I mirrored what papers and presentations I could find that I've done over the last 10 years to my home page www.atarininja.org/~txs. If you happen to have any of my presentation slide decks or papers that I don't have uploaded please send them to me. I'm very poor at saving these things for posterity.
With regard to this blog. I'm going to be updating less frequently, but the blog is still alive. I've moved a lot of my shorter posts over to my twitter feed @txs_. Please follow that for the less detailed and shorter updates. Some more research will be posted here soon.
We all know the economy is continuing to take the proverbial plan b all over the tech job industry. The question really isn't "will it effect me?", my guess is yes, the question really is "how is this going to effect me". It may not directly cost you your job, but it will effect you in other ways, stifling innovation, limiting new technologies to hit the market, and generally causing a downturn in "cool stuff" going on.
According to the Techcrunch Layoff Tracker there were 317,000+ laid off tech employees through today. Will the gloom and doom ever end? Layoffs tend to be a trailing indicator of economic downturn, so don't use this as a prediction of future trends, but I doubt we've seen the bottom as of yet. For those of you still with a job, congratulations, and for those of you currently on the employment sidelines, good luck.
My question to my loyal reader is: How will this effect the information security landscape? Will budgets be cut in this area thus highly effecting the service and product providers in the space, or is security such a necessity that we will be immune to the economic slump? Please leave thoughts and ideas in the comments, this is an open forum post today. There is no right answer.
My brother pointed me to this link today. It's not the most high tech talk you'll ever see, but it is very funny and very inspirational. Mike Rowe is the host of the show dirty jobs on the Discovery Channel. He has a very interesting past including being a late night pitchman for the QVC channel as well as being a professional Opera singer with the Baltimore Opera. On the show Dirty Jobs he has done some of the most menial and dirty jobs in history and, with few exception, did the job with a smile on his face. He has some very interesting and valuabel insights into what "work" really is and how it has degraded within today's high tech society. Take 20 minutes and watch this video.
This just in from the desk of Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO:
From: Steve Ballmer
To: All Microsoft FTE
Subject: Realigning Resources and Reducing Costs
In response to the realities of a deteriorating economy, we.re taking important steps to realign Microsoft.s business. I want to tell you about what we.re doing and why.
Today we announced second quarter revenue of $16.6 billion. This number is an increase of just 2 percent compared with the second quarter of last year and it is approximately $900 million below our earlier expectations.
The fact that we are growing at all during the worst recession in two generations reflects our strong business fundamentals and is a testament to your hard work. Our products provide great value to our customers. Our financial position is solid. We have made long-term investments that continue to pay off.
But it is also clear that we are not immune to the effects of the economy. Consumers and businesses have reined in spending, which is affecting PC shipments and IT expenditures.
Our response to this environment must combine a commitment to long-term investments in innovation with prompt action to reduce our costs.
During the second quarter we started down the right path. As the economy deteriorated, we acted quickly. As a result, we reduced operating expenses during the quarter by $600 million. I appreciate the agility you have shown in enabling us to achieve this result.
Now we need to do more. We must make adjustments to ensure that our investments are tightly aligned with current and future revenue opportunities. The current environment requires that we continue to increase our efficiency.
As part of the process of adjustments, we will eliminate up to 5,000 positions in R&D, marketing, sales, finance, LCA, HR, and IT over the next 18 months, of which 1,400 will occur today. We.ll also open new positions to support key investment areas during this same period of time. Our net headcount in these functions will decline by 2,000 to 3,000 over the next 18 months. In addition, our workforce in support, consulting, operations, billing, manufacturing, and data center operations will continue to change in direct response to customer needs.
Our leaders all have specific goals to manage costs prudently and thoughtfully. They have the flexibility to adjust the size of their teams so they are appropriately matched to revenue potential, to add headcount where they need to increase investments in order to ensure future success, and to drive efficiency.
To increase efficiency, we.re taking a series of aggressive steps. We.ll cut travel expenditures 20 percent and make significant reductions in spending on vendors and contingent staff. We.ve scaled back Puget Sound campus expansion and reduced marketing budgets. We.ll also reduce costs by eliminating merit increases for FY10 that would have taken effect in September of this calendar year.
Each of these steps will be difficult. Our priority remains doing right by our customers and our employees. For employees who are directly affected, I know this will be a difficult time for you and I want to assure you that we will provide help and support during this transition. We have established an outplacement center in the Puget Sound region and we.ll provide outplacement services in many other locations to help you find new jobs. Some of you may find jobs internally. For those who don.t, we will also offer severance pay and other benefits.
The decision to eliminate jobs is a very difficult one. Our people are the foundation of everything we have achieved and we place the highest value on the commitment and hard work that you have dedicated to building this company. But we believe these job eliminations are crucial to our ability to adjust the company.s cost structure so that we have the resources to drive future profitable growth.
I encourage you to attend tomorrow.s Town Hall at 9am PST in Café 34 or watch the webcast.
While this is the most challenging economic climate we have ever faced, I want to reiterate my confidence in the strength of our competitive position and soundness of our approach.
With these changes in place, I feel confident that we will have the resources we need to continue to invest in long-term computing trends that offer the greatest opportunity to deliver value to our customers and shareholders, benefit to society, and growth for Microsoft.
With our approach to investing for the long term and managing our expenses, I know Microsoft will emerge an even stronger industry leader than it is today.
Thank you for your continued commitment and hard work.
Steve
And while we are at it, I'll link my tech layoff tracker of choice. http://www.techcrunch.com/layoffs/
Let's hope that 2009 starts to spin this thing around.
In retrospect, I didn't need teachers to teach me things; I needed teachers to force me to get out of my comfort zone, and partners to get me unstuck.
Kragen Javier Sitaker, March 1, 2007.
Taken from "my evolution as a programmer"
Blogging is out, "Tweeting" is in. Twitter is the new black, it's the latest and greatest, it's.. well weird. I've posted on my thoughts regarding microblogging in the past (here). "At first I was afraid, I was petrified", but then I realized just how useful this type of medium can be. I've since found myself adopting this technology as a way to keep up with the latest and greatest information security minutia directly from the people that are creating it. With groups of people such as the Security Twits along with the researchers I know personally, it's a very useful 1:Many discussion medium. The down side of the microblogging thing is that it's been taking away from my time/energy to create real blog entries for my reader(1). I promise this will change soon.
In the mean time, follow me on twitter (txs_) if you wish to join in the interesting conversation. I'm always keen to hear what my reader(1) has to say.
To quote a great song by the band Fort Minor: "Where'd ya go, I miss you so. Seems like it's been forever, since you've been gone". Well it hasn't quite been forever, but it has been nearly a month. I have all sorts of good reasons why I've been too busy to give you kind reader (note the intentional use of singular) the type of interesting infosec jibber jabber that you deserve... BUT.. I'm not going to tell you about them. Frankly it's none of your business.
Instead I'm going to give you a pointer to an interesting piece of research journalism conducted by business week. In a previous post to this blog (here) I commented on the dangers of fake chips and hardware entering the market from China and the potential security implications of these pieces. Well now business week has conducted a multiple week research piece tracking back the origin of a number of chips that caused malfunctions in equipment provided through BEA to the US military. With an interesting video and five fact filled pages of story, this is a very good read indeed. (*Thanks to Chris Eng for pointing this story out to me*).
A friend just passed me a link to this wonderful article about the public disclosure of the health of executive officers of a company.
Right now there are no laws/rules in place with the United States government or SEC that requires senior management and other high ranking officials to disclose serious illness to stock holders. Part of me agrees completely with this in that the health of an individual is a private matter and should not have to be disclosed to the public. The inventor part of me says screw that!
The particular CEO in the article is none other than Apple Computers CEO, Steve Jobs. In the past, Steve has been diagnosed with a tumor on his pancreas that was "cured" with surgery. He has recently been seen in public looking very haggard and slim. When called on his health, Apple's only public response was: "Steve loves Apple, Steve's health is a private matter."
So this begs the question, should a publicly traded company be required to disclose serious health issues about it's senior management team? In most cases it wouldn't matter all that much, but in this case the implications are HUGE. Without Jobs, Apple is far less of a company. His track record of innovation and marketing excellence are what keeps the Apple stock price at a staggering out of control high. If he were to fall seriously ill, Apple stock would (and rightfully should) plummet.
So should companies be required to report on the health of their senior management team? They all have to get physicals for insurance, so why not make them disclose their results to the world? Thoughts?
Oh, and one other thing, there really are some awesome quote magnets out there, and much like Linus Torvalds, Steve Jobs doesn't disappoint:
"This is Steve Jobs. You think I'm an arrogant [expletive] who thinks he's above the law, and I think you're a slime bucket who gets most of his facts wrong." (Quoted from NY Times article located here)
The jury is still out on Twitter. Micro-Blogging is for the times between face to face meetings, major blog posts, emails, instant messages, and phone calls. As if we don't have enough ways to communicate already, it appears as if we needed a way to publish every 10 seconds "what we are doing".
My first thought is "why?!". Do we really need to update everyone out there every time we eat a meal or take a shower? I'm doing my best to keep an open mind and I'm trying to give it a fair go, but I'm just not ready to see the benefit of this new technology. At best Twitter can be used to update people with regards to your current location so they can meet up with you at a local pub. To me it seems like a broadcast based IM system with mappings to SMS phone technologies. Maybe I'm just missing the point of it all.
I'm not even going to get into the privacy issues that are apparent with technologies like this. If people don't keep in mind what they are posting about they are likely to give away far too much information to the world. This is a much bigger problem than just Twitter (Facebook, Myspace, blogs in general, etc).
If you use and actually like micro-blogging technologies like Twitter, please leave a comment and explain why. Help me get into the year 2008.
I know that this is old news to most of you. But I finally got around to viewing "The Last Lecture". This was a lecture given by Randy Pausch who is a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Randy is dying from pancreatic cancer and was asked by CMU to give a talk at their last lecture series. I had been avoiding it due to the fact that I generally consider myself a rather non emotional person and I didn't think I would really enjoy a talk such as this. I was completely wrong, this talk is PHENOMENAL. Everyone should watch this talk at least once and really try to understand the points he is making. Please give it a watch, I'm fairly certain you will enjoy it too.
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