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I don’t really understand why anyone would want to pay Google money for Adwords. I ran a little experiment recently to promote our web sites using Google Adwords and Twitter. Here are the results: The results of my little online marketing experiment show a huge advantage for Twitter with focused search phrases in bios over …

Don’t ask me why, but I was invited (and joined) the Pakistan Networkers group on LinkedIn.  I see all kinds of cool job opportunities in the Emirates which I can’t really take but the traffic is interesting. I saw this picture in a post today from the Pakistan Networkers group. It graphically describes the complexity …

A common conversation I have with my technology clients  touches on patent protection as a  security countermeasure against abuse of intellectual property. The short answer is that if you’re not DuPont or Roche, then patent protection is not going to help you very much. If you develop software , you are probably infringing  someone’s patents …

Bahya ibn Paquda was the author of the first Jewish system of ethics written in Arabic in 1040 under the title Al Hidayah ila Faraid al-Qulub, Guide to the Duties of the Heart. In his view, most people acted in accord with selfish, worldly motives. This was almost 2,000 years ago before the age of …

We saw the movie “Blood Diamonds” last night;  the way some companies practice IT risk management reminds me of TIA – “This is Africa”.  Joseph Granneman talks about some of the problems with conventional IT risk assessment on Searchsecurity.com Risk assessment, as currently practiced in information security, is dead. I’m not saying we need to …

I was talking with my friend Gennady Weizman yesterday about medium term (as in the next 6-18 months) impact of the current financial markets crisis on the tech market.   Most of our business is in the telecom industry – so I have an interest in whether our clients will have money to spend. it appears …

Most companies have reasonable  perimeter security – i.e. a firewall and IDS (intrusion detection system) or IPS (intrusion prevention system).   Although  security people often view an IPS as the next generation of IDS; it’s important to distinguish between the roles of detection and prevention. Detection helps you understand what kind of attacks are being mounted …

Is there a “black-box” security solution for the business? What risks really count for your business? No question is more important for implementing an effective program of security countermeasures. The management, IT and security practioners cannot expect to mitigate risk effectively without knowing the sources and cost of threats to the organization. We all depend …

These are dangerous times for a business. Every day brings another threat. The sub-prime crisis, the crash of world financial markets, the price of oil (going way up and now going down again), an impending crash of the US sub-prime credit card market (like how long can you charge 35% over the top interest rates?), …