“We’ve updated! On November 14, 2008, LinkedIn published revised versions of our Privacy Policy and our User Agreement. Using LinkedIn means you consent to these policies, so please take a few minutes to read and understand them.”

However, if you log out and back, the notice will be gone– so if you weren’t looking too closely, you might not even realize you’ve just consented.

Rebecca Herold at Realtime IT Compliance looked into this and found that the FTC doesn’t much like this kind of implicit privacy changes. Instead, companies should be getting explicit consent, also called “Affirmative express consent,” says the FTC:

As the FTC has made clear in its enforcement and outreach efforts, a company must keep any promises that it makes with respect to how it will handle or protect consumer data, even if it decides to change its policies at a later date. Therefore, before a company can use data in a manner materially different from promises the company made when it collected the data, it should obtain affirmative express consent from affected consumers.

This would imply that if LinkedIn is updating its privacy policy with such a minimal notice, it may not have changed in any way “materially different” from before. But if it is different, they might face a bit of trouble.

Police had no idea that one SIM card could be used simultaneously from two handsets before the detention of Nazir Ahmed for interrogation. Nazir was picked up from Morigaon after an SMS from his mobile number in the name of ISF-IM claimed responsibility for Thursday's blasts in Assam.

Nazir had a Reliance connection and an Eve handset. Each handset of this particular model has a unique International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number. Cops found that two IMEI numbers were using the same SIM. Accordingly there were two record sheets of calls and SMSes from Nazir's mobile number. The record of the SMS to the media was found in only one sheet, which forced police to believe that Nazir's SIM might have been cloned and someone else was using the duplicate card, with or without the owner's knowledge.

"We stumbled upon this technological surprise that Nazir Ahmed's SIM card was used in two handsets," Assam IG (Law and Order) Bhaskarjyoti Mahanta said.

So far, not that interesting. There are lots of vulnerabilities in technological systems, and it's generally a race between the good guys and the bad guys to see who finds them first. It's the last sentence of this article that's significant:

The experts said no one has actually done any research on SIM card cloning because the activity is illegal in the country.

If the good guys can't even participate, the bad guys will always win.

We have been conducting polls of our customers and of IT professionals at technology trade shows for the past two years and the results are in: Pulling together all of the management pieces and processes is even more crucial in a virtualized environment.

So what does this mean for you? You will need to refine your incident and problem management processes with new technologies in order to reduce downtime and maintain end user performance. But of course even the most basic technologies are not well integrated even in today’s world.

I recently participated in a Gartner Conference and watched to my amazement a real-time electronic survey of the audience. To my disbelief, the audience, filled with 300+ people from Fortune 2000 companies provided real-time responses to the question:

What level of integration does your IT org have between event management and service desk applications?

• None: 10%
• Manual Phone call from IT ops to IT service desk staff member: 46%
• Manual click button on event manager to open trouble ticket: 20%
• Automated event management system automatically opens trouble ticket without requiring human oversight or approval: 24%

Unbelievable… still very few of the survey respondents have yet to formalize problem management systems with event management systems. For 56% of the audience the process is still manual!

Another interesting real-time survey question at the Gartner Conference was:

Who in your organization is responsible for critical problem processes and resolution?

• IT Service Desk 13%
• IT Operations 49%
• Process Team 12%
• Other 9%
• Responsibility not formalized 17%

Virtualization adoption and the speed with which things change in a virtualized environment require automation and will transform Incident and Problem Management. Clearly with this new technology we are required to re-think Organizational, Behavioral and Cultural Challenges required to take advantage of the opportunities that virtualization provides.

Incident and problem management processes and metrics must bridge organizational silos that have been the norm within IT. With virtualization, people have to work more closely together in the different silos than ever before. IT leaders need to break down the walls between the technology-centric silo mentalities.

Business Imperative Action Plan:

1. What can you do today? –Understand the impact of virtualization on incident and problem mgt. workload, provide technology training for helpdesk/service desk staff.
2. What can you do in the next 12 months?

Formalize problem management processes, metrics and personnel.
Invest in tools and processes for systems on virtualized servers.
Long term: On the Radar Screen!
Instill teamwork into all groups responsible for the virtualized environment service and support. Map components and configuration items directly to end user services.

Final Thoughts: Know the management pieces and ensure that they fit together. It’s great to buy new technology, but be demanding to ensure that your vendors show you have they will help to link all these pieces together - Change, Inventory, Incident, Problem, Server, Capacity, Performance, Configuration, Event, and Integrated Workflow.

Charlie Rose:  
And so when you look at where we are going, there seems to be two issues that are apparent to me at least, risk and leverage.  We just lost sight of risk and leverage of what was appropriate?

Warren Buffett:  
Yeah.  Again, because it pays off for a while.  You know, you can lose leverage, and it's the only way a smart guy can go broke.  If you owe money, you can't pay them out.  You just pay for everything, you do smart things, you eventually get very rich.  If you do smart things and use leverage and do one wrong thing along the way, it could wipe you out, because anything times zero is zero.  But it's reinforcing when the people around you are doing it successfully, you're doing it successfully, and it's a lot like Cinderella at the ball.  I mean you know at midnight everything is going to turn to pumpkins and mice; right?  But if the evening goes along, I mean, you know, the guys look better all the time, the music sounds better, it's more and more fun, you think why the hell should I leave at quarter of 12.  I'll leave at two minutes to 12.  But the trouble is, there are no clocks on the wall.  And everybody thinks they're going to leave at two minutes to 12.

Charlie Rose:  
And should wise people have known better?

Warren Buffett:  
People should always know better.

Charlie Rose:  
Yeah.

Warren Buffett:  
I mean people -- people don't get -- they don't get smarter about things that get as basic as greed and you can't stand to see your neighbor getting rich.  You know you're smarter than he is, and he's doing these things, you know, and he's getting rich, and your spouse is getting unhappy with you because you aren't doing -- pretty soon you start doing it.  And so you get what I call the natural progression, the three Is.  The innovators, the imitators, and the idiots.  And that's what happens.  Everybody just kind of goes along.  And you look kind of silly if you disagree.  I mean, you know, you could have these crazy Internet valuations in the late 1990s, but they prove themselves out in the market.  The next day they were selling for more than they were the day before, and people said, you know, you're crazy if you don't get in on this.  So it's very human.  Now, with housing it's something even more dramatic than that, because most people aspire to own their own home.  And if you really think that houses prices are going to go up next year and the year after, you feel if I don't buy it this year, I'm going to have to buy it next year.  That's not true of an Internet stock.  But it's true of a home.  And when somebody makes it very easy for you to do it by saying you don't really have to put up my money, you can lie about your income a little, or we'll give you 100 percent mortgage, you're going to do it, because everybody that's done it has been proven right.  You have what they call social tools, and, you know, you're going to feel like an idiot if you didn't do it, because the house cost more.

Warren Buffett:  
Oh, I think confidence will come back.  I will tell you this.  This country is going -- be living better ten years from now than it is now.  It will be living better in 20 years from now than ten years from now.  The ingredients that made this country, you know, the miracle of the world -- I mean we had a seven for one improvement in the average American standard of living in the 20th century.  Now, we had the great depression, we had two world wars, we had the flu epidemic.  You know, we had oil shock.  You know, we had all these terrible things happen.  But something about the American system unleashed more and of a potential to human beings over that hundred years so that we had a seven for one improvement in -- there's never been any -- I mean, you have centuries where if you've got a 1 percent improvement, then it's something.  So we've got a great system.  And we've got more productive capacity now than we ever have.  The American worker is more productive than he's ever been.  We've got more people to do it.  We've got all the ingredients for a sensational future.  It's just that right now the athlete's on the floor.  But we -- this is a super athlete.

We read many stories on the net where folks claim that the current financial crisis could have been avoided with more or better use of technology.     This is expected, as software companies and IT professionals will often try to piggy-backtheir business development strategy on the “crisis of the day” to sell more goods and services.    Honestly, in this current situation, the main technology that we needed was simple, accurate financial models.

For example, in the chart above, the US economy was doing quite well with US federal funds rates low.   Housing prices in the US were skyrocketing and there was a concern about inflation.    There was an understandable concern the sustainability of that economy.

So, in perhaps one the most ill-advised Federal Reserve actions of many decades, the folks at the helm of the Fed decided to raise their lending rates around 500 percent over a two year period.

As we all know, primarily because of the action by the Fed, the world faces perhaps the worst economic disaster in modern times, while the US Executive Branch and the Congress fight over how to spend $700 Billion taxpayer dollars to inject liquidity into the markets to try to head off a global financial disaster.

It is amazing to me that the US Federal Government, or their advisors, does not have simple financial models with cause-and-effect analysis such as:

• Homeowners with adjustable rate mortuages will not be able to make payments;and
• Housing prices will fall dramatically; then
• Homeowners will default on loans where the collateral is much less than the asset value, and
• Banks will suffer great losses, and
• Lending will come to a halt, then
• Banks will collapse, then
• Wall Street will exit the markets in panic
• … and more trouble….. !!

There are and continue to be a lot of discussion and opinions about how risk management needs improvement. and I agree.   We will also read folks talk about how technology can be used to help solve this problem, including CEP/EP and related software (see also Capital Market CEP Fantasy Land). However, as much I would be pleased to see more CEP/EP applications and use cases, I do not believe that event processing technology is really very useful to solve the core problem of the current financial crisis.

The core problem is, seemingly, that our “financial experts” do not even have simple models that will illustrate what will or could happen when you raise the fed lending rates 500 percent in two years in an economy pregnant with adjustable rate mortgages.

To me, this does not appear to be rocket science.  The negligence by the US Federal Reserve and their advisors is astonishing.

John McCain is, objectively, a bad decision maker, desperate and reckless.   He knows that his party is in trouble and that the Democrats have the advantage; so what does he do?

First, he picks a very conservative, inexperienced female governor from Alaska who, until recently, did not even have a US passport, as his running mate.  This was an obvious act of desperation, thinking that he could pull the Hillary votes in the election.  A heartbeat from the US Presidency at a time when there are two ongoing wars and our country on the verge of economic collapse and he gambles with a “Hail Mary” touchdown pass?  This is not the man we need as President.

Then, not even a member of the Banking committee in the Senate, and self-described “not knowledgeable on economic issues”, John McCain tries another “Hail Mary” pass by rushing off to DC to “save the world” and tries to demand Obama suspend his campaign and the debates?    The US is on the brink of economic collapse and McCain puts politics and election desperation above the future of the country?   This is not the man we need as President.

During the same period, Barack Obama has proven to be cool, intelligent, and a good decision maker.   This should be obvious to anyone with the mind to actually think what is good for the country and not about politics.

John McCain is desperate and reckless.   We don’t need desperate and reckless people leading this country.