Jeremy Rauch | December 17th, 2007 | Filed Under: NYSec
Third Tuesday tomorrow — its time for NYSec.
6PM at Pound + Pence. Pound + Pence is located at 55 Liberty St, at the corner of Liberty and Nassau. Its easily accessed from just about any of the subway lines, the PATH, NY Waterway, etc.
We’ve been seated in different areas the last few meetings. Rather than wander aimlessly around the bar, I’d recommend asking at the front where the NYSec people are. They should send you our way.
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Thomas Ptacek | December 9th, 2007 | Filed Under: Uncategorized
Mr. Mogull, I expect 500-1000 words rewritten double spaced on Data Loss Prevention by Friday morning. This article is a crime.
Mr. Hoff, I expect 500-1000 words rewritten double spaced on Network Access Control by Friday morning. This article is a crime.
Other things that sorely need cleaning up on Wikipedia? Extra credit for:
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Thomas Ptacek | December 9th, 2007 | Filed Under: Uncategorized
Just because the blog had been on unintentional hiatus does not mean I
managed to shut up for any length of time. I’ve been putzing around Wikipedia
for the past month, instead of writing here. Here is what I’ve
learned:
You vendors have some stupid and terrible marketing departments.
Here is what the $130k/yr directors of marketing at venture-funded
security startups seem to have figured out: Wikipedia articles land on
the first page of Google search results for any given topic. Prime
placement on Google is something they pay money for. All they have to
do is edit “the encyclopedia anyone can edit”, and bam! There they
are, way more prominently than their competitors’ Adwords buy.
Here’s the M.O. of these crack marketing squads: find the article that
covers the space their product is in —- say, Data Loss Prevention —-
go to the “List of vendors in this space” section, and add a link to
their company.
Stop doing this. Here’s how serious I am about you needing to not do
that anymore: I’m going to tell you how to do it right.
Find two (2) trade press articles about your company. The more
mainstream the better, but Wikipedia editors have a hard time
differentiating, so “IT Journal” or “Government Computing
Quarterly” will do just fine.
These articles verify your notability. If you aren’t notable,
you can’t have a Wikipedia article. If you can’t verify that
notability with a reliable source (read: trade press hit), your
claim of notability doesn’t mean anything.
Register a Wikipedia account. Do not try to do this
anonymously, and note that you will gain privacy from having
a Wikipedia account; “anonymous” editors are identified by their
IP addresses.
Your account comes with a “user page”, like this one. To
that user page, write one short sentence saying that the account
is affiliated with your company. Do not skip this step.
Add a page for your company. Make it one paragraph long,
footnote it with the two trade press hits you came up with, and
add one link to your company at the bottom of the article. Here
is a data point: the article for RSA Security. Is your
company more notable than RSA Security? I didn’t think so.
Consider that an article an asymptote for what you will achieve
on Wikipedia.
Now go to the page on Data Loss Prevention, and instead
of linking to your website, link to your article.
Here’s what will happen. Either:
The page will remain on Wikipedia forever, and nobody will be
able to muster an argument against you being listed on “Data Loss
Prevention” (or “Network Access Control” or whatever), or
Somebody —- maybe me —- will put your article up for deletion,
and the community will vote on it, and if you lose, you will have
no presence on Wikipedia for awhile.
In several places in this handy guide for how Alan Shimel and Michelle McClean
can abuse Wikipedia to advertise their products, I said things like
“don’t do this” or “don’t skip this step”. Notice the second bullet
above this graf. If you skipped any of those steps —- for instance,
by anonymously adding a big long article about Consentry to the
Wikipedia without disclosing your conflict of interest —- your
article will come up for a vote and be deleted out of sheer spite. You
are dealing with a group of people that spend literally 30-40 hours a
week arguing about the Franco-Mongol Alliance, they have
limited patience, and I find it incredibly amusing to egg them on.
A public service announcement from the marketing department at
Matasano Security. Matasano: helping to feed a hungry world.
8 Comments
Thomas Ptacek | December 9th, 2007 | Filed Under: Navel Gazing, Uncategorized
Holy crap.
Our last post was an entire month ago!
So, here’s what happened: we got slammed.
Let me sum it up for you: I am going to go out on a limb and predict
that we’ll be posting screen shots of the product, in anticipation of
its release, by the middle of January ‘08. We’d show it to you now,
but then you’d get to draw an uncomfortable “before-and-after”
conclusion about our design skills —- we’re waiting on a turn from
our UI designers.
(January, oh-eight? What the hell is wrong with us? Oh, yeah,
consulting. Worth it. But painful. I laughed at the guy who told me
we’d have no problem shoving product out the door while keeping a full
client workload; we were turning out more lines of code per day than
my old employer! Turns out I forgot about a little thing called QA.)
Operating under the assumption that you don’t care about the
machinations of Matasano, the company: here’s what happened with the blog:
Not posting became “a thing”. As in, “oh my god, it’s been three weeks
since we posted!”. And I’m like, “I’ve got an awesome post queued
up —- This Old Vulnerability: SSH CRC Compensator Attack!” And, so,
it turns out: don’t do that. Obsessing over post quality delayed this
post by at least two weeks, and you have this guy to blame.
And hence this insipid meandering post, because if I don’t write
something, it could be 4 more weeks before you see us again.
Some things to expect in the next 2 weeks here:
And like 20 other things we’ve queued up in the meantime.
Thanks for your forebearance. Glad to be back.
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