Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-03-07
Posted on March 7, 2010
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- This one won't go away: FTC to appeal ‘red flags’ ruling http://lawyersusaonline.com/blog/2010/02/28/ftc-appeals-‘red-flags’-ruling/ #
- This is not getting better – The top 10 spam botnets: New and improved http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=1373 #
- The Search Wars, & Irony: Continue – http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100302/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_microsoft_google #
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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-28
Posted on February 28, 2010
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- Vermont OKs the Creation of Virtual Corporations http://bit.ly/LWmit from @gigaom #
- HiTech Breaches Are Being Reported Online: http://aiimknowledgecenter.typepad.com/weblog/2010/02/whos-watching-your-health-records.html #
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Disaster Recovery Planning
Posted on February 24, 2010
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I had the pleasure recently to present to a group of IT and business leaders on the topic of disaster recovery. Based on some of the questions and feedback from the group, I thought I would add some comments on this topic on the blog.
First, a fair number of attendees commented that they were having a hard time explaining the need for disaster recovery, or obtaining the necessary resources (either staff time, money, or both) to implement a solution. Of the attendees, only a handful reported they had completed the implementation of a disaster recovery solution. I think these are common problems for many organizations that are otherwise properly focused on meeting the computing needs of their user community. Disasters generally happen infrequently enough that they do not remain a focus of senior management. Instead, most businesses focus on servicing their customer base and generating revenue, and addressing the day to day issues that get in the way of these things.
Second, one of the attendees properly emphasized that IT staff are an important part of the planning equation. Without qualified and available staff, a disaster recovery system will not produce the desired outcome – a timely and successful recovery, no matter how expensive the system itself costs.
Third, at least one attendee indicated that they had implemented a solution with a service provider, but the solution was incomplete for the organization’s recovery needs. This is also a common problem for organizations that have significant changes in their systems over time, but disaster recovery is not included in the new system acquisition process.
Disaster recovery as a concept should not be introduced as an IT project, in spite of the fact that there are important IT components to any disaster recovery plan. Instead, disaster recovery is a mindset. It should appear on the checklist of items to consider for organizational decisions, along with other considerations like “how will this project generate revenue?” and “how will this project impact our commitment to protecting customer data?”
Disaster recovery solutions are more than just another virtual server or service. Disaster recovery is another insurance policy against the uncertainty of life. Organizations routinely purchase liability insurance, acts and omissions insurance, and other insurance policies on the basis that unanticipated negative events will inevitably occur. System failures, computer viruses, and other environmental failures are inevitable, even if rare. Disaster recovery solutions are a hedge against these unfortunate events.
Risk assessments for information systems help organizations to quantify their exposure to the unknown, and to estimate the potential impact to the organization if a threat is realized. Risk assessments also provide an orderly way to prioritize system recoveries, so that a disaster recovery solution focuses on mitigating the largest risks to the most critical information systems. As was pointed out at the presentation, payroll systems often seem the most critical systems, but the mitigations for the unexpected failure of a payroll system may not be a computer solution at all. Instead, the organization may elect to simply pay employees cash based on their last pay check, and reconcile payments once the payroll system is available again.
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-21
Posted on February 21, 2010
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- Hardware AV Patent in the News: http://news.yahoo.com/s/zd/20100215/tc_zd/248380 #
- IT as a Young Person's Game? http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20100217/tc_infoworld/113209 #
- Not Nice: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100219/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_google_china #
- Lawyers aren't the only ones with technical jargon: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100219/wr_nm/us_security_cyberspace #
- Legal online forms without help from an atty can be more trouble than they are worth. #
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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-14
Posted on February 14, 2010
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- Bad News for Hardware Encryption: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100208/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_crypto_chip_cracked #
- Google giving Verizon a run for their money? http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100210/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_google_broadband_network #
- End of Entourage in exchange for Outlook: http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20100212/tc_pcworld/microsoftendswaronmacintoshwithoffice2011 #
- The hole just gets deeper for homeowners in foreclosure: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100213/ap_on_bi_ge/us_lawyer_scams #
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Cloudly with a Chance of Computing
Posted on February 11, 2010
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The marketing team that originally went with “cloud computing” to describe various information services that are hosted outside of an organization’s walls may not have read The Clouds by Aristophanes. In fact, they may have been inspired by the many Visio drawings of network engineers that had a little cloud to represent some wide area network. Or maybe the originators of this appellation all live in a cloudy city where it rains all the time (like Seattle). The truth is that it is difficult to know where these sorts of things get started. But I was reading the lamentations of another writer about the return on investment of cloud computing (or should I say, lack of ROI), and his woes got me to thinking about clouds and whose computing they might actually benefit.
As a species, technology people are a suspicious bunch. And many have control issues. This may be the single largest cultural reason why organizations have such a hard time letting go of their core infrastructure or applications to an external vendor.
In spite of this, I don’t think any IT staff person would propose building their own search engine for the internet; everybody uses a “cloud” search engine like google or yahoo or bing to find stuff on the internet. Even though the search engines actually keep track of what you are searching for and use that information to fine-tune their index (and potentially respond to subpoenas from people looking to sue or arrest you), I don’t think all that many IT people would go to senior management and say “I want $x billion in my budget to create a secure search engine for the internet for our organization.” That’s because my hypothetical is silly. Google is basically free (because it is paid for by advertisers), indexes an enormous amount of the internet, and is both relatively reliable (only one or two outages here and there) and relatively accurate in the results it returns. Free is usually hard to beat, and when you throw in reliable with free, yep, time for a new project idea.
Now, a fair number of IT professionals are not thinking about internet search when they are considering a migration to cloud computing in their organizations. I’d guess that core applications are on the list, like email, telephone services, document management, or other mission critical systems. For those organizations that have gone through the pain of Microsoft Exchange 5.5, and the subsequent migrations to 2000, 2003, 2007, and maybe 2010, have experienced IT staff that can take a part and put back together an Exchange implementation, and experience little downtime today, cloud computing probably doesn’t make this better or less expensive.
Instead, cloud computing (like its older brother, the poisonous snake, the Application Service Provider (ASP)) is aimed at a different market segment. For smaller organizations, who can’t afford a full time IT person and certainly aren’t going to pay for an Exchange specialist to be on staff, a cloud vendor is a reasonable alternative. At $8 a month per mailbox, an organization of 10 users will pay a $1,000 per year to have their Exchange server hosted by a service provider like mailstreet.net – far less than the cost of an IT person and all of the licensing and equipment needed to host a server in house, never mind the backup, disaster recovery, and virus protection/anti-spyware services.
There are certainly downsides to placing your email with a cloud (what if the service provider goes out of business, what happens when you lose your internet connection, what if the service provider’s engineers keep reading your email), but I have a hint for IT people – most companies like cheaper whenever they can get away with it. And in this case, spending $100,000 a year to have email in-house is hardly a good idea if you can do it for 1/100th of that cost by contract, unless of course your email (75% of which is spam and viruses) is so uber-important that you must have complete control over it.
The return on investment analysis will be different for more complex and proprietary systems. While there may be plenty of cloud computing services offering you Microsoft Exchange, there are probably relatively few that will be able to offer hosting for the custom practice management systems for attorneys, or health records systems for physicians. There are also more security and operational considerations for those sorts of systems – and a lower chance that a hosting provider will have the specialists on staff that you need to support that kind of system. Notably, Lexis and Westlaw both provide what is essentially a hosted research service, and they are large enough to have teams of attorneys on staff to provide technical support to lawyers that use these services, but they appear to be the exception rather than the norm when it comes to other specialized systems.
So, in sum, cloud computing is aimed at providing services for organizations that can’t afford to host a system in-house, but can’t operate without access to the functionality of a particular application. For organizations with existing IT staff and systems that work, I don’t see cloud computing easily supplanting either. But then, google might release something that you can’t live without soon enough!
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-02-07
Posted on February 7, 2010
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- Legal considerations when using free software in IT consulting projects (from a non-attorney's perspective) http://bit.ly/crhOE0 #
- The IPad Isn't a Third Device, but a Third Revolution – PCWorld Business Center – http://shar.es/aM3SI #
- http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100204/en_nm/us_australia_copyright_internet #
- Keep in mind that because it is snowing in Maryland, the world is, in fact, ending. #
- @LindsWorek I can help you get a domain, setup a Wordpress blog, and host your web site in reply to LindsWorek #
- Google Book War continues: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100205/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_google_book_battle #
- Kapersky Speaks: http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20100205/tc_pcworld/kasperskygooglehacktakesspotlightfromrussia #
- @JDTwitt I will be honest I don't get it either, but Eros llc made 200k a yr selling them !!! in reply to JDTwitt #
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Online Marketing Update
Posted on February 7, 2010
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For those of you that enjoy science experiments, advertising online can present a very interesting lab. Your objective in advertising is to sell a product or service, in this case, legal services. The measure of success is the amount, if any, of revenue you generate from your advertisements, taking into account the actual cost of advertising online.
There are a fair number of places to advertise online. For the internet search market, Google, Yahoo and Bing are probably over 90% of the market based on usage statistics. All of these services provide a way to advertise your web site. These work by displaying ads that are triggered by the keywords that search engine users enter into the search form. For example, if you create an ad that is tied to the keyword “copyright infringement,” and a user searches for that or a similar phrase, your ad will display alongside the indexed results from the search engine. Where your ad appears in the results will depend on how much you have bid for the advertising space and also how relevant the search engine thinks your ad is (and the link it will take a user to) in relation to the words that are searched for.
You also have the option of advertising on certain social networking web sites, such as linkedin and facebook. In the case of facebook, you write an ad that will display based on the demographics that you are targeting. For example, facebook will target your ad to display to people living in Maryland that are older than 18, are male, and have a college degree. Linkedin, by virtue of targeting working professionals, allows you the ability to target prospective customers based on their industry, job category, and location.
All of these services provide you with a way to pay for “clicks” or for individuals that see your ad and actually click on the link to travel to a page on your web site. Where users end up on your site will likely determine whether you get a customer as a result. So, if you were to write an ad looking for prospective clients with a pending divorce case, your “landing page” (the page that your ad will display when clicked on) should probably have information about your practice, your experience handling divorce cases, and a way to contact you to schedule time to meet. A landing page that is not relevant to the search terms that led your user there will likely cause your visitors to quickly go somewhere else.
Not all advertising campaigns will lead directly to cash. You may only want visitors to come to your site to learn more about you and to think of you the next time they have a legal problem that you can help them with. In that case, you can set other goals for your advertising campaign, like, increasing the time that users spend on your site that find you through a search engine, or increasing the number of pages that users click through on your site. You might also want to develop a following or a group of users that return to your web site over time by subscribing to an RSS feed of content from your web site or blog. Or you may want to increase the number of people reading your tweets on twitter. Having certain, measurable goals helps you to determine if your ads are performing properly, whether your landing pages are structured properly, and whether your overall web site is properly organized for your prospective clients.
And, with online advertising, you can tinker with your advertisements over time to evaluate what ads brought clients to your site and which ads did not. With some search engines, you can also develop graphical ads and run them alongside plain old text ads to see which works better for bringing in users to your web site, and ultimately, converting into paying customers.
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-01-31
Posted on January 31, 2010
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- Online Donation Revolution? http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100115/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_haiti_text_donations #
- Report: Companies unprepared for cybercrime – CNET News: http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10440901-245.html?tag=twitter #
- RT @nightwatchdev How to Sync the Things App for Mac with MobileMe http://bit.ly/7g2gpq #
- McAfee report exposes cyber extortion of U.S. power grid – http://shar.es/aPft3 #
- RT @cnet iPad in search of a complete secondary market http://bit.ly/9okFPx #
- Fastcase launches iPhone legal research app – Washington Business Journal:: http://bit.ly/dxnzt0 via @addthis #
- FB Patent Infringement, Oh My: http://bit.ly/Vy1p5 #
- Microsoft and the Word Patent Debacle: http://bit.ly/gJf9Q #
- Courts, Congress Shun Addressing Legality of Warrantless Eavesdropping – http://shar.es/aPy0N #
- How unique and trackable is your web browser? http://panopticlick.eff.org #
- Robots evolve to learn cooperation, hunting – CNET News: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10432608-1.html?tag=twitter #
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The Mac Lawyer’s Task Manager
Posted on January 31, 2010
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On January 23, I spoke at the MSBA’s Hanging out a Shingle conference for attorneys considering going out on their own to practice law. I spoke about some of the technology needs and issues of solo attorneys and new firms. As a Mac user, one of the attendees at the conference asked me what software I used to keep track of tasks, and whether I know of a task manager that would synchronize my tasks between my Mac and my iPhone. I did not, but being the presenter I am, I told the audience I would look into it.
I’ve been testing out a software package called Things that was developed by Cultured Code. Things runs on the Mac and provides you with a way of tracking what’s do, and also scheduling recurring tasks (like pay the firm credit card or bill your clients). Things can synchronize with the task list that you can keep in Mail for the Mac, which can then be synchronized with MobileMe and be available within iCal (tasks in Mail will show on the right hand column of your calendars in iCal). As for the iPhone, Cultured Code has also published an app that can synchronize with a desktop running the full program in the office. In order to sync, the iPhone and Mac with Things running must both be on the same WiFi network.
So, for example, in the morning, you could open up Things on your Mac, manage your tasks for the day, and before you leave the office, open up your iPhone’s Things app, let it synchronize, and then leave. As you get stuff done while out of the office, you can check off the items on your to do list (like go to the bank, mail those payments for your office rent, buy some more copier paper, and drop off some pleadings at the courthouse). When you get back, you can open up Things on your iPhone (after connecting to your WiFi hotspot) and Things will update on your Mac, marking off as complete those tasks that you have completed out in the world.
As a result, for those of you addicted to checking off items from your to do list, you can now get your fix electronically on your iPhone, without having to carry a paper list, or manage two independent lists (one on your Mac and one on your iPhone).
And for those of you that want to have a single task list shared across multiple Macs, there is a way to do that as well. If you subscribe to MobileMe, you have the option of synchronizing files on iDisk. Things itself has a database file in XML that it uses to manage its data. You can put that set of files onto iDisk and allow other Macs the ability to access that file and be updated with the latest list. There is a complete post by another author here that explains the step by step. Please note, however, that this MobileMe solution is not real time. In testing, I’ve found that you generally need to keep Things closed on the other Macs until after changes to the XML file are fully synchronized, then open up Things on the other Mac to see the changes made. Using iDisk may be a solution for a small office, but probably will not work for a large number of attorneys and paralegals working together. Hope this helps.