Gordon Woolf's Blog

Email: the world will know

One of this country's senior politicians has just found that emails may not be what they seem. In particular a forwarded email may be changed easily before it is forwarded. That should be a warning to everyone who uses email.

To start from the basics: There's a simple Law of Email, which states "Never send anything that you wouldn't want the whole world to know".

They are easy to copy, easy to change, easy to get out of even secure offices since the introduction of USB sticks, which has led some companies to disable the USB ports on their computers, a method which causes more problems than it solves.

Encryption should be used if you are sending confidential information by email, but encryption does not assure security since it has to be decrypted at some stage ("Decryption" rather than the unencryption which I've seen many times). Emails may be decrypted on the main mail server which offers little security within an office.

There are better ways, one of the simplest being to create a PDF of a document, encrypt that and sign it digitally. Warning: simply requiring a password to open a PDF is not securing it; a Google search will reveal programs that will ger around that (which I've needed to do to get an ad into a magazine that was secured by a foolish designer).

If you have this kind of material then you'll need to study the Acrobat help files. There are also some examples of commercial software programs that will make it a simpler task.

On the other hand, there are authors and others who are so scared of someone stealing a single copy of their ebook that they make access difficult for the people who have paid for the file. I would quote from my own experience when running a milk bar/convenience store. If you put a box of lollies on the counter they will sell, but a proportion will be stolen -- move them to the back or anywhere where the customer cannot easily pick them up and they stop selling. There will be a point at which theft is too great but it will always be worth losing a few.

It can also reflect on the trust between a business owner and his customers. In my book Success in Store there are two examples of the relationship between my wife and some local high school students who came regularly for fish and chips. In the first, they left wrappers and cans by the seats on the footpath until one of them saw my wife go out to clean up their mess as they left. "Do you have to do that?" one asked. No one else will do it, she said, and from that day there was no more mess; everything went in the bins.

Similarly, a sheepish youngster returned to hold out a confectionary packet, saying he'd forgotten to pay. Next day one of the other students asked if he'd returned to pay. "He told us on the way back to school and we said 'you don't do that there'."

Fair dealing will do a lot to reduce problems of theft but that does not help with the general continued availability of email and its likelihood to spread far beyond its original intended use.

A recent search for my name in Google, and going far beyond the first two or three pages where most of us stop searching, came up with an email I wrote in 1996 which is 13 years ago, long before the Internet was anything like it is today, and in the earliest days of the web when many exagerated claims were being made about "hits" on web sites. If you are interested, that email is at http://open4success.net/Olnews/mbox2/282.html

That was not the start of email for me as I'd already been using it for the best part of a decade; at that time the problem was that there were not many people you could send emails to but I did use an email-to-telex service to submit articles to some publishers.

In all that time, there have been regular warnings that normal email is the least secure communications system of all. At least with phone recordings you can be fairly sure that what is heard is what you said, and there are legal safeguards on what can be used. With email, forgery is simple, and preservation and distribution is even more simple.
 

Do we need bread for the bread?

The sandwich shop owner appeared on TV screens around the world. His shop was on Wall Sreet and he was being asked how the credit squeeze affected him. It was, he said, making it difficult. He was having problems borrowing the funds to pay wages, and to buy stock.

Hey! Time for a reality check: if a sandwich store owner has to go into debt to pay wages and buy his fillings, then we are all facing disaster. This is the true cash business. Buy bread and butter in the morning, sell it at lunchtime and pocket the profits in an afternoon. The founder of the Subway empire, so legend states, needed only a thousand from a friend to get not only the stock but the equipment he needed.

Of course we now have a new definition for “market trader”. It means the denizens of Wall Street and their ilk around the world who believe in derivatives and that you can sell things before buying them. The true market trader is of the kind who had a stall in London's Petticoat Lane or on Portobello Road; he or she had a simple business plan: buy, markup, sell, buy again... There was generally no place in the expenses which had to be covered by the markup for loans to run the business.

Loans exist to provide capital. Sometimes that capital is of a short term nature. I recall from my own past of going to see the bank manager because we had planned a trade directory and the idea had sold so well that we did not have enough money to print it; the ads we had sold more than covered the print cost and we had an advance order from a government department for a couple of hundred copies, but none of that money would come in for at least two months and the print bill had to be paid on delivery. We'd actually done quite well in getting prepaid ads but the print bill for a book a lot larger than we had envisaged was therefore way above what we had budgeted.

The manager, in a major bank in London's Fleet Street, heard our tale, looked at our figures and allowed us the few hundred pounds we needed. He chatted about our plans for a magazine in the same field as the directory and then told us he had to leave for a meeting with another client who had a similar problem. We might even read about it next day.

We did. Rupert Murdoch bought the News of the World.

Our tale is a good example of what banks and other means of getting credit are for. They are not to provide daily running expenses. Unfortunately many people seem to have forgotten that.

Afterthought: We wonder if the conversation between journalist and Wall Street sandwich shop owner really went like this:

J: You must be hit by this credit crisis...

SSO: Well, maybe a little. It'll cut our sales if the businesses upstairs cut their staff.

J: How about I bring our cameras in and we'll do a piece on how this affects the little guy. You'll get your face on screen and everyone around here will recognise your shop in the background.

SSO: That's be good. Yes, I can say I need credit... I've got wages and I have to buy the bread. That's it, I need bread for the bread.

J: We won't go overboard! But the news director told me not to come back without some man-in-the-street footage.