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What HP did

High tech is an incredibly competitive, dog-eat-dot industry where fortunes can turn on the success or failure of your most recent product launch.
andrewbyline

High tech is an incredibly competitive, dog-eat-dot industry where fortunes can turn on the success or failure of your most recent product launch. Even the successful companies can’t sit on their laurels for too long, the technology moves too fast to get complacent.

Secrets are closely guarded, because the level of espionage is high, and disgruntled employees make things worse by regularly leaking information to the media that can have a huge impact on public perception and stock prices. That’s why companies take huge steps, from banning iPods and memory sticks from the work environment to monitoring employee e-mail and Internet use, to make sure nothing gets out before it’s time.

Which kind of explains why computer giant Hewlett-Packard did what it did.

When critical details of HP’s long-term strategy showed up in a Cnet article ( www.cnet.com ), the board knew the leaker had to be high up — a senior manager or a member of the board itself. To find out who that person was, the chairperson and a few board members retained the services of a private detective and a data mining company.

Patricia Dunn, HP’s chairwoman, reportedly authorized the use of a technique called pretexting to find the leak, with investigators essentially posing as HP employees and Cnet journalists to approach phone companies and obtain copies of their records. The ruse was successful, exposing board member George Keyworth as the source of the leak. But it didn’t end there.

Given the number of laws broken to obtain that information, the data mining companies, investigator and Dunn are facing charges of fraudulent wire communications, wrongful use of computer data, identity theft and conspiracy to commit those crimes. Dunn has since had to step down from her position on the board, and may even go to jail.

While pundits have argued both sides of this issue, whether HP was justified or not in pursuing the person doing the leaking, some good came out of this scandal — a greater awareness of the threat of pretexting.

For a long time hackers have used pretexting to get things like computer passwords from people, calling them up at work or at home and pretending to be systems administrators from their company or representatives from their Internet Service Provider. The reason for this approach is simple — it’s a lot easier to get someone to reveal their codes than it is to guess or steal them.

To protect your personal information, never give anybody a code by e-mail or over the phone unless you are 100 per cent sure they’re legitimate.

If someone calls you asking for sensitive information — computer codes, credit card numbers, SIN numbers, etc. —   tell them you’re busy and call them back using the official service number on your last bill. Get their names if possible.

Never respond to an e-mail inquiry if you can help it. A legitimate e-mail inquiry will have a phone number you can use. If there’s no other way to communicate, don’t replay to the e-mail sent, go to their website and send your reply directly to the customer service address provided — it should find the right person.

Also, you should question why anyone would need your code — organizations should already have that information on file, and if they lost it you have a right to know the circumstances.

You may get asked for personal information by various companies, such as to confirm your Social Insurance number, but you can always get around that by calling the organization back to confirm that they’re legitimate, or by giving the last six numbers instead of all nine.

Remember, thieves can learn a lot about you just from using a phone book, accessing a company directory, or even Googling your name. People can easily find out where you live, when you were born, where you went to high school and university, even the name of your pet — so be a little careful choosing your passwords in the first place.

People can also get a lot of sensitive information by going through your garbage, so always be sure to destroy bank and credit card documents, and bills from service providers.

 

Microsoft products to focus on user experience

The problem with programmers is that they know too much — you don’t have to explain to them what different functions in software do, because they built those functions themselves.

The result is software and an interface that’s overly complex. For example, I’ve been using Microsoft Word for the past 12 years. I use about 13 menu items regularly and about eight shortcuts to access those menu items. I use another 20 or so menu items from time to time, a fraction of the 133 clickable menu items I have to choose from.

That’s exactly the type of issue that Microsoft hopes to address in the next version of Office, Office 2007, with the assistance of Office User Experience Team. In a video on ZDNet ( www.zdnet.com ), team leader Jensen Harris explained that the Office user interface really hasn’t changed in 17 years, and that feedback from customers confirmed that it was becoming too complicated to use as new features are added.

Starting a complete redesign in 2003, Microsoft used some pretty advanced techniques to see how most normal users worked, and built the interface to work with them. The result is a kind of toolbar Microsoft is calling “the ribbon”, which will make the software simpler to use, easier to customize, and more intuitive for all the people out there who aren’t computer programmers.