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Thomas Ptacek | April 15th, 2006 | Filed Under: Industry Punditry, Uncategorized

Let’s play “trade press column… or data sheet copy?”

Threat Control - As an application-aware platform, the Secure LAN Controller protects against both known and unknown threats, providing more accurate detection than security tools operating at lower layers, with blocking at a finer level of granularity.

Is it from a column? Or is it from a marketing data sheet? You decide! Either way, I challenge the writer to prove that they know what these words mean.

Here’s another one:

In cases like this, the only real way to assure protection is with additional security and monitoring hardware such as a wireless intrusion detection and prevention system. Such systems can monitor the airwaves for these types of attacks, and they do not suffer from vulnerabilities as your wireless infrastructure may. In addition to being able to alert you to an attack, these systems can also take preventative action to shield and contain the attack. In the case of the Aironet DoS, the IPS can detect the ARP storm, then de-authenticate and tar-pit the attacker.

Risks to your wireless APs mean you should buy special wireless IPS. Column or data sheet? You be the judge.

5 Comments so far

  • Cory Scott

    April 15th, 2006 2:13 pm

    Marketing data sheets are the food equivalent of a processed meat by-product and trade rag columns are like processed meat by-product with a sprig of parsley on top, most likely served at a truck stop.

  • Andrew Donofrio

    April 16th, 2006 8:37 pm

    I used to have to prepend and scatter about excerpts of vendor marketing fluff into my general summaries of products’ crypto architectures. I quickly learned that the people building the products often had nothing to do with the people writing the product descriptions, sometimes to the extent that the former did not even review the pseudo-technical content produced by the latter, which occasionally forced me to be more of a marketing editor than I liked in the midst of performing my technical work. I also learned that many pseudo-technical articles out there were written by the latter and not the former, which, of course, your game serves to illustrate.

    Anyway, I often tried to pull at least one amusing fluff statement into these summaries, which would then make their way through a lab and finally the gov’t. Afterall, there was no better general description of what a product did than “tar-pit the attacker.” (I still wait for the day a product gets medieval on the attacker’s a**.)

  • Thomas Ptacek

    April 17th, 2006 12:21 pm

    A confession: I am one of the people who “writes the product descriptions”, and not just because I’m part of a 5-person startup — I was a product (marketing) manager at Arbor Networks, too.

    I have an on-the-one-hand/on-the-other perspective of the trade press.

    On the one hand:

    The lab/eval work that the major trade rags do is not pure fluff. I’m not just saying this because I like Greg: I go out of my way to read Network Computing lab reviews and learn things when I do.

    (On-the-other-tangential-hand: I have a shit-list of publications that are so awful that I’ll demerit a vendor for citing a favorable review in them).

    On the other hand:

    Bylined articles, editorial content, and industry analysis that happens in trade publications is pay-for-play, and substantially less honest than with Gartner/Forrester/Yankee/whatever. At least the real industry analysts base their opinions off something approximating an empirical benchmark (market performance and adoption, via survey).

    Byline authors just make shit up.

  • PaulM

    April 17th, 2006 3:59 pm

    The first one is clearly a cut sheet as it uses lots of capital letters which imply trademark and branding. After all, what good is Krad Systems’ new rack-mount gizmo if the features are anything but exclusive?

    The second one could be a cut sheet, but is general enough that if it actually came directly from a vendor, it’s far more likely that it was circulated as a “white paper” and someone tried to pass it off to customers as research. My guess is that it’s a column, but your point is well made.

  • Anton Chuvakin

    April 18th, 2006 1:46 am

    OMG, this is so funny: a Famous “Rag or Slick” Quote Contest :-)

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