Marie-Pierre Gouaux of Atos Origin becomes Training Manager of the Year

This is great news, congratulations Marie Pierre – it just goes to show what can be done when you get the right person, in the right place, and you let them do what they do best.

The press release is here:

http://www.trainingpressreleases.com/newsstory.asp?NewsID=1329

Of course, I like this part of the press release too:

Achievements over the last year have been impressive, yet Gouaux has still managed to achieve a 40% reduction in training costs. Training bookings and management were automated during 2004 using Enterprise Study Network and training administration was outsourced to BroadSkill.

Here's one way to stop email phishing

I’ve just had an email from a bank explaining how they will never send me an email asking for security or personal information…and it won’t help. In fact it will make the situation worse as I am now expecting more email's using their branding.

All I have to do (if I wished) is copy the email and change the email links that are in there. While I’m at it I can change the phone numbers too. Then I can send it out to a spamming email list.

The email has links in it to their site for more information on email security…I’d change that link to a login page, and I still think it will catch people out.

There’s only one way to stop people getting caught – disable hyperlinks in emails unless their destination organisation is the same as the source of the email.

It would work like this (it would require changes to the email client, but then that’s what standards are for):

• The email would come from an email address that is signed using a trusted digital signature (ie the message is signed).
• The email client would look at the hyperlinks in the message and only allow links where they are authorised by the digital certificate (ie to the same organisation or their clearing house).
• To be trustworthy the email client should not create any hyperlinks in any other email message, and ideally not allow any hyperlink to be copied to the clipboard either. It you see a hyperlink then it means it’s safe should be the rule.
• The email client should make it clear where the certificate is from (ie ‘This is a message from Sainsburys Bank’), the message must be in a part of the client that cannot be spoofed.
• Phone numbers could also be ‘certified’ in a similar way.

As a starting point I think I’d like to see the option to disable email hyperlinks. I don’t want to disable HTML email itself – I find that’s too useful, besides even the hyperlinks in text emails get ‘enabled’ by Outlook, so disabling HTML wouldn’t be a complete cure.

If you were using an email client set up in this way then it would be easy to trust that the hyperlinks within it were genuine.

Six Degrees of Separation and Blogging

You may have heard of the idea of ‘Six degrees of separation’ where everyone on Earth is separated from anyone else by no more than six degrees of separation, or six friends of friends.

This interesting but seemingly useless concept is in fact is a powerful idea, to restate it differently:

“If someone has a problem in the world, they are only six people away from someone who could potentially solve it.”

If we could get this mechanism to work in the real world then it would have a profound effect.

How many brilliant ideas have there been that have fizzled out because the originator wasn’t in the right place at the right time, or didn’t know the right people? (They say that the biggest advantage of graduating from places like Oxford and Cambridge is the network of contacts that you leave with)

For ‘Six Degrees’ to be an effective communicator you need two things:

• Your local network of friends needs to be fairly large and influential
• Those friends need to be keen to communicate your need (indeed everyone along the chain needs to communicate – it’s only as strong as the weakest link)

One of the reasons why this isn’t effective at the moment is that this combination is rarely met.

Broadly speaking success comes when:

• You either know the right person directly (or within a couple of degrees) in which case the problem of poor ‘communication’ is reduced. Sales people call this ‘networking’.
• You get the attention of a media outlet which can reach a large audience, increasing the chances of reaching the right person – increasing your number of friends if you like.

Blogs to the rescue?

Blogs bring a new possibility. They are a new way of communicating your problems to a wide audience and crucially people can contact you. Feed aggregators play an important part in the broadcasting

I put this to the test this week (which in turn inspired this blog entry).

Taran Rampersad has been discussing ways of using SMS text messaging in disaster zones like the Tsunami. At the same time I’ve had some coorespondence with a program manager on the Windows Mobile team and it occurred to me that I could put these two in touch. I’m sure the Windows Mobile team could come up with something.

We’ll have to see if anything comes of this…but at least I’ve tried.

Executive summary:

• If you’ve got a problem tell people about it – use a blog to write about it.
• If you read about a problem and you know someone who can fix it – tell them – you may just play an important, but maybe unsung role in something special.