With the Memorial Day weekend approaching in the United States, people’s thoughts start turning to summer vacations. The idea of lying on a beach or swimming in a lake on a warm, sunny day makes everyone smile. With graduations and the end of school right around the corner, sun, surf, barbeques and ice cream is quickly becoming a reality.
Many people will rent a house for a week (or two, if you’re lucky) to get away from it all. Whether you rent a castle in the mountains, a shack by the ocean, or a bungalow near a lake, they all have one thing in common – a contract. If you have the foresight to find some place in January or you are scrambling now to see what’s available, every rental has a contract to sign.
Last year my family and I went to Cape Cod in Massachusetts for a week. A few months prior to our vacation, we got a contract in the mail. It was a standard 2-page document that laid out our responsibilities, notes on a security deposit, cleaning fee, the dates we were renting, etc. I signed the document, put a check in the envelope and sent it back to the home owner. I also made a copy of the signed document for my records. Fortunately I have a scanner, so this was easy. Since we had plenty of time before our vacation, this was no big deal. Time was not an issue in this case.
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This past week an incident occurred at HP that was both embarrassing and very costly. Just prior to announcing its quarterly earnings on May 17, 2011, three memos were leaked from CEO Leo Apotheker that painted a very bleak picture for the company. The memos warned of upcoming cost-cutting measures for the company that pointed to a rough few quarters ahead. Apotheker told executives to “watch every penny and minimize all hiring” and said the firm’s current workforce plans were “unaffordable given the pressures on our business.”
The memos were leaked to news organizations that promptly reported the stories. As a result of the information, HP’s stock price dropped 5%. Given their market cap of around $80 billion, that’s a $4 billion oops. Apotheker told CNBC that he would find out how the memos made their way to the media. “It is very unfortunate that these things happen and we will try to get to the bottom of this,” Apotheker said. “But I have full confidence in the team that I am working with and we’ll continue to execute.”
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You sat by the printer, hoping you had enough toner to print the stacks of documents you needed to send and get back ASAP. Then you settled down at your desk, with stacks of color-coded sticky notes meticulously marking where others needed to fill out information and sign. Next you trekked to the post office, sending your documents and notes to your signer, and returned to the office with a tracking number, your only tie to the just-sent envelope.
And you waited and crossed your fingers.
You hoped that your signer would heed the meticulously marked, color-coded sticky notes.
You hoped that your signer would return the documents in a timely fashion.
And you hoped that the envelope wouldn’t get rerouted, lost or otherwise delayed in the mail.
Once the documents were returned, you could begin the arduous process of verifying the signatures, initials, and information before scanning the documents for storage.
Computer viruses, worms, trojans and malware are with us all the time. The vast majority of these come in through email or infected documents. A lot of malware comes in through spam. The spam email has a link to a website that infects your computer. Sometimes it tries to install a payload that wreaks havoc on your system or more commonly it tries to get you to enter a credit card number to steal money.
Just today, I was looking at a webpage, clicked on a picture and was taken to a malicious website. The URL is http://178.17.162.163, but I’m sure this is not a static address. The page immediately started a fake anti-virus scan and started downloading a package – anti-malware.zip which opened Mac Protector. It also could be called MAC Defender or Mac Security. This was on my MacBook Pro. Yes Virginia, this happens on Macs and PCs. This is a known Mac malware ruse that tries to install a program and then asks you to pay for it with a credit card. It’s just the latest in a series of these fake anti-virus scams.
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These last few weeks have been tough on cloud computing. The latest problem was the recent security breach of Sony’s Online Entertainment network. About 25 million user accounts were compromised, including the theft of credit card information. This follows the larger breach of Sony’s PlayStation Network (PSN) in April where 77 million users had information stolen.
About the same time as the Sony trouble, Amazon had a few hiccups with its AWS (Amazon Web Services). AWS delivers computing services in the cloud which makes it very easy for a business to run applications at a fraction of the cost of building its own data center. The AWS services went down in Amazon’s Virginia data center and a few notable businesses, such as Reddit and FourSquare, were off the air.
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