Blogging, Gartner knowledge and Security

Real knowledge.

By reading about or studying a subject you can learn a lot. To become proficient you also have to practice, in fact you have to practice, practice, practice. This is well-known in Human Language learning. In IT this basic truth is sometimes forgotten. Gartner Group is an  advisory firm specializing in writing subject matter articles and reports targeted on IT decision makers. These reports are often initiated and balanced. Let’s say you like to introduce Business Intelligence (BI) to your company but do not know much about BI. Looking at what Gartner has to say about BI, is a good start and here  a problem starts, many readers stop here and make their decisions only on Gartner reports. You think you know the subject, but you only have a superficial overview of the subject  and the market . I call this Gartner Knowledge .  Above I wrote ‘ often initiated and balanced ’, but you can question how objective such reports are. You do not bite the hand that feed you, do you? Gartner knowledge   is something I many times have thought writing about, someday I maybe will.

Anyway when I started blogging  it was mainly to get practical knowledge about blogging. I studied blogging by reading blog posts, and then I wanted to know more, so I created this  blog and wrote some posts.

The first thing I learned about was Spam Sites.

From Google I got statistics about blog hits, i.e. readers of my blog. My main purpose was to learn about blogging, but of course I was very curious about readers and how many actually read my posts. Soon, very soon I had many readers, but almost all were from odd looking sites. I suspected web scanning programs (bots, crawlers, etc.) were the main readers of my blog. After some googling I found these came from spam   sites . Spam site programs create blog hits to create an interest for the site ‘ who is this reader of mine? ’ and luring you  into go there  and expose you to their malware or whatever evil they try to contaminate your computer with. Even worse many sites show ‘ Followers of my blog: ’ with links to frequent readers of the blog, luring your readers  to go to the spam sites.  You should not go to sites you do not trust, even if they are readers of you and you should not link to such sites. This was the first thing I learned when I started blogging.

When I learned about this I talked with some experienced  PC support guys I know, to get first-hand information about real security issues with PCs today. As I suspected old fashioned virus infections are rare these days. Windows (7) is becoming more secure and the virus protections in becoming better making viruses a less threat that is was. The major problem  (for PC support) these days is more cleansing  PCs after their owners has clicked on ‘ You have won a million $, click here to collect… ’ and then you have annoying spam malware in your computer that make you go bonkers.

The second thing I learned.

It is easy to leak or give away information unintentionally when you demonstrate examples. I blog about IT when I show examples I found it is very easy to expose sensitive info. You should take great care only show information necessary for the example you writing about.  I have probably done some blunders when I started, but I hope those are not sensitive or possible to exploit. This is a good learning experience.

The third thing I learned so far.

It seems that by exposing you to the web you are soaked into social networks of various kinds. I’m now a member of linkedIn , with contacts to God knows who. I have started to look at Twitter and Facebook. This is something I probably write another post about in future.

Update

Another thing I learned

When you publish a Google document as a post here, the images goes anywhere, what you see here is far from what I have composed in my Google document.