Cyber-Warfare: Fighting and Winning
February 16, 2010

In my last article, entitled: "Cyber-Terrorism vs. Cyber-Warfare: Defending The United Networks of America," my goal was to set the stage for a way to think about America's place in the Information Age. Will we be a super-power, Cold-warriors, a sovereign nation, a first-world or a third world entity in the 21st century?

Before we can get into the strategy and tactics of fighting and winning a cyber-war, it would be helpful to understand who we are and who we are fighting.

Are fans citizens? That may sound like a strange question. But in a connected world, fans self-select into communities of interest. When a community of interest forms around a pop-culture icon, a sports team or a movie, we call the members of the community, fans. When a community of interest forms around a political or religious worldview, what should we call them?

Obviously, the tyranny of geography does not apply to a connected world. Global communities of interest can form around any topic in a very short time frame. Look at any trending topic on Google or Twitter to get a better appreciation of the speed of information in the Information Age.

The colloquial association with terms such as "community of interest" or "fans" is that of a passionate, but casual affinity toward a particular subject. While this may be true in the traditional sense of the words, one disturbing trend has been the zealousness and vitriol of passionate, sometimes only partially informed advocates of particular worldviews, and their remarkable ability to voice their opinions as facts.

Internet purists will tell you that the system is self-correcting and that "facts" and "fact checking" are actually overly scrutinized in online settings. There is considerable evidence to the contrary. Just the other day, President Obama quoted the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who, when arguing with a colleague said, "... you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts." Real facts are hard to come by in the Information Age - there's too much noise surrounding them.

One interesting consequence of the Information Age is the ability for people to cocoon themselves in the information they agree with and wrap themselves in the security of hearing only what they want to hear. This becomes more and more important as communities of interest metamorphose into social media trust circles. (A trust circle is simply a group of people whose opinions you trust above other sources.) In the Information Age, trust circles not only self-assemble, they are among the most powerful forces we face.

In the advertising and marketing business, we used to complain about the decentralization of mass media in the United States (truthfully, people are still complaining about it, but you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.) In the mid-20th century, there were three networks and you could inform, enlighten and entertain (or brainwash or propagandize) a remarkably large percentage of the population by disseminating information from only a few sources.

After the advent of the cable television industry and a new technology called the electronic remote control, the enemy was the fragmentation of the audience - you needed more tools to reach the same number of people in more places.

In the last 60 months, we've gone from a 500-channel universe to a multi-million-channel universe. Consumers (viewers) can no longer be described as fragmented; they are atomized. They have not gone away ... they are simply self-assembled into millions of overlapping trust circles. This trend, of consumers taking control of their information consumption and distribution, will continue as long as the technology progresses. In other words, everything will continue to decentralize at an accelerated rate for the foreseeable future.

Who are we fighting? Is it a nation, or a self-assembled mist of atomized, like-minded individuals? Are there now, virtual nation-states?

If the very definition of government is an "empowered central command." Certain questions are now unavoidable. For example, what popular currencies do governments use to govern?

� Cash - our cash is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States of America.

� Military Power - Why do people believe in our cash? Could it have something to do with the 10 Nimitz-class supercarriers on active duty around the world? It might. Gunboat diplomacy is well understood and understandable. Our conventional military power is so extraordinary; no thinking nation would attack us with conventional military force. Any version of traditional warfare would be met with such overwhelming force; I don't have enough hyperbole to describe it.

� Information - America is the world's grandest experiment in freedom of expression. As we know, the control of information is directly translatable into cash or military power.

When I discussed these three currencies of government with a rather well known economist, I was told that Cash and Information are equivalent for this argument. Since our nation's wealth is only supported by the belief in our posterity, information or propaganda (choose your own word to describe the Tao of the people) and the military are the two most powerful currencies in the Information Age. According to my friend, they are symbiotic. I'm not sure I agree, but I'm not an economist. Assuming that information and the military are two sides of the modern coin of the realm, in the Information Age, what constitutes weapons-grade information?

� Top Secrets (Governmental, corporate, personal, etc.)

� Data (all of our records: financial, medical, consumption, etc.)

� Metadata (descriptions of data such as people's identities, financial data, etc.)

� Network Topology (our digital infrastructure)

� Telecommunications Networks

� Access to the power grid

� Access to access points in the networks

I have had the remarkable pleasure of speaking with several high-ranking military officials in the last few weeks. The subject has been analog leaders and digital soldiers. I was told that practically every military leader (of sufficient rank) in the United States Armed Forces is an expert in the strategy and tactics of wars fought on battlefields. That is very comforting. But the most devastating wars we are likely to fight in this century will not be fought on battlefields. We are going to fight cyber-wars, several of them, and they are going to target our economic sovereignty in ways that conventional wars never have.

A few weeks ago, hackers targeted Google and a couple of dozen other tech companies. The attacks were specific, vicious and successful. The NSA, CIA, FBI, TSA, Homeland Security folks, Army, Secret Service ... name your governmental agency or arm ... had no idea. There were no air raid sirens, no red alert Klaxons, the nation did not know it was under attack. It was.

If you don't know the history of Google, it is very well retold in Ken Auletta's book, Googled: The End of the World As We Know It. In the book, you will find a description of what Google is. I'm sure you think of it as a search engine and, if you are more enlightened, you may know about its other products and ad-supported businesses. People search for information on Google over 100,000,000,000 times per month and Google has a copy of every search ever done (over its entire 12 year history). It learns from every search and it is optimized to deliver the best, most relevant advertising to you based upon that search. Don't be fooled, by the business model, into thinking that an advertising company can't possibly have national security value. Information is "the" currency of the Information Age and Google has a 100% monopoly. No other entity on Earth comes close.

After the attacks, there was much Sturm und Drang about who did what to whom. Was it an attack by the Chinese government or just a couple of unaffiliated hackers? If it was a nation attacking us, how would we know and how would we fight back?

Testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee, the top U.S. intelligence official warned that U.S. critical infrastructure is "severely threatened" and called the recent cyber attack on Google "a wake-up call to those who have not taken this problem seriously."

"Sensitive information is stolen daily from both government and private sector networks, undermining confidence in our information systems, and in the very information these systems were intended to convey," said Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, in prepared remarks outlining the U.S. intelligence community's annual assessment of threats.

After the attack, Secretary of State Clinton said, "A new information curtain is descending across much of the world," as she called the growing Internet curbs the modern equivalent of the Berlin Wall. She went on to say, "We stand for a single Internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas," as she cited China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt among countries that censored the Internet or harassed bloggers.

Sorry Mrs. Clinton, bureaucracy and diplomacy are not going to get this done. The United States Government is practically powerless in this arena. This was not a conventional attack. There were no enemy combatants, no bombers, no nuclear missiles ... this was a cyber-attack with a specific target. Could there be a more asymmetrical warfare problem; a few unidentifiable, highly skilled, highly motivated individuals against the United States of America. Just how many Nimitz-class supercarriers would you like to send and, where might you send them.

Here's an idea. Let's nationalize Google. The only way to punish a nation-state in the Information Age is to cut off its access to information. A combination private and government crafted information isolation is the economic equivalent of destroying the Ancient Library of Alexandria for any specific country. If China wants to play an Information Age game of schoolyard name calling, let's cut off its access to Information. It's a level of economic sanction that we could not accomplish any other way.

Obviously, multi-national corporations will have a huge problem with this. So will everyone else. It's a war, and when you are at war, people get hurt! That's why you try to avoid them. But we can't fool around with this. We have analog leaders who think in analog ways and they are being asked to deal with a remarkably complex set of digital infrastructure issues, that, honestly, only a very few people truly understand.

OK, maybe we can't nationalize Google, but I've made my point. The only way to fight a cyber-war is with cyber-tools. We need a bunch of them, and we need them fast! To fight and win a war in the Information Age, we need to control the information. In many ways ... Google already does.

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Cyber-Terrorism vs. Cyber-Warfare
February 9, 2010

Seven-year-old, Mark Fielding looked up from his computer. He was very annoyed. "Mommmm!" He yelled in a way that was sure to get her attention. "The Internet is down again." It was the last thing she heard before the lights went off. Mark turned on his iPod touch and opened a blank Safari window to use as a flashlight. He found his mother by the front door. She was looking out on a darkened landscape. Neither of them had any idea just how dark it truly was.

Ten minutes earlier, a remarkably powerful computer virus had destroyed six of America's most important data centers. Five minutes earlier, a different piece of code killed every caching server on the three biggest CDN's. At Zero Hour, the attack culminated in the computer-controlled destruction of the entire power grid in North America. It would take days to fix, months to fully repair and the cost would be measured in Trillions, not Billions.

America's days as an economic super-power had ended. All the financial data at the IRS was destroyed, six of America's major financial institutions could not access their records. No one could find a digitized medical record in any database with proper metadata (the data that describes data). With our data destroyed ... our economy ceased to be. The breakdown of social services was immediate and devastating. The doing of life would never be the same. America, as we knew it, was gone.

Who did this? The Chinese? The Russians? Religious Extremists? No. It was a small group of unaffiliated, highly motivated computer hackers. Who did they work for? Anyone. Who paid them? No one. Why did they do it? Because they could. What was their punishment? Sadly, they were never found.

What an emotionally unsatisfying way to end a great science fiction story. No enemy? No villain? No narrative? Try selling it to Hollywood. What bad writing!

Perhaps, but this is not science fiction, this is a very real probable future for The United Networks of America. Which is were we all live right now!

Most people interface with The United Networks of America through the world wide web. However, you can also gain access through your wireless phone or over the public Internet. You may think of the Net as Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon or CNN.com, but there are literally millions of private, local area and wide area networks that all have access points on Al Gore's information superhighway. These networks contain all of the information that describes us. I called it Metamerica in an article I wrote last year. Metadata is data that describes other data, and Metamerica is the information that describes us.

If you need a good way to think about metadata and data, consider this. What use are the data on your iPod without a directory to tell you what songs the data represents. Let's say you have 10,000 songs on your iPod, without the directory of songs (the metadata) the data (your music files) are practically useless. In the information age, America without Metamerica would also be practically useless. Where is Metamerica? It is in the data centers at Google, the IRS, our banks and financial institutions, medical facilities, business networks and even on our home computers. And, for all practical purposes it is unprotected and unprotectable.

This fact alone should be enough to scare any thinking person. But I have not yet begun to describe the hard part of the problems we are facing.

What is a war? The dictionary says it's an "armed conflict between nations." The dictionary does not say what they have to be armed with. What is terrorism? What is a crime?

In the Information Age, what is a country? What is a state? What is a nation? What is a tribe? What is a community of interest? What is an enemy? Where do they live? Do they need to be people?

What are weapons? What are military targets? What are civilian targets?

The US Defense Department's Quadrennial Defense Review, published this week, highlighted the rising threat posed by cyber-warfare on space-based surveillance and communications systems. "On any given day, there are as many as 7 million DoD (Department of Defense) computers and telecommunications tools in use in 88 countries using thousands of war-fighting and support applications. The number of potential vulnerabilities, therefore, is staggering." the review said.

"Moreover, the speed of cyber attacks and the anonymity of cyberspace greatly favor the offence. This advantage is growing as hacker tools become cheaper and easier to employ by adversaries whose skills are growing in sophistication."

Defensive measures have already begun. Last June the Pentagon created US Cyber Command. But ... how will we know when we are being attacked by a country, an enemy, a terrorist, a criminal, a mob, a gang, an individual? When would the military know it was supposed to get into the fight? CIA? NSA? FBI? Google Security? A consortium of concerned citizens with anti-virus software on steroids? How can you tell an invasion from a teen-age prank?

William Lynn, US deputy defense secretary, described the cyber challenge as unprecedented. "Once the province of nations, the ability to destroy via cyber now also rests in the hands of small groups and individuals: from terrorist groups to organized crime, hackers to industrial spies to foreign intelligence services ... This is not some future threat. The cyber threat is here today, it is here now," Lynn said.

I spend a fair amount of my time counseling my clients on how to deal with the fact that 2010 is the middle of the analog to digital transition. Today, we have analog leaders and digital citizens. Analog commanders and digital soldiers. If the pen is mightier than the sword, the "digital pen" is mightier than a million ball points! Forget the threat of cyber-attacks for a second and think about how an enemy might use the power of social networking and the ability to instantly publish any type of message globally to their advantage.

It's time to rethink the public Internet, computer networks and the infrastructure of our digital world. The currency of information is as important and valuable to our economic sovereignty as tangible stores of value. Bits of gold dust or bits of information ... in the super-digital age, they deserve equal protection.

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Digital Job Hunting: How To Email The Perfect Resume
February 9, 2010

This week on Digital Life I did a segment about Digital Job Hunting. I was surprised by the amount of viewer mail asking for a printed version. Here it is.

In today's super-competitive job market, having a well formatted, easy to read resume is an absolute requirement. Most HR experts agree that you also need a concise, on-point cover letter to give you the best chance for success.

Before your life became digital, you would go to the stationary store and buy very good paper so that your resume and cover letter would look great. Then, you would transport them in a large envelope so that you would not have to fold them. You should still do all of this for an in-person meeting, but if you are applying for a position via email, here's how to get the best results:

Since you're using email to apply, put the entire contents of your cover letter in the body of the email. Make sure you use a plain text email, do not use any fancy formatting or HTML code or include any pictures or logos of any kind. This will ensure that the person who gets the email will see it exactly as you wrote it and they will be able to read it using any email software on any computer. Make sure that you include a text only email signature with your complete contact information. By text only I mean ASCII text, plain text or rtf (rich text format) - do not use an HTML email as a cover letter. Only plain text emails format adaptively format with reasonably predictable results on every email client. Don't use tabs, don't use bullets, and don't use any formatting of any kind in your email cover letter. Just type it like an email and use the key between paragraphs. This way, what you send is what they will see.

What you send is what they see, is really important for your resume too. Formatting a resume takes time and you want to make sure that when someone reads it, it looks exactly like you expected it to.

In order to make sure what you send, is what they see, you can't send a word processing document, you must send a .pdf file. (.pdf is an abbreviation for Adobe's Portable Document File format). Here's why ... A word processing document made on your computer will almost always look different on someone else's computer, especially if you've used unusual fonts or done any distinctive formatting. Can you imagine spending all the time you spent to get your resume to look perfect, and then sending something that flowed over page breaks or had bullet points that didn't line up? Sending word processing documents for presentation is very risky business. Whether it's your resume, a report or a proposal, if you're presenting a finished product, sending a Word document is a very bad idea.

Here's what you do instead. Open your resume in your word-processing program and print it to a .pdf file. Unlike a .doc file, every .pdf file looks exactly the same no matter who opens it. Problem solved.

How do you do it? If you are on a Mac, the "save to .pdf" is included in every print dialog box. If you have a current version of office, you can save as a .pdf. On older machines with older versions of office, you may need to use a third party .pdf program like Adobe Acrobat. If you don't want to spend the money on Acrobat, there are literally dozens of free .pdf utility programs available online.

One viewer wrote in that they had their resume done by a professional resume company and that they only had a paper version of the document. On the off chance that you are in the same boat, scan the document at a resolution of 300 dpi and save (or print) it to a .pdf file.

Now, just attach the .pdf file to the email cover letter and send it with confidence. Your cover letter and resume are going to look perfect no matter how the files are viewed or printed.

Making your online presence and your online presentations match your offline presence and your offline presentations is an important skill set in the 21st century. If you want more information about digital literacy or digital job hunting please visit shellypalmer.com

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Apple's Maxi iPad with Wings For Extra Protection
February 9, 2010

As a Jobsian supplicant and an Apple acolyte, I really, really want to love the iPad. No one on Earth has made me buy more stuff I don't need with money I don't have than Steve Jobs. He's my hero. One writer who came to visit me in my home office looked around and observed, "It looks like Steve Jobs threw up in here." It does. There are three MacBooks, two MacBook Pros, one Mac Pro, several 30″ Apple monitors, an Airport, dozens of iPods from every generation, a couple of iPod Touches, plus my old and my new iPhone 3Gs. Apple, Apple everywhere and only one lonely PC in sight. (I use the PC so I can feel the pain and suffering of the other 92% of the computing world, keep up on the latest virus issues and bash the crap out of Windows - which is a full contact sport in my world.)

So, with this insane fanboy intro, you should be expecting a serious love letter to Cupertino about their latest offering, the iPad. Not going to happen.

Behold the iPad. Obviously, no female staffers were consulted while the C-suite was approving the name. iTampon was a huge trending topic on the day the device was introduced, along with "Tampad," which is also funny, but a little gross. Moving past the name, I am trying to understand what the iPad is and why it needs to exist.

It is beautiful, sexy, Applesque, remarkable, awe-inspiring, extraordinary and every other adjective Apple management could find in the thesaurus. I agree. It's all those things. But beauty is only skin deep. Let's have a quick look at what it is and what it isn't.

The iPad is a very big iPod Touch. If you have extra money to spend, you can add the spotty, woefully inadequate AT&T; 3G network. That would make it a cloud-connected device with "anytime" minutes. As in, "any time you can get a signal." If not, it's a very big iPod Touch.

Like the iPod Touch, it is a consumption device, not a creation device. It has no camera. This doesn't seem to be a big deal, except that Video chatting is one of the fastest growing behaviors and the iPad's "intimate" approach to computing (Steve Jobs's own words, not mine, so no snickers about feminine protection and intimacy) would seem to leave you wanting for that capability.

It has no USB support. So, you are locked into the convention of connecting to the iTunes/App Store/iBookstore software on your computer to move files to and from the iPad. There will be a huge issue with converting HD video files and many other types of files for use on the device. There are some annoying dongles that can be used to read an SD card (from your camera) or output video to an external monitor (like your TV). Knowing Apple, they will be $30 bucks a pop and, if you're like me, you'll lose them constantly.

The screen is 1024�768. This is a 4�3 aspect ratio VGA display. It is not HD compatible. You cannot play HD video on the device. And, 16�9 (HD formatted) video will have to be viewed in a letterbox. Astoundingly, it outputs composite video. It is very possible that your new HDTV does not have a composite video input. However, there is some good news, video from the iPad will look smoking hot on anything with a Cathode Ray Tube display. So don't throw out your old Sony Trinitron, color tube TV may be coming back!

Like the iPhone family of devices, you cannot play Flash video on an iPad. (Apple hates Adobe, this is unlikely to change.) So you are going to see a lot of blue boxes where streaming video and Flash applications appear on websites. Since 98% of computers with web browsers are Flash enabled, your multi-media web browsing experience will be somewhat sub-optimal, and I'm being kind.

I could go on, but the lack of USB support is the deal breaker. This is not a computer, not an iPod, not a netbook, not a notebook ... it is an extension of the Apple ecosystem.

If you need to drink the proverbial Kool-Aid to have an iPhone or even "be" a Mac Person, you'll need a gallon jug of the stuff to get you to buy into the iPad.

Would it have killed them to put a working USB port in the thing? How about a little iSight camera facing you? And, what were they thinking with the OS? You can only run one app at a time. Like an iPhone or iPod Touch, the OS can only run one app at a time. I'm writing this article on my MacBook Pro, let's see how many apps I have open: MS Word, Mac Mail, Firefox, Address Book, Daylite, Omnifocus, Adobe Bridge, Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Keynote, PowerPoint, Lightroom, Soundtrack Pro, iTunes and the all-important Text Expander running in the background. (Text Expander, from Smile On My Mac Software, is the single most useful app on a Mac and it would be 100 times more useful running on an iPhone or iPod Touch while other programs are running so you could, um ... expand your text.) One app at a time? You must be kidding me.

The iPad is an extension of the Apple ecosystem. Once you enter, you will be trapped (lovingly, beautifully, thrillingly) inside. They will give you all of the software for free, a word processor (Pages), a spreadsheet (Numbers), presentation software (Keynote), photo software (iPhoto), email (Mac Mail), etc., all part of the ecosystem. You will buy books, magazines, music, movies, all neatly presented inside a prison of such striking beauty; you may not realize that you are being held captive. This model will be awesome for content creators and publishers. They will be able to charge you and know you paid. (Except for the recorded music industry, which is circling the drain and is not responding to treatment.)

Will the iPad capture the minds of consumers? Will it start new industries? Is it a paradigm shift or a parlor trick? I don't know. Being a Kindle owner (and lover) and looking at the iPad e-reader app, the iPad wins no contest - oh, wait ... no it doesn't. The backlit screen is not e-ink and your eyes will fatigue like they do on a computer. The battery won't last anywhere near as long, it's double to four times the price before you add the data plan. All true, but the iPad is beautiful and the apps are magnificent looking and ... hold on, I've spilled some blue liquid out of my Kool-Aid cup. Thankfully the iPad is Maxi-sized and has wings for extra protection.

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iPhone vs. BlackBerry: What To Buy?
February 9, 2010

"Should I buy an iPhone or a BlackBerry?" It's the most popular tech question I get asked. Here's how to think about what your answer should be.

Phone
First, both Apple and RIM call their devices phones. While this is technically true, iPhones are only available on the AT&T; network. BlackBerrys can be found on both Verizon and AT&T.; Depending upon where you live, this simple truth may be the only thing you need to consider. In many locations throughout America it is practically impossible to use the iPhone as a phone. AT&T; simply drops too many calls, too often. This may sound like harsh criticism, but I have never ended an iPhone call with "good bye." It's always, "Hello? Hello?" As a phone, the iPhone is all but useless. To be fair, I don't think you would do much better with a BlackBerry on AT&T;, but I have heard fewer complaints from BlackBerry users about the network.

On the other hand, a BlackBerry Curve (or Tour) on Verizon Wireless is not only an excellent phone, it is a serviceable speakerphone (For all practical purposes, the iPhone cannot be used as a speakerphone.)

If you are looking for a phone, buy a BlackBerry.

Multi-media Functionality
A 32GB iPhone 3GS, may not be much of a phone, but it is an extraordinary multi-media device. It has a serviceable camera, a remarkable screen, a killer user interface and, as you already know from Apple's commercials, over 100,000 available apps. If you can think of it, there's an app for it, and the list is growing daily. This sounds like a unique selling principle of the device. And, in many ways it is. However, in practice, there are only a certain number of apps that apply to you and, in practice, the functions are available on both devices.

Camera (Still & Video)
iPhone wins - no contest!

Screen
iPhone wins - no contest!

Photo & Video Viewing, Game Play and everything fun
iPhone wins - no contest!

Web
iPhone wins - no contest! However, the Google apps for BlackBerry can make web browsing on a BlackBerry good enough for occasional use.

Email
The iPhone integrates with Mac Mail quite well. It has the ability to receive POP3 and IMAP email from your servers and also is somewhat compatible with Microsoft Exchange. The email client is sub-optimal (I'm being kind). If you do a lot of email, you will hate the iPhone.

The BlackBerry has a flawless email client. Whether you use Exchange or POP3 or IMAP, it is push and it is a pleasure. You can search the device quickly and find everything related to everything. With regard to email and txt, the BlackBerry is all business and it just works.

HTML email is the wildcard, Apple wins because of its wonderful screen and user interface, but BlackBerry software does display HTML email and, although it is not an enjoyable experience, the emails are readable.

Keyboard
BlackBerry wins - no contest!

Battery Life
BlackBerry wins - no contest!

Voice Recorder
iPhone & BlackBerry both work. iPhone's voice recorder integrates with iTunes (very nice), BlackBerry's requires a bunch of transcoding from the BlackBerry desktop to your preferred file format. Yuck!

What to Buy
If you really want an iPhone, go ahead and buy one. You will also absolutely need to purchase an external battery like the Mophie Juice Pack (I like the juice pack because it is more powerful than the Mophie Juice Pack Air and I'm not purchasing an external battery for its aesthetics.) If you buy an iPhone, there is a very good chance you are also going to need to purchase a cell phone and get a contract from Verizon. I don't know about you, but I like to make a phone call or two on my phone and, as I said, this is simply not possible with an iPhone. (Jobsian supplicants: Before you burn me in effigy, understand that I am one of you. I own a 32GB iPhone 3GS. I love it and worship it. I love Steve. In fact, if you were to visit my home, it looks like Steve Jobs threw up in here. I literally have every Apple product ever made. But, you must admit this unspoken truth - the iPhone sucks as a phone.)

If you really need to do email, txt and have friends who use BBM (BlackBerry Messenger a free, instant BlackBerry-only chat client) and you don't feel like having two phone company contracts to pay each month, BlackBerry is the way to go. However, if you really want all the features of the iPhone, including access to the App store, you are going to want to also purchase an iPod Touch You can probably get away with the 8GB model for $199. Apple offers models up to 64GB for $399, but unless you love movies on the go, and want to store dozens of them on your device, you don't need to spend the extra money. The Touch doesn't have a camera, but it is a great little WiFi enabled web browser, app and gaming platform. Carrying both a BlackBerry and a Touch is a good compromise.

If you want only one device - you can't have all of the features available in our mobile, 3G world.

The recommended iPhone Rig: 32GB iPhone 3GS, Mophie Juice Pack ($99), Any Verizon Cell phone.

The recommended BlackBerry Rig: Verizon BlackBerry Curve or Tour, 8GB iPod Touch ($199)

What do I carry? I have a 32GB iPhone 3GS and I have a Verizon Motorola Droid, which has replaced my BlackBerry Curve for the moment. Is the Droid an iPhone killer or a BlackBerry killer? That's for the next column.

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Sexting Is More Than Pix
February 9, 2010

Can you translate this dialog: kotl. iwsn. gypo. l8r. now. 2 c-p. 459. ruh. 143. im so fah, gypo. lmirl. no, gnoc. pir. ttfn. (Answer key at the bottom of the article.)

Don't you speak Sext? About half of the 13-19-year-olds in America do. Add a still picture or video taken in the shower and you have all the ingredients you need to publish what used to be a very private moment.

The Chicago Tribune reported:

"In the last five years, the time that America's 8- to 18-year-olds spend watching TV, playing video games and using a computer for entertainment has risen by 1 hour, 17 minutes a day, the Kaiser Family Foundation said. Young people now devote an average of 7 hours, 38 minutes to daily media use, or about 53 hours a week - more than a full-time job. "What surprised me the most is the sheer amount of media content coming into their lives each day," said Kaiser's Vicky Rideout, who directed the study. "When you step back and look at the big picture, it's a little overwhelming." The numbers zoom even higher if you consider kids' multitasking - such as listening to music while on the computer. That data show young people are marinating in media for what amounts to 10 hours, 45 minutes a day - an increase of almost 2.25 hours since 2004."

The Kaiser Family Foundation study attempts to quantify what we all know from our personal experience: We live in a connected world. This is not news at all. Even the amount of time spent with the devices doesn't seem newsworthy. But there are a few items here that we might take a moment to think about.

First, there is no socio-techno divide. Technology is seamlessly woven into the fabric of the lives of every "Born Digital," that's kids born after 1989. You can no longer ask, "Should we get little Johnny a cell phone?" The question now is, "Which cell phone is best for little Johnny?" You can't "protect" or "shield" kids from technology - it is a pervasive force in our culture. And, perhaps most importantly, you cannot alter how people's behaviors will evolve with technology, you can only seek to understand it and make both the upside and downsides known.

I'm sure some of you will push back on the last point. After all, in our society we use the rule of law to regulate harmful acts and even harmful tools. You need a license to drive a car, buy a gun (in most States), you need a prescription to legally purchase drugs, you must have attained the age of majority to purchase tobacco products and alcohol. We even have child pornography laws to protect our children from sexual predators. I'm stating the obvious, most of us are completely aware of the laws surrounding the doing of life. You shouldn't drive drunk. You shouldn't break the speed limit. You shouldn't download music or movie files you don't have rights to, etc.

The problem is that police rarely come to your home and arrest you for file-sharing and you have to get caught to get a speeding ticket. When a 15-year-old girl sends a video of herself, naked and doing seductive things, to an 18-year-old boy she hardly knows, what should happen? She has broken any number of child pornography laws. So has he. What to do?

Moving on, if you are paying for your teen's cell phone, should you have the right to read (and decode) the opening paragraph of this article? What would you do with the information? Would you listen to that conversation if it were a voice call? Would you eavesdrop if the conversation took place on your living room couch?

There was a "sexual revolution" in the 60's. It was a decade of transition. Hippies, transformed into Disco Queens, LSD went out of vogue, Cocaine became the coin of the realm, each subsequent decade had its own kind of revolution. The 21st century finds its teens empowered with media tools - and they are using them in extremely social ways.

Before you can find a solution, you need to identify that you (all of us) have a problem. It's a simple one best described by my favorite George Bernard Shaw quote: "Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity." In this case, teens are the social media professionals and we are the lay public. Do you speak 14-year-old? Perhaps it's time to learn.

kotl: Kiss on the lips.
iwsn: I want sex now.
gypo: Get your pants off.
l8r: Later.
now: Now.
2 c-p: Too sleepy.
459: I love you.
ruh: Are you horny?
143: I love you.
im so fah: I'm so f***ing hot.
gypo: Get your pants off.
lmirl: Let's meet in real life.
no, gnoc: No, get naked on camera.
pir: Parents in room.
ttfn: Ta ta for now.

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Tiger Woods: A Reasonable Expectation of Privacy
February 9, 2010

Tiger is having a tough week. You know the whole story. At least you think you do. You've heard the damning voicemail, you've seen the remarkable sext messages, you've seen the nude photos of his wife (both the photo-shopped and real ones), you've seen the extraordinary photo-shopped pictures of a severely beaten Tiger standing next to his golf-club-wielding wife. Yep, you've seen and heard it all.

Most people I've spoken to come away with the salient points: Tiger is the most famous athlete in the world. He is the richest. He cheated on his wife. He's going to have to play his way out of this mess, etc. But, there is a much more important lesson to be learned here.

Most people believe that because Tiger is the focus of this "scandal" that there are unlimited resources being applied to the uncovering of his indiscretions. One hears all kind of rumors about the thousands of dollars offered for any bit of information that might help astonish the gathering hoards. For the right story, the world's best investigative reporters have been retained - they will use private eyes and any means possible to get the story. NSA-type surveillance technology has been conscripted for the effort.

Nope.

It's the 21st century. And in our time, there is absolutely no reasonable expectation of privacy. Not for Tiger, not for you, not for me. This lesson should not be lost on any of us. No one is as famous as Tiger, but when your significant other wants to catch you doing something you shouldn't be doing, they will use the same tools to incriminate you: your browser history, your txt message stack, your mobile phone records, the MAC addresses of your electronic devices, your credit card receipts (the electronic statements, not the physical pieces of paper), the GPS chip in your car, the GPS chip in your phone, any Facebook quiz you ever took, Google Earth, Google Latitude and Google History. (Yes, Google is not your friend here.) In fact, I do not have enough space in this article to list all of the places you leave an electronic trail, so obviously yours, that even an unmotivated semi-tech-savvy 14-year-old could trap you.

Tiger is a human being with a family and he is doing the best he can to deal with a very difficult situation, but his plea for privacy is naive. There is simply no such thing.

Most of us think that we are safe because we are, for all practical purposes, anonymous. So what if I call home from the bowling alley and tell my wife I'm at choir practice? She won't know, and no one will care. True enough. As a practical matter, it is very unlikely that a tabloid television show or magazine would care to use this bit of information in any way. But her lawyer will make extraordinary use of it during your divorce negotiations. How will the lawyer obtain this information ... child's play.

Did you buy drinks for your friends on your company credit card? Did you send a "Tigeresque" sext message? (The un-dry cleaned, GAP blue dress of this generation.) Have you taken a risqu� picture and MMS'd it? Left a suggestive or self-incriminating voicemail message? How about simply calling from a landline phone from a place you should not have been (forgetting that almost everyone has caller ID)? Did you opt-in to having your credit card statements emailed to you as PDF files? Your life is an open e-book. Mine too, and that's the point.

There's not much we can do about this. There are elected leaders in Washington trying to deal with privacy in the information age, but the technology is far beyond the scope of even the most comprehensive legislation.

So, here are the guidelines for living your digital life in the 21st century. Do not type or txt anything you do not wish to make part of the permanent body of knowledge of mankind. You can't take it back ... ever. Every voicemail you leave is a recording. Remember Watergate? If not, check the Wiki. When you take a quiz on Facebook or press the "Allow" button, you are giving a person or company you don't know access to your Facebook data. In general, don't take pictures you don't want your mother to see (that's the nicest way I can think of putting this). Lastly, do not ever think that an electronic transaction is private. It may be secure, but a secure transaction is not a private one. Someone, somewhere, has complete (as in, absolute, total, full) access to your financial data when you do a transaction. They may not be in a position to hurt you in any way, but when someone wants to know if a transaction took place, there is no such thing as an anonymous electronic transaction. That's what cash is for.

Tiger, thanks for the teaching moment. Welcome to the 21st century!

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Facebook Privacy: An Oxymoron
February 9, 2010

In an open letter to his 350 million users, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg laid out his plans to revise and "improve" Facebook's privacy options: "The plan we've come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone."

If you drill down to the "manage privacy" area from the "settings" link on your Facebook profile, you will be presented with a simplified list of options. Take a minute right now, open a browser and follow along. You need to do this now, trust me.

Click "Profile Information," click "Change Settings" and one by one decide what you want to display and who you want to see it. Do exactly the same thing for "Contact Information" and exactly the same thing for "Search." Seriously, stop reading this article now and go review and reset your Facebook privacy settings. It is very likely that they are not set the way you think they are. I'll wait.

Welcome back. I didn't tell you to review or reset your "Applications and Websites" settings or your "Block List" settings because it does not really matter how they are set. If you've blocked someone previously, they are still blocked and I'm about to scare the hell out of you with regard to "Applications and Websites" on Facebook.

Facebook is described many different ways. To some, it is a community. Others call it a social network. Still others say it is a "conversation." All of this is wrong. Facebook is a commercial enterprise started in Silicon Valley. It is a "for profit" venture with the goal of increasing shareholder value. No decision is made about the "community" on Facebook without a group of very serious, profit-minded executives thinking through how the decision will impact the bottom line, the cap chart, the exit strategy, etc. Facebook is, first and foremost, a business.

Keep this in mind as we sort through some of the Facebook's "privacy" issues. One of the most popular things to do on Facebook (if not the most popular thing) is to look at other people's pictures. This is a well-documented behavior. In order for this to occur, people need to "publish" their pictures. Now comes the hard part. Who gets to see them? If you want your pictures to be private, why publish them? If you only want a select group of people to see them, why not upload them to a secure photo-sharing environment like Kodak Gallery? What is the sociological or behavioral thought process behind the notion of publishing something in a public venue and then trying to limit viewership?

Moving on. Let's say that you do not have the technological prowess to privatize your images using other tools. Or, let's say you really like the features of Facebook and you want to use them in a private way with only a certain, highly filtered group of people? Is there a reasonable expectation of privacy? If you select an "only friends" privacy setting for a picture, what's to stop one of them from "dragging and dropping" your "private" picture onto their desktop and emailing it to others? Do you know and trust everyone you "friend" on Facebook? Of course not. If you select the "friends of friends" privacy setting, you have almost no control of the image and the "everyone" privacy setting is self-explanatory.

Let's assume, for a moment, that I acknowledge that there is a value in the modicum of privacy that these controls afford. The real danger to your privacy is not from your friends or friends of friends, it's from Facebook itself. These new settings are structured to make your data more available, not less. You have to go set them to be restrictive. They are defaulted to be open. Why? Facebook is now competing with Twitter to be the realtime data and brand sentiment engine of choice. They need your status updates and behaviors to be available to them or they can't repackage you and sell the data.

Which brings us to the "Applications and Websites" settings. This is really the most telling casualty of Facebook's revised privacy policy. Someone please go find the radio button that used to say, "Do not share any information about me through the Facebook API" It's gone! So, no matter how your privacy settings are set, when you install an application and press "Allow" you are allowing the third-party person or organization who built the application access to ALL of your Facebook profile data. Not some, all. And, it does not matter how you have previously configured your privacy settings. The "Allow" button overrides them.

For most people, this is not an issue. Andy Warhol said, "Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." During the user generated content craze a few years back I updated it by saying, "Everyone will be famous for 15 megabytes." Today, you could say that, "Everyone will be famous for 15 words." (The average length of a Tweet or FB update.) If fame or street cred within your social network or community of interest is your goal, Facebook delivers. However, Facebook privacy is an illusion at best. If you want your information to be truly private, it doesn't make sense to publish it to a community of 350 million users. And it never will.

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Email Signature Etiquette
February 9, 2010

This week on Digital Life I did a segment about Email Signature Etiquette. It generated a bit of buzz, so I thought I'd share it with you.

Almost every email program lets you automatically add a signature to the emails you send. I'm sure you seen all kinds of interesting ones: flowery ones, very dense ones, and the horrifying and aesthetically offensive ones. What should yours look like? Here are a few simple guidelines:

First, every single email you send should have a signature. It should be plain text, so that it will look the same no matter what device or software is used to read it. When I say plain text, I mean just type (for geeks, ASCII text), no pictures, no logos, no html code, nothing but text.

Why? More than half the corporate world uses BlackBerrys to communicate. Depending on the vintage, they handle HTML over a wide range from, very poorly to marginally poorly. The operating word here is "poorly," so why set up a signature that's guaranteed to torture a large number of corporate users. Overly ornate signatures will produce highly unexpected, and possibly unreadable, results on a BlackBerry. This is also true for the body copy of the email. Tabs, bullets, any kind of alignment is all thrown out the window and HTML looks like jumbled computer code when it is displayed as text.

Another, and possibly more important, reason to use plain text is the wide range of spam filters that are currently deployed. Many of these filters look at the ratio of text to graphics as a test. If you're email is already in HTML format, a logo or a combination of logo and your picture may kick your email into the corporate trash.

Like I said, signatures should be simple, complete and in plain text.

What should you include in your email signature? If it's your personal signature: your name, email and the phone number(s) that are most relevant to your average recipients. Yes, your email address is in the "from" field at the top of the email. And, yes, they can reply to you by simply clicking "reply." But what if they want to copy your information into a document or the notes field of a database or an address book program? The goal is to make contacting you and storing your information convenient.

If you have a business account, your signature should include all of your contact data. Name, title, company, office address, your email, your phone numbers and the company website. All text and all neatly stacked flush left.

Why include everything? How many times have you wanted to call someone about an email they sent and, because their phone number wasn't in the email, you had to stop what you were doing to go look it up. Putting all your contact info into your email communication shows a world of respect for the one thing that everyone needs and has way too little of, their time.

One last thing, it is completely OK to leave the line, "Sent from my blackberry" or "Sent from my iPhone" at the bottom of a mobile email. It lets the recipient know that you are answering their email from your mobile device and that may get you a pass on some small typos and spelling errors. However, do everyone a favor and lose the, "Typing with my thumbs" line. It's the 21st century; everyone types with their thumbs.

Set up some plain text email signatures and use them. It's the right thing to do. For more help with your digital life, come visit me at shellypalmer.com

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The Non-technical Solution to Sexting
February 9, 2010

Since the MTV/AP Sexting survey came out, I've been hearing from concerned parents and school administrators all over the country. As you know, Sexting is slang for sending and receiving sexual content using mobile phones. How do you do it? Well, you probably don't, but your kids do. It's very simple really. The kids either send txt messages to each other containing untoward content or, they play a modern game of I'll show you mine, if you show me yours with their cameraphones.

Interestingly, the survey found that 61 percent of the kids who sent Sext messages said they were pressured into it, and if that's not bad enough, 29 percent said that they have sent naked pictures to someone online, that they don't actually know in real life. This is a problem in everyone's digital life and I have some suggestions.

First, I think it's important to understand the technology. This may make you roll your eyes. But, do you think Tiger Woods really understood that the voice mail he left (that we've all heard) was a digital recording of his voice? That it was recorded on someone else's device and that he no longer had control of it?

A little history: As you know, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph back in 1877. What you may not know is that the early phonographs could both record and playback (very much like a modern day voicemail system). Edison liked to demonstrate his phonograph by allowing people to speak into the machine and then playing the recording back for them. However, the technology was outside almost everyone's conceptual understanding. Up to that point in history, the only thing that could mimic the sound of one's voice was a ventriloquist, so people thought it had to be a trick. Clergymen came to pronounce it "the devil's work" and to discredit Edison.

But here's the really fun part. Edison used to charge people 25 cents to try to "fool the machine." A person who spoke Latin (a dead language) would speak Latin into it and, of course, it would speak Latin back to the person. People wondered how Edison was able to teach a machine to speak Latin. A person would speak Chinese into the machine and it would speak Chinese back to them. Again, people would wonder how the "Wizard of Menlo Park" taught the machine to speak Chinese. People simply did not understand the concept of a recording.

That was then, it's the 21st century. What was Tiger thinking? Didn't he understand that he was making a recording? Understanding the technology may help you think about how you want to start the conversation with your kids.

All of the mobile devices we're talking about are digital. They are little computers. When you send a txt message you can think of it as a word processing document that is automatically stored and delivered. The only problem is, you don't know where it is stored and who it will ultimately be delivered to. The same goes for digital pictures. Cameraphone or digital camera, the image is uploadable and downloadable. And, once you press send, you can never get it back. No matter what you do, no matter who you know, and now matter how hard you try. These are computer files, and they are as easy to share as music and video and pictures you upload to Facebook.

I saw a very effective demonstration that one parent did for their 16 year old daughter. At her Sweet 16 party, during the obligatory photomontage, they showed a picture of her in the bathtub at age 6 months. She was naked, of course. Her friends giggled. She was mortified. The next day, her father asked her, if there were any other pictures that would embarrass her if they were displayed at the party? That pretty much ended the issue.

There is no technological solution to this issue. But there is a very reasonable parenting solution. When my kids were little and it was time to cross the street, I asked them to hold my hand as we crossed. We've all done this with our kids. But that wasn't the only thing we did. We instructed them to look both ways. We discussed the consequences of crossing a busy street without looking. We didn't do it once, we did it almost every time we crossed the street with them. And we did it for years. As they got older, there were some streets we could cross together without holding hands, but even with a certain degree of autonomy, if we came to a very busy street, hands were held.

One day ... one very important day they were allowed to cross the street by themselves. This day did not just happen. The trust was earned over a protracted training period under our very watchful eyes.

We don't want to stop anyone from using and exploring new technology. But kids should not be allowed to "play" with power tools, and that's what these devices are. They are digital tools that make permanent records of how we use them. As parents and school administrators, it's up to you to make this simple fact sink in. You can't have one short chat about it, you need to hold their "digital" hands and make sure that they understand the danger of publishing content about themselves and others that can never be unpublished.

In the 21st century, nothing can be unsaid.

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