I have to admit that I was already a fan of Collins’ quantitative style blended with clever insight, but this was the first time that I had seen him in person, and he was just spectacular. He has a vivid, animated way of telling a story, and had a great sense of humor. This combination of presentation skill was put to immediate use with his first statement drawing a hearty laugh from the audience full of entrepreneurs.

“How many of you in the room are constitutionally unemployable?”

Much of his remaining presentation provided interesting stories and insight from the research that he has done to understand the make-up of exceptional companies.

As Jim said, he has spent years studying the contrast between average companies and exceptional companies. They faced the same set of variables… similar economic conditions, similar competition for top human resources, and a similar set of huge unknowns.

What is the single biggest element of difference?

Not a function of the cards you are dealt, or circumstance… it is conscious choice and discipline.

Jim’s key principles & disciplines that have come from the studies we have worked on:

1. Building greatness is a cumulative never ending process! The idea that no matter how exceptional, you are always only relatively as good as to what you can do next.
2. Most overnight successes are 20 years in the making…. Wal-mart  took 13 years to get to 125 stores. Starbucks required 17 years to get to 38 stores.

“If you start to break Packard’s law, and there are very few laws of business, it is like breaking a law of physics for building great companies.” - David Packard (Co-founder of HP)

If you allow growth to exceed your ability to get enough of the right people to fill the key seats to execute on the growth brilliantly, you will fall as surely as a stone dropped from your hand. This is one of those timeless truths that extends beyond technology and economics.

The number one constraint on growth and sustained success…

An ability to get enough of the right people in the key seats to achieve that sustained growth.

The discipline that WHO comes before WHAT. Collins always kept coming back to the “who” thing over and over again. He said, “The more turbulent the world, (given the great current economic uncertainty of our financial system) the more important this issue is.”

A question from the audience came near the end of his session… How do you figure out who are the right people to put in key seats on the bus?

Collins responded with “Given that I stand here amidst a room full of unmotivated people… the right people are self motivated, self disciplined, self managed, The task is not to motivate unmotivated people, the task is not to have to manage people… self motivated, figured it out from there… self motivated people don’t need tons of management … when you have to start managing, you know that you have the wrong person at the task.”

Final thoughts:

Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness is a function of conscious choice and discipline. It is not a matter of circumstance, it is one of choices.

I believe that every one of the Inc. 500 companies that I met at this conference achieved the list because they did not embrace the status quo. Incredible passion, an unwillingness to accept failure and an excessive and compulsive willingness to solve customer’s problems were key ingredients in the business building formula for the entrepreneurs that were at the conference.

Why? Because renewable energy technologies — what I call “E.T.” — are going to constitute the next great global industry. They will rival and probably surpass “I.T.” — information technology. The country that spawns the most E.T. companies will enjoy more economic power, strategic advantage and rising standards of living. We need to make sure that is America. Big oil and OPEC want to make sure it is not.

My favorite talk, as expected, was the Sotirov/Dowd talk on How To Impress Girls With Browser Memory Protection Bypasses. The attack is a conceptually simple, yet completely reliable technique for exploiting vulnerabilities in web browsers. Of course, the media has sensationalized the impact of their findings, but ultimately, this is still significant as far as browser-based exploits are concerned. It’s worth mentioning that part of the technique allowing them to load a .NET DLL at an arbitrary location under Vista was reliant on an implementation bug wherein the OS disables ASLR if the version in the .NET COR header was below a certain value. However, the address space spraying and stack spraying techniques are likely to be extended to other platforms utilizing similar memory protection mechanisms.

As for the girls? I can report first-hand that the ladies at TAO on Wednesday night were hanging on Alex’s every word. They were particularly impressed when he whipped out the laptop for a live demo. Unfortunately, none of the dozen iPhone owners in the immediate vicinity thought to snap a picture (too busy Twittering). Oh well.

I also enjoyed Hovav Shacham’s talk on return-oriented programming. Simply put, he described a generalization of the return-to-libc shellcode approach with the intent to demonstrate that one could achieve Turing-complete computation using “found code” in process images. By chaining together series of mini-computations ending in return (RET) instructions, it was possible to build higher-level programming constructs such as branches and loops. The nature of the x86 instruction set provides some flexibility because instructions are interpreted differently depending on how you align the instruction pointer (i.e. the old shellcode trick of searching the process image for any JMP EBX instruction and using that as your EIP). In RISC architectures such as SPARC, however, you don’t have that luxury; if your %pc isn’t aligned properly you get a bus error. So it was quite interesting to see that they were able to extend the concept to RISC. The practicality of the attack technique is limited by the fact that the shellcode is tuned to a particular binary image — if the shellcode was built using instructions extrapolated from glibc 2.3.5, it won’t work for a system running glibc 2.4.

I thought Scott Stender’s talk on Concurrency Attacks in Web Applications was interesting as well. In a nutshell, spewing thousands of simultaneous requests at web application transactions that are not thread-safe can create interesting problems. In the presentation, Scott ran his demo against a VM running on the attack machine. I found myself wondering how effective the same attack would be over the Internet — would it be significantly less reliable (or not at all)? Race conditions are generally easier to exploit locally than remotely due to more predictable execution conditions. Certainly this is an under-tested vulnerability class though.

One presentation I wasn’t able to attend but want to follow up on is Nate McFeters, John Heasman, and Rob Carter’s talk which discussed the GIFAR attack I’ve been hearing so much about lately. The gist is that you can create a file that is both a valid GIF and a valid JAR, then use some Java applet tricks to initiate HTTP requests on behalf of the victim.

Finally, the Pwnie Awards didn’t fail to disappoint. Drama ensued over the Most Overhyped award, but at least this year some of the winners showed up to claim their awards! Halvar rapping Symantec lyrics was also quite memorable.

All in all, a fun and informative week, but as usual, I was relieved to get the hell out of Vegas and head home on Friday morning.

P.S. For a much more entertaining BlackHat/Defcon Recap, read Jennifer Jabbusch’s account of the week’s events. It’s my favorite one so far!

My favorite talk, as expected, was the Sotirov/Dowd talk on How To Impress Girls With Browser Memory Protection Bypasses. The attack is a conceptually simple, yet completely reliable technique for exploiting vulnerabilities in web browsers. Of course, the media has sensationalized the impact of their findings, but ultimately, this is still significant as far as browser-based exploits are concerned (here is a more accurate report). It’s worth mentioning that part of the technique allowing them to load a .NET DLL at an arbitrary location under Vista was reliant on an implementation bug wherein the OS disables ASLR if the version in the .NET COR header was below a certain value. However, the address space spraying and stack spraying techniques are likely to be extended to other platforms utilizing similar memory protection mechanisms.

As for the girls? I can report first-hand that the ladies at TAO on Wednesday night were hanging on Alex’s every word. They were particularly impressed when he whipped out the laptop for a live demo. Unfortunately, none of the dozen iPhone owners in the immediate vicinity thought to snap a picture (too busy Twittering). Oh well.

I also enjoyed Hovav Shacham’s talk on return-oriented programming. Simply put, he described a generalization of the return-to-libc shellcode approach with the intent to demonstrate that one could achieve Turing-complete computation using “found code” in process images. By chaining together series of mini-computations ending in return (RET) instructions, it was possible to build higher-level programming constructs such as branches and loops. The nature of the x86 instruction set provides some flexibility because instructions are interpreted differently depending on how you align the instruction pointer (i.e. the old shellcode trick of searching the process image for any JMP EBX instruction and using that as your EIP). In RISC architectures such as SPARC, however, you don’t have that luxury; if your %pc isn’t aligned properly you get a bus error. So it was quite interesting to see that they were able to extend the concept to RISC. The practicality of the attack technique is limited by the fact that the shellcode is tuned to a particular binary image — if the shellcode was built using instructions extrapolated from glibc 2.3.5, it won’t work for a system running glibc 2.4.

I thought Scott Stender’s talk on Concurrency Attacks in Web Applications was interesting as well. In a nutshell, spewing thousands of simultaneous requests at web application transactions that are not thread-safe can create interesting problems. In the presentation, Scott ran his demo against a VM running on the attack machine. I found myself wondering how effective the same attack would be over the Internet — would it be significantly less reliable (or not at all)? Race conditions are generally easier to exploit locally than remotely due to more predictable execution conditions. Certainly this is an under-tested vulnerability class though.

One presentation I wasn’t able to attend but want to follow up on is Nate McFeters, John Heasman, and Rob Carter’s talk which discussed the GIFAR attack I’ve been hearing so much about lately. The gist is that you can create a file that is both a valid GIF and a valid JAR, then use some Java applet tricks to initiate HTTP requests on behalf of the victim.

Finally, the Pwnie Awards didn’t fail to disappoint. Drama ensued over the Most Overhyped award, but at least this year some of the winners showed up to claim their awards! Halvar rapping Symantec lyrics was also quite memorable.

All in all, a fun and informative week, but as usual, I was relieved to get the hell out of Vegas and head home on Friday morning.

P.S. For a much more entertaining BlackHat/Defcon Recap, read Jennifer Jabbusch’s account of the week’s events. It’s my favorite one so far!

Four chains, four Wi-Fi pay policies: CIO magazine looks at Borders, McDonald's, Panera, and Starbucks, and how they're offering Wi-Fi. I'd like to suggest you read this article, but the author writes, "Right now, according to Hotspot Locations, there are more than 33,000 WLAN hotspots worldwide, and more than 10,000 in the United States alone." I don't know who "Hotspot Locations" is, and I need to disclose that I have a financial interest in what must be their competitor, JiWire, but any hotspot finder that calls them "WLAN Hotspots" and reports 11,712 in the U.S. and 33,106 worldwide just isn't working very hard. JiWire lists over 230,000 hotspots worldwide, and notes over 60,000 in the U.S., while Boingo and iPass each resell access to over 100,000 hotspots worldwide.

Up, up, and away in my beautiful, my beautiful warballoon: Defcon hackers deployed a balloon with Wi-Fi receivers on it 150 feet in the air to scan for network vulnerabilities in Las Vegas last week. They found 1/3rd of networks had no encryption--although I always wonder if they're using passive scanning where 802.1X allows a limited connection for authentication and appears "open" in some ways, or if they were actively scanning, in which case 802.1X networks would be unavailable.

Cincinnati Metro service has Wi-Fi on 20 buses: The free service supplied by AT&T in an ads-for-access deal with the authority was placed after a couple years of testing on a relatively long commuter run. The authority spends $15,000 per bus to setup a connection, which seems rather pricey. Other authorities are paying in the low thousands, from what I've seen, so I'm not sure what their particular case is.

does this surprise anyone:

A grisly slaying on a Greyhound bus has prompted calls for tighter security on Canadian bus lines, despite the company and Canada's transport agency calling the stabbing death a tragic but isolated incident.

Greyhound spokeswoman Abby Wambaugh said bus travel is the safest mode of transportation, even though bus stations do not have metal detectors and other security measures used at airports.

Despite editorials telling people not to overreact, it's easy to:

"Hearing about this incident really worries me," said Donna Ryder, 56, who was waiting Thursday at the bus depot in Toronto.

"I’m in a wheelchair and what would I be able to do to defend myself? Probably nothing. So that’s really scary."

Ryder, who was heading to Kitchener, Ont., said buses are essentially the only way she can get around the province, as her wheelchair won’t fit on Via Rail trains. As it is her main option for travel, a lack of security is troubling, she said.

"I guess we’re going to have to go the airline way, maybe have a search and baggage check, X-ray maybe," she said.

"Really, I don’t know what you can do about security anymore."

Of course, airplane security won't work on busses.

But -- more to the point -- this essay I wrote on overreacting to rare risks applies here:

People tend to base risk analysis more on personal story than on data, despite the old joke that "the plural of anecdote is not data." If a friend gets mugged in a foreign country, that story is more likely to affect how safe you feel traveling to that country than abstract crime statistics.

We give storytellers we have a relationship with more credibility than strangers, and stories that are close to us more weight than stories from foreign lands. In other words, proximity of relationship affects our risk assessment. And who is everyone's major storyteller these days? Television.

Which is why Canadians are talking about increasing security on long-haul busses, and not Americans.

Most event processing systems would be incomplete without the ability to process events in the form of messages.   Messages can be delivered in either a connection-oriented protocol or a connectionless protocol.   Most enterprise-class messaging systems have both.   Many messaging systems have features like guarenteed delivery, which are important to many applications.

On the other hand, you do not have to work with a messaging system or enterprise service bus (ESB) to process events, because the transport layer is independent from the event processing layer, theoretically.  Most enterprise-class event processing system architectures will use a combination of both asynchronous and synchronous messaging. 

To understand event processing I recommend you turn to network management and the practical use of Simple Network Management Protocol (SMNP) for a basic undertanding of event processing.   SNMP uses both synchronous event-based messaging, called polling, and asynchronous messaging, called traps.   Network management systems engineers use a combination of both polling and trapping in all enterprise-class operational NMS.  Optimizing polling and trapping is one of the tasks good NMS engineers do well. The same holds true in most distributed event processing architectures.  

For example, look at the CEP/EP reference architecture on this site.  You will notice that the mechanism for event transport is generic, represented as an event bus, but it does not specify the transport protocol.  If you are receiving raw events and comparing correlated results against a signature in a database, you are using both asynchronous and synchronous messaging.    In theory, you could build an event processing system with only connection-oriented protocols, but this would be an exeception, not the rule.

Event processing is generally associated with messaging because we generally represent event-objects as electronic messages.   In theory, we could call these cyber event-objects anything we want; for example, we could call them “packets.” However, packets are generally associated with the underlying Internet Protocol (IP) layer by network engineers.  

Moving up the stack, we think in terms of a complete message-object, which we generally call “a message.”  This message could be an SNMP event-object, an SMTP event-object (an email message), or an HTML request to a web server, to only name a few.    In fact, the basic unit of work at the application level of a distributed network application is what we call “a message.”  

So, in On Messaging and Events Opher asks, “Is event processing just fancy name to message processing ?”

Events are generally represented in some electronic format.  The event-object must be transported electronically in cyberspace, and the way that it is transported is in what network engineers generally call “a message.”   It make no difference what we call it, really; because whatever we call it, it is still binary data representing information we are interested in, hopefully in a format we can efficiently process.    Enterprise-class event processing systems are designed to work with myriad formats, protocols and transports.   One size does not fit all.

The Rail Tram and Bus Union (RTBU) said today it was planning a 24-hour strike by rail workers on July 17, the busiest day of the Catholic event. It is the day Pope Benedict XVI will make his way through the streets of Sydney during the afternoon peak. The NSW Government will take the matter to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) tomorrow. Mr Iemma said his Government would not cave in to the RTBU. "The Government will not be blackmailed into giving them what they want as a result of these industrial terror tactics," he said.

When we boarded a little later, I asked for the ninny's name. He refused and hissed, "If you make a scene, I'll call the pilot and you won't be flying tonight."

The credit controller, from Gloucester, says he now suffers "appalling" abuse from the authorities and public who doubt his motives. The bus-spotter, officially known as an omnibologist, said: "Since the 9/11 attacks there has been a crackdown. "The past two years have absolutely been the worst. I have had the most appalling abuse from the public, drivers and police over-exercising their authority. Mr McCaffery, who is married, added: "We just want to enjoy our hobby without harassment. "I can deal with the fact someone might think I'm a terrorist, but when they start saying you're a paedophile it really hurts."

Israeli authorities are investigating why a Palestinian resident of Jerusalem rammed his bulldozer into several cars and buses Wednesday, killing three people before Israeli police shot him dead. Israeli authorities are labeling it a terrorist attack, although they say there is no clear motive and the man -- a construction worker -- acted alone. It is not known if he had links to any terrorist organization.

Turns out the ninja was actually a camp counselor dressed in black karate garb and carrying a plastic sword. Police tell the Asbury Park Press the man was late to a costume-themed day at a nearby middle school.

Amsterdam police say 15 camels, two zebras and an undetermined number of llamas and potbellied swine briefly escaped from a traveling Dutch circus after a giraffe kicked a hole in their cage.