Many color laser printers embed secret code on every page printed to identify the printer. European Union justice watchdogs are concerned that “Big Brother” computer printer technology that allows security agencies to track printed documents. It seems they think these codes may breach EU privacy laws.
Archive for February, 2008
My Tipple on Google-Free Wednesdays appeared in the FreePint Newsletter #247 this week.
From Competitive Intelligence Marketplace:
Academy of Competitive Intelligence - SCIP Exhibitor
Here’s the link to Fuld-Gilad-Herring Academy of Competitive Intelligence’s listing on SCIP’s 2008 Annual Conference list of exhibitors. The company description:
Fuld-Gilad-Herring Academy of Competitive Intelligence offers the most comprehensive and rigorous global professional certification program and the only program to grant CEUs in the field of competitive or business intelligence from the leading thinkers and educators in the field. THE GOLD STANDARD IN CI TRAINING. ACI’s website: http://www.academyci.com/
Full listing of SCIP08 exhibitors can be found at http://69.36.183.158/08annual/exhibitors_l.php
This excerpted portion of an article in the Report on Business, Build a killer survey, by MARK HEALY, in the Globe and Mail Update published on January 8, 2008, is a must read for anyone forced into doing Competitive Intelligence research without a strong background in this type of research. This article offers excellent, practical, and well reasoned advice.
In business, there are some dirty jobs as well. Carrying out competitive intelligence is one of them.
I get asked a lot ‘how’ to conduct competitive intelligence. i.e. how to extract information from organizations/firms/people that may or may not want to part with it. You can look this up online and find all kinds of vague moral and ethical guidelines, and links to nowhere. But no one really talks about what is acceptable and unacceptable, or how to do the work. Here are some simple guidelines and rules.
A. First, avoid it if at all possible…
B. Understand the rules of engagement…
So let’s focus on the four approaches/techniques that are widely accepted as above-board:
1. Just ask…
2. Mystery shopping…
3. The white paper approach…
For B2B environments, mystery shopping can be difficult if not impossible…
4. Job postings and recruiting events…
Mark Healy, P.Eng, MBA is a partner at Torque Customer Strategy. He teaches a “Demystifying Consulting” lecture series yearly at The Richard Ivey School of Business, as well as Schulich’s and Laurier’s Business Schools.
I just helped a company with a chronic copper theft problem, now I find this: Markets in stolen catalytic converters? and this Czech police investigate railway bridge theft.
If you are new to the concepts of Competitive Intelligence, then you may find Peek Inside Your Competitor’s Business, useful.
Other interesting Competitive Intelligence articles at BNET offer useful guidance:
And our short article, Ethics, or Not, about our 3 simple rules.
False blind man caught out during car check: report - Yahoo! News: “ROME (AFP) - A 70 year-old Italian man who had been pretending to be blind for 40 years to get an invalid’s pension was arrested as he drove his car, Sky TG24 television said Thursday.
The ‘particularly nervous’ man was stopped during a routine road check in the northern city of Spezia and could not provide a driving licence, city police chief Massimo Giaramita said.
‘Then we checked his medical record and were amazed to find that he was registered as 100 percent blind,’ Giaramita said.0
He had been claiming an invalidity pension and other benefits from his former employers for 40 years, the report said.”
Number of legal aid lawyers plummet, by Cristin Schmitz, Lawyer’s Weekly, February 22 2008.
I always avoided doing work on legal aid files because it was so difficult to get paid for the full value of the work. This article seems to indicate that Canadian Private Investigators will be doing even less work on legal aid files.
Europe’s Philosophy of Failure
In France and Germany, students are being forced to undergo a dangerous indoctrination. Taught that economic principles such as capitalism, free markets, and entrepreneurship are savage, unhealthy, and immoral, these children are raised on a diet of prejudice and bias. Rooting it out may determine whether Europe’s economies prosper or continue to be left behind.
This rather depressing article in Foreign Policy is a “must read” for any business person or public policy maker. The unhealthy attitudes towards capitalism being taught to European children will certainly cause economic hardship, and that will make it expedient for their leaders to blame the evil capitalist Americans for all their woes.
The article illustrates how pretending not to care for money is an idealistic affectation of those who, without reason, believe that they have less than they deserve while in the presence of those who have more. This hogwash seems to appeal to a wide cross-section of the left in Europe. It’s unfortunate that they don’t have the sense to look east of the Elbe to see the poverty this type of thinking produced.
Today this type of thinking represents a threat to stability and prosperity. Change in these attitudes will represent an enormous opportunity for growth.
I found this interesting article on Gwen Harris’s blog, Internet News.
Manipulation of search results
Is Search A Lie? Can You Really Believe Google? Bruce Nussbaum, Business Week (February 08)
Can a PR firm manipulate results at Google (and other search engines) to the degree that this man claimed?
“I sat next to a a guy I’ve know for years from a major public relations/media relations firm at the World Economic Forum in Davos two weeks ago and he told me how his company manipulated search to improve the image of its clients.”
One commenter advised, “… growing need for people to understand the difference between legitimate search results and PR-fueled, or otherwise manipulated, search results.”
Yes, but identifying these results usually takes a fair amount of subject knowledge and awareness of techniques to notice the signs of the gamed results. No wonder people trust search results less .
The last link leads to an article about search atheism, a term I could learn to love.
To quote Phil Bradley, “Of course companies and individuals try and game the search engine, and anyone who blindly accepts results without analyzing them deserves what they get.”
I don’t believe in the paperless office. I remember a client who tried to impose the “paperless office”. Employees kept paper files in their car trunks and they would sneak out to the parking lot to review critical paper files and notes throughout the day.
However, we can streamline how we handle paper files. Here are some good articles on the subject.
I do not use IE as my default browser due to security concerns. For several years I have used Firefox, first to address the security issue, then because I liked the tabs and add-ons. Here are my favorite add-ons.
NoScript allows JavaScript, Java and other executable content to run only from trusted domains of your choice, e.g. your home-banking web site, and guards the “trust boundaries” against cross-site scripting attacks (XSS). Such a preemptive approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities (known and even unknown!).
Tab Mix Plus provides all sorts of Tab options that don’t exist in Firefox.
Cooliris Previews lets you preview a web link without having to open up the whole page. You can expand the preview to a full tab/window, navigate within the preview, e-mail the site/page link to others, etc..
PDF Download solves all the problems with opening PDF files in Firefox.
Zotero is a citation manager, recommended and supported by about 100 academic institutions.
Split Pannel allows you to view two pages simultaneously for comparison or copying info from one to the other. Can be resized by dragging the bar between the main browser and new panel.
Internote allows you to create persistent sticky notes on a web page which will be there once you return. Notes are very customizable, and come with many small, useful features. A manager is available, in which you can see all of your saved notes, edit them, print them, and delete them.
Resurrect Pages 1.0.8 allows you to see dead pages, broken links by searching through five big page cache/mirrors: CoralCDN, Google Cache, Yahoo! Cache, The Internet Archive, and the MSN Cache.
The two following add-ons save time and allow access to pages that are browser specific without switching browsers to view IE only websites.
User Agent Switcher allows access to sites that might restrict your access based on which browser you are using. Since it does not render a page as another browser might and doesn’t work with every site.
IE Tab enables use of the embedded IE engine
Industrial espionage is not a new. Most industrial countries have been doing it, in one form or another, since before the Industrial Revolution.
In the 14th century, the Italians devised a machine to make silk thread. This allowed them to dominate the silk thread market until about 1670 when first French, then Dutch spies, discovered the secret of the process and machinery.
The industrial espionage of England’s Thomas Lombe paid-off in 1716. Eventually Lombe’s silk thread factory employed hundreds, preceding the Industrial Revolution by about 50 years. Silk was not a mass market good and therefore the silk thread factories did not spark the Industrial Revolution. It took the wool and cotton factories to do that.
In an article entitled, Cyberterrorism, Inc., we see the usual link between CI and industrial espionage as if the two are the same. Creating a link between the two is the work of feeble minds.
To gain an advantage over competitors, many corporations are hiring ex-military and government agents trained in the art of intelligence gathering techniques, according to a report from the SANS Institute, a Washington-based cybersecurity training organization.
These individuals are used to head new company divisions whose mission is to spy on competitors and obtain intelligence. Companies spend over US$2 billion annually to spy on each other, according to the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals.
In 1999, North American companies lost more than US$45 billion to theft of trade secrets and other valuable corporate data, according to the SANS report. “Today’s total losses are anyone’s guess,” the report continued.
CI is the act of creating Intelligence from open source data. Industrial espionage, on the other hand, usually involves the commission of criminal offences. I suspose the distinction is too complex for so-called journalists.
Researchers at Purdue University are working with the state of Indiana to develop a system that would use a network of cell phones to detect and track radiation to help prevent terrorist attacks with radiological “dirty bombs” and nuclear weapons.
Such a system could blanket the nation with millions of cell phones equipped with radiation sensors able to detect even light residues of radioactive material. Because cell phones already contain global positioning locators, the network of phones would serve as a tracking system, said physics professor Ephraim Fischbach. Fischbach is working with Jere Jenkins, director of Purdue’s radiation laboratories within the School of Nuclear Engineering…
Tiny solid-state radiation sensors are commercially available. The detection system would require additional circuitry and would not add significant bulk to portable electronic products, Fischbach said.
The mobile telephone has become a modern-day slave bracelet for so many people, now it might also become a national security appliance.
