As some say (me included), it’s nice to give people something of value just the moment you first meet. It binds. And what is of more value than an insightful point delivered in a funny way? Plus it doesn’t cost you much and has potential to change the world (a wee bit, but still).

So why not add some value to the usual biz-card exchange? Say, in form of couple of valuable words on the back side of a card? And I bet you can also make it fun to read. In order to boost up the fun factor I used couple of doodles by Hugh MacLeod.

If you want to print each card with a unique picture on the back, moo.com is the place.

[UPDATE: If you are planning to come to the meeting, we will need your name in order for security to let you into the building. So, please send us an email with a subject "[ISSA] Potwierdzenie udziału w spotkaniu - Wroclaw 2008-09-23" to wroclaw at issa.org.pl

Be sure to actually include your name!]

I’m happy to invite you to this month’s ISSA meeting on September 23. We'll be talking about security policies and, more on the technical side, about DNS cache poisoning.

When: September 23, 6:30 PM

Where: Credit Suisse, Grunwaldzki Center building B, fourth floor, Grunwaldzki Square 25, Wrocław

Agenda:
1. Welcome after summer - Michał Sobiegraj
2. Development and Deployment of Security Policies - Radek Michalski
3. DNS Cache Poisoning (recent update) - Jarek Sajko

We plan to end the official part of the meeting around 8:30.

See you!

It comes to be more and more tempting to store and process important business docs on our mobiles/smart-phones as the devices keep growing bigger, mightier and more usable. Together with the time saving benefits we get from being able to do the work while on the go, there is also a still growing danger of our precious information being stolen together with the device and used by a thief for whatever evil purpose they intend it to use.

And face it, you wouldn’t work on a report or an email while in a cab or a plane if it wasn’t an essential and really urgent thing to do. So, I guess we can safely assume that the data you have on the device may be worth a lot for someone who knows this and that about your business.

So, what options do we have here? Not getting much into technical details, let’s just try to figure out what could work for someone who most importantly wants to do their job without their phone driving them nuts and secondly wants the solution to provide a reasonable level of security to the precious data in it. It’s quite obvious that we need to encrypt, but how? Again, technical details aside, let’s just focus on user-device interaction.

Last week Tom Fishburne’s This One Time at Brand Camp (his latest cartoon book) got to me finally and I’m here to report to you that it’s been a wonderful read! The cartoons generally talk about marketing. I’m not a marketing pro or anything, you probably know this, so I think I am a pretty good test for Tom’s toons and their amusingness to a layperson. And I have to say, they passed the test surprisingly well. Even better, I learned quite a bit while laughing out loud. Can you wish for more?

One of the best cartoons from the book (in my opinion of curse) is the one on the left (click it to enlarge).

Brilliant! Not even a word and the message is crystal clear. Makes you nod and go “Right. That’s how it is.” Just brilliant!

Great job Tom! Please keep it going :-)

Since you are reading this, you probably think security is oh-so important. Well, here is a funny surprise: turns out most people out there actually think that living their lives, doing their business and running their errands is way more important.

And some of them actually have an idea how to make things better. Worth taking into account when your business relies on people buying your security solutions or services. It seems like the very least you should do is to make sure your users and customers understand how THEY benefit from the introduced security measures and why the inconveniences they introduce are absolutely necessary for them to work. And better make sure they really are necessary.