Hakiri

There is a nice story about Jerry Rice, american football player, running in the Sunday, February 9, 2010 print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle’s. The story is about the secrets of success.

In summary the secret of success according to Jerry Rice is the following:

• Put effort
• You will have to struggle
• Persist despite the setbacks
• Strategize and make your choices
• Choose difficult tasks
• Keep learning and trying to improve

According to Carol Dweck’s research (read MindSet) success in nutshell is all about in the trying and the doing. Apart from the putting effort and to keep learning, Carol Dweck also suggests that another success ingredient is to capitalise on mistakes and to comfront deficiencies as they allow you to learn more

At the end of the day it is down to what works for you. There isn’t universal truth.

When we see something that is simple and obvious we automatically assume that we can reach the same idea because after all it is simple and obvious. However, simple and obvious concepts are hard to come up with.

Do not ignore the simple and the obvious. Some of the greatest things ever invented are quite simple and rather obvious but nevertheless great and irreplaceable.

I think that we are at the verge of another online change. We are going from hyper global communities, to ultra local and even micro communities.

Global communities are places such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and all other social networks which sole purpose is to get as many users on board as possible. They are doing well but have become significantly less helpful in the last couple of years. In other words, people find them too intrusive, to globalized and subjective to abuse. People add friends as maniacs for no apparent reason apart form increasing their rank and apparently popularity level – a number which often means nothing to anyone.

As a result of all of this, we see the emergency of hyper local communities where real relationships can be made; micro communities designed around very specific purposes with clearly defined goals. These communities matter as they are real. They are small but sometimes quite significant and influential.

Needless to say, hyper local and micro communities are more secure and less subjective to abuse. Simply put, when people know each other quite well a lot of technological and social related problems such as spam, fake identities, etc., become non-issues. They simple disappear. This is an interesting side-effect which worths further exploration.

Mashable is running an interesting article today titled 6 Things World of Warcraft Can Teach You About Social Media Success. It is about the life lessons the author of the article learned while playing WoW.

I took the courtesy to summarize them all here but pay a tribute to mashable by visiting their website first.

The Lessons

1. Success requires constant dedication – To succeed, you need to put in time and dedication.
2. It’s important to strategize your communication – If you don’t communicate effectively and clearly who you are and what you want no one will listen.
3. Set an objective and develop a strategy – Do not attempt to utilize social media without any specific objective or idea on how to be successful. You will fade away because you didn’t try to participate actively in the community or just didn’t know how.
4. It’s about networking – The people you connect with are incredibly important. It can mean the difference between success and failure.
5. Join new services, create new lines of communication – You should always be looking to create new lines of communication and new people to interact with. Rely on these people to educate and enlighten you. Expand your horizons by trying out new things in social media.
6. Earn other people’s trust – People won’t trust you until you can show them that you are to be trusted. Enough charlatans exist that you have to prove your value first before earning respect.

All of this reminds me of something I wanted to do for long, long time. Let me explain. In my high school years me and my friends used to organize late evening StarCraft tournaments – nothing too obsessive, two games max per day and no more than 1-2 hours long. We used to do these tournaments for a couple of months and it was then when I noticed similarities between the strategies involved in the game and the things that we do in real life. I very rarely play strategy games these days but I’ve always wanted to summarize in a blog post or something my conclusions from my experience when I used to play.

I guess now I have an incentive to finally sit and do it.

I wrote about the importance of simplicity before but here is another reason why you should believe me. :)

Keep this in mind the next time you design a service or a product. The simpler the better.

Some people say that what happens on the Web STAYS on the Web. Although I agree that this is true for some of the content it is largely untrue for the majority of it.

The reason for this is relatively simple. Not everything is rated equally and not everything is disseminated in a way that it is preserved within the inner fabrics of the web ecosystem. For something to stay on the web you need not only to publish it but also to cause the so called viral effect where hundreds if not millions of individuals help the information to disseminate permanently. The viral effect is a key property for prolonging or immortalizing the life of information. It also protects the integrity of the information so that its true meaning cannot be lost. If you think about it, the viral effect is to some extend like a networked RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) system.

Without the viral publishing successful dissemination of the information is not possible and without recurrent viral campaigns its immortalization is not guaranteed.

For the majority of the content it is fair to say that if it born on the web, it will die on the web as well.

This is a quick post just to share some early morning thoughts with you. So, there they are.

If you notice everything around you is probably getting more and more automated and synced. Data is flowing in and out of any particular system and of course between different systems and their input and output channels. Data is also flowing between virtual and physical world by means of automation or convenience such as mobile devices, etc. All of this is pretty fascinating as a great number of our days on the earth can be recorded better than ever before and also communication between people is immensely improved.

There are several interesting questions that need to be answered in this hyper-synced world. The first important question, which as a security guy I am obligated to ask, is how secure is the whole interlinked, highly-synced world is? My conclusion, which by the way comes after being involved in this world for quite some time now, is that is not very secure if at all. It is easy to lose track of the information flow and therefore it is easier for attackers to intervene with the synchronization process. Not knowing the origins or the integrity levels of the stream of information could lead to all kinds of catastrophic situations. I am sure you can imagine some.

The second question is more phylosophical and it is about whether we actually need that level of synchronization between each other. Sadly, it seems that syncing online reduces our social lifestyle by a great factor as it is easier to meet people on virtual places and it is also easier to share an opinion especially if anonymous. Moreover, you don’t have to express opinion online anymore, your life can be simply synced by the help of technology worth a couple of hundred pounds.

I am not trying to make any point here. Most people who read/write blog posts believe that we should stick to the good/bad mantra when developing an opinion. No. What I am trying to do is to facilitate a conversation. And that’s all I need to say.

To experiment is good. Just a few of my experiments turned into successful projects but I do not regret for wasting my time on the others. Each experiment helped me understand better the topic I was diving into and also made me a better person a long the way.

It is pretty sad that the majority of people avoid starting experiments because, a) experiments are often treated as projects, and b) projects could fail. Fear of failure is a huge thing nowadays. It is a bit ridiculous because the whole purpose of the experiment is not to make something work (make it successful) but just to test if something could work and as such experiments lead only to conclusions and nothing else. Sometimes experiments lead to successful projects though, but that is rare as I mentioned in the beginning of this post.

I am sure that this post is pretty meaningless to most of you but please understand that I am trying to convey a message here which I hope makes some change. The message is that people should do their own personal experiments all the time, checking, verifying and breaking the established dogmas. It is just a healthier way of living and it makes things a lot more exciting.

So you read or hear about a concept you are not familiar with and you rush to learn more but out of frustration you give up pretty quickly and forget the the whole thing all together or you grow some negative emotions or even worse, fear. Most people will do exactly this.

Things are not as complicated as they seem but it takes time to adjust your brain to the right type of thinking that is required to understand the subject or to learn the craft you are interested in. I’ve experimented with several brain tunning process on myself and found one of them working so I thought that it might be useful to share it here with you. Keep in mind that none of this is based on any substantial research. I am only giving away what I’ve found working for myself and what I’ve read online.

The general concept is to let the idea/craft/whatever sink in deep into your brain and to gradually expand without rushing into anything. Let me explain. Let’s say that you want to learn how to do something which is pretty challenging for yourself. So you basically start with getting familiarized with the core concepts by taking small dozes of information or by just practicing a little bit of the craft. There is no need to rush. Take 10-20 minutes every day to refresh your mind regarding the subject. Take your time to enjoy the process of learning. The more you live with the idea the more it becomes part of your life. Soon or later (definitely sooner than you think) you will totally embrace the idea and from that point on learning more will be quite painless and enjoying experience and you wont feel frustrated at all.

My explanation why this works on me, and again this is based on my vague understandings of how the brain works, is that it takes time to for my brain to make long lasting connections between the new concept/idea and what I already know about. With the time these connections will get stronger and that is important. I guess this also has to do something with becoming confident about the subject.

Nothing is impossible.

Simply put New is a very relative word. New to whom? And how do you prove that something new is new indeed? You cannot. Perhaps you can suggest that something is new as nothing like it has been documented before, but again this is very subjective.

You often see rants about what is new and what is old in the security scene: underground and aboveground. Some people will complain that nothing new has been discovered when a presumably new type of vulnerability/research is released. Others will simply take it as new without even questioning it and essentially start a hype.

Perhaps new should be changed with fashionable. Like in the fashion business new things are often well forgotten old things, i.e. ideas always circulate. And new things are simply not possible without the help of old things because we require access to technology, whether it comes in terms of knowledge or tools, to build them. In that respect nothing new is actually new.