Beware inside the Hive

The observation "People are like bees"  caught my eye in a book I'm reading by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman called Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. 


The gist of the full quote was that the security systems that people set up are similar to bee hives.  Bees are very attentive about defending their hives from outsiders and will attack anything that tries to get too close.  But if you can get into the hive itself the worker bees will assume you're supposed to be there, that "management" is ok with the whole idea, and let you go about your business.

This analogy is not far off from what happens in our real offices.  Social engineering hackers like Kevin Mitnick used a variety of schemes to get under the radar and into the relatively safe regions "inside the hive".

Think about it: the photocopy repairman is walking around the office, the delivery guy is in the mailroom, the guy in the suit is looking for someone down in accounting.  What do you do when you see these things?  99% of the time you let them go if you're like most people.

It's a safe bet that this kind of vulnerability will persist as long as we have offices.  Your IT security, and office manager may be aware of it and have reminder programs in place, but chances are that unless you work in a government classified facility a motivated thief, attacker or competitor would have little trouble getting a look around. 

The conclusion: don't assume your workspace is private or secure.  Think about what you're showing on your desktop and computer screen, and take steps to keep it private.

Finding a great niche

There's a great big buzz about tablets computers, fanned in particular by the announcement of Apple's iPad today. The idea of a tablet computer is that it does not have a keyboard, or any other peripherals. You simply touch the screen with your finger to point, click, gesture and type. Think of an iPhone, but with a much bigger screen.

I absolutely love them, by the way ... but that is not the point of this post. Oh, and they are great for some kinds of computing, like web browsing and casual note taking and, ... anyway, not the point of the post. What is the relevant is that they have been around for a while and there are several major PC makers already selling them, like Lenovo and HP. They are turning up in places like hospitals for use by professionals there.

Last week I met with executives at one of these bit PC makers to talk about PrivateEye. They are looking at integrating the product right into the platform, which would be great. That's when I found out about the perfect niche for us: You can't put a 3M privacy filter on a tablet. The plastic interferes with the touch screen.

So I am now an even bigger fan of tablets. And touchscreens in general. We learned something really useful in that meeting: There is a whole segment of new systems out there where we can go and the competition can not. Our next task is to start making connections and finding ways to tell buyers that they can still have privacy with that shiny new gizmo.

And maybe I'll need one myself... for testing purposes.

Bill

Loving the competition

We plan to be big at Oculis Labs. Our PrivateEye product solves a major computer privacy problem that just about everyone who works with proprietary or personal information has felt: is someone looking over my shoulder at my screen right now?

You've probably felt that sense of unease yourself. If so, you're part of that great big market we think will use PrivateEye. Given that you're reading this blog, there's a good chance you are technically interested enough to be an early adopter too. You could go over to the oculislabs.com website right now and download the product (go ahead, I'll wait here...)

The trouble is, not everyone is like you. Many people are happily not reading a tech blog right now. Most have no idea that they could solve the problem with a cool new software application. What they would think about is what you are probably thinking right now: 3M privacy filters.

There, I said it. We have competition, and they are big and well known. It's ok. This proves a $100m annual market for what they are selling. In other words, there's $100m worth of caring-about-that-problem-and-solving-it-with-a-primitive-piece-of-plastic in the world today.

It gets better: how many people have rejected the plastic filter because it is too cumbersome, or not effective, or too expensive? A lot of people have. There's the really big opportunity: finding ways to reach the 120 million new laptops that will ship this year.

Next time I'll tell you about one great niche we've found where we can go.