.  And, most important (fanfare), the earliest sunset occurs on December 8!  Amazingly, the sunset actually begins, ever so slowly, to become later after that date.I am seldom concerned with when the sun rises, late as that is during the Boston winter; the time of sunset defines my length of daylight.  So since that discovery, it has always been a cheering consolation to me that the “day” is already at its shortest on December 8, before winter really has set in!  For me, the light returns already; it makes winter a little easier to face.

Why the Daylight Period Varies

The strange and fascinating wandering of actual solar time relative to the clock is expressed in a peculiar parametric curve called the analemma.  It shows (now listen carefully) the locus of the subsolar point on the Earth’s surface at a given Universal Time, for all days of the year.  Alternatively, it is the locus of the sun in the sky at a given clock time, say 9 AM, on all days of the year.If one were to strobe the sun at the same clock time every day for a year, the sun would trace out its analemma in the sky.  Somebody has actually done this!  In a photograph that is now a classic, Dennis di Cicco of Sky and Telescope magazine photographed the sun on the same plate (through a filter), with a permanently mounted camera, about every ten days, at exactly the same time of the morning.  He then removed the filter to shoot the background in normal daylight; the result was a cluster of suns rising over his neighbor’s house, in the bottom-heavy figure-8 shape of an analemmaic curve.The analemma is a parametric curve, plotting north-south latitude on the Y-axis, deviation in east-west longitude on the X-axis, and the parameter of graphing is the calendar date.  An alternative interpretation of the X variable is time, via the Earth’s rotation speed of one degree of longitude every four minutes.  If there were no deviation of solar time, the analemma would just be a vertical line, tracking the sun’s seasonal movement from about 23 degrees north of the equator to 23 degrees south.The actual looping analemma is due to the sum of two effects.

  • The first has to do with the seasonal apparent travel of the sun north and south.  The sun (or rather the subsolar point) travels at a constant speed along a wavy (sinusoidal) path.  It is roughly at a northern plateau around the June solstice, moving almost parallel to the equator.  It then begins to angle south, crossing at the September equinox, then approaching a southerly plateau in December, and so on. The speed along the path is constant, but the longitudinal (east- west) travel of the sun against the coordinates of the sky is the projection of this speed on the equator.  Clearly, this cycles faster and slower.  Around the solstices, the projected motion is at its fastest, around the equinoxes at its slowest.  The result of this effect alone would be a propeller-shaped analemma, a skinny, equal-looped figure-8.
  • The other effect, completely independent, is due to the fact that the earth’s orbit is not a perfect circle, but is slightly elliptical.  The Earth moves a little faster when travelling the portion of its orbit that is closer to the sun, a little slower on the more distant part.  So the advance of the sun across the firmament varies correspondingly faster and slower through the year.

By coincidence, the ellipticality effect is, at this epoch, almost synchronized with the seasonal motion of the sun: perihelion (Earth closest to sun) is on January 3, the southern solstice on December 21.  So the resulting curve from the elliptical orbit alone is a thin elliptical analemma tilted slightly to the northwest-southeast.The complete analemma is the sum of these two curves.  The longitudinal extents of the two are roughly equal; and they are in phase (reinforcing) on the southern half (our winter) and at opposite phase (cancelling) in the northern.  The result is a distorted figure-8 curve with a very fat bottom loop, a small top loop, and a slight scrunch to the right.The time deviation of the sun is slight from April to September, less than five minutes fast or slow.  But the sun reaches its maximum fastness (16 minutes) in mid-November (sunrises and sunsets are earlier than average).  And it reaches its maximum slowness (14 minutes) in late February (sunsets later).  The period around the December solstice is a headlong rush of the daylight toward the evening.  The result is the widely spread latest-sunrise and earliest-sunset times that I enjoy so much, while the northern winter sets in.

My main reference for the information in this piece is an excellent article on the analemma by Bernard Oliver, in Sky and Telescope, July 1972.    

Upgraded my Macintosh. Super-stressful day. … Not!?

Bought a new Mac. Wanted to duplicate the config on my old one. Figured it would be 16 hours of reinstalling, reconfiguring, etc.

Turned on the new Mac. It asked if I was migrating from an existing machine. I said Yes. It said “Copying…” Copying happened. Then the machine booted, completely configured, set up, and ready to go exactly as if it were the old machine.

With my last Windows system, it took literally three times as long just to reinstall the operating system than it took to completely migrate to a new Mac  and copy 100Gb of iTunes, media files, data, and preferences.

I then spent a stressful four hours hunting frantically for some application that must surely have broken in the copying. Some preference that didn’t get transferred. Some critical system file that got overwritten.

Nope.

All that stress Microsoft had trained me to have, totally wasted. Apple did with a software team one tenth the size what Microsoft hasn’t managed for 15 years. (And don’t give me some crap line about how Microsoft has to support so many open architectures. They’ve deliberately ignored, adapted, and “extended” standards since 1993 precisely to insure consumers were forced to choose between compatibility and Microsoft software.)

The amazing thing is that I know many excellent software engineers who have gone to work for MSoft over the years. Really, really good people. Somehow, their genius hasn’t made it to the world of actual shipping software. All that talent, design ability, and skill made irrelevant and useless.

Now the question is: do I do a Get-it-Done Guy column about this? It really represents a HUGE efficiency gain, but I don’t want to provoke religious wars. Hmm…