To all those who misuse email, this post is for you..no, not the spammers, there is a special place in hell reserved for you. This missive is for those that are using email improperly, causing unnecessary work or wasting time. Yes, dear readers, it is time for another email etiquette post. The likelihood of my readers needing this advice is extremely low but my hope is that posting my pet peeves will be cathartic for all of us.

Number one pet peeve for this week…users who send a request by email to two or three different people. If you are one of those people, as Jon Stewart would say, meet me at camera 3.

diatribe@Cam3

Listen, only ONE person is needed to action an email request. I know you think that by emailing multiple people you are hedging your bets, i.e. someone will respond in the time frame you need. Sometimes that may even be true. But, when multiple people are in the TO: field for a job that only takes one person that tells me instantly that I don’t have to do anything because someone else will do it. It also makes it look like you are just sharing information with multiple people and not savvy enough to use the CC: for that function. If you want ME to do something, email ME and ME only. And further, if I find out that you did email me directly but sent a second and a third email to others asking us all to do the same thing…and we all start working on it…and we all find out that you wasted our time, there will be trouble. If you don’t know where to send an email, send it to the Manager, they’ll delegate it. Don’t send it to three people like some stupid fishing expedition because then those three people have to email each other to figure out who is going to get back to you, THEN get back to you, all of that generating more email and delay.

/diatribe@Cam3

Second pet peeve is not a new one…NEVER..and I mean NEVER forward a message you were blind copied on. I got the email. The whole building got the email. Don’t assume that the person who was smart enough to use the BCC in the first place was too dumb to include the necessary people on the email. I cannot think of one good reason to forward an email you receive through bcc…If there is one, let me know.

Maybe I misplaced that /diatribe tag.

It used to be that you could feel pretty good about a 7-8 character password, once upon a time. Then people figured out that they could guess an encrypted password a lot faster by encrypting the guesses. So, the “file” your password is encrypted in only has to be compared to a huge collection of encrypted guess files called “rainbow tables”. How effective is this solution? The Ophcrack using rainbow tables was able to crack the password Fgpyyih804423 in just over two and a half minutes. [Source]

Passphrases go a long way to defeating these pre-computed cracks because they are too long to pre-compute. However, there are computers today that can brute force attack a 12 character password (191 trillion possible combinations) in a day and a half. [Source]

My length of password is 20 characters, a 15 character password would take the fastest computer on earth 53000 years to crack using brute force methods. All of these calculations have one downfall though. There used to be a time when users would download large files off of each other and they realized that when 500 people download a file from a server it swamps the server, but if you give each of those people the ability to share a chunk of that file with other people you have a distributed sharing of that file. This concept is called Bit Torrent. How long will it be until a hacker develops a method to chunk down the tasks in brute forcing a password and distribute that to an army of computers. How large was the last botnet discovered…50 000 computers? What is stopping an enterprising coder from using those 50 000 computers in a grid to brute force a password, any password?

I’m also wondering what our financial institutions are doing…I know if I enter my PIN wrong three times I’ll get locked out, but 50 000 computers trying different PIN’s exactly simultaneously, that is 150K tries, more than enough to crack a 5 number PIN. The four number PIN Scotiabank limits their customers to has only 10 000 combinations. A little scary if you ask me.

Moral of the story. Use a passphrase with no less than 15 characters.

Internet Evolution survey tries to get to the bottom of what irks “Digital Workers.” Anyone in IT could have guessed the first one (slow internet) but a close number two was the infamous “Reply All”.

Read the article here (See my previous blog posting on CC: and BCC:)

On another, related note, thanks again to Ray for posting this on his blog…I mean have you ever heard of the site “Internet Evolution” before today? How does he find this stuff?

Hi everyone,

Regular readers (Hi Mom!) will know that SPAM is not a new topic for me. I often am asked why we can’t do a better job blocking spam and as luck would have it, the last time I was asked I had just received this email:

From: Paige Godwin

Subject: We:lc,om.e t-o Be;st E;nt-er;ta:in;me:nt

Body: ON.LY BE-ST SI-TE http://sendursms.com/topsite.html

Obviously spam..I think most of us would not even bother opening this email. So why didn’t our spam filter catch it? I ran it through this spam scoring website to get more information (powered by SpamAssassin)

This email scored a 0 which means, according to the Spam filter, it contains nothing which would trigger most spam filters to reject it. As I have said before, spam is big money. These “companies” license the spam filtering information under a shell company/pseudonym and then modify their spam so that it scores low (or not at all) and then blast it out. I.T. departments and vendors then spend time and money updating the spam rules so that tomorrow this email will be marked as spam, nefarious spammers obtain the new rules and the dance begins again. Look again at the subject of the spam above, the variety of punctuation, spacing and mis-spelling and you will have an idea of all the variables at the disposal of spammers to fool spam filters.

Spam filters are good at catching the dumb spammers but as long as smart spammers can access the logic in most commercial spam filters (on the internet or by simply buying the product updates for a proprietary system) this cycle dooms us to a career of always chasing the smart ones.

I have heard much discussion around our office in the last few months about people receiving multiple copies of emails. In an audit of ourboard’s communications “poor netiquette” was cited as a problem and when we dug deeper into that issue we discovered that this was codefor the resentment and frustration generated by receiving the same email 2-3 times. Some of this problem revolves around people not understanding how the TO:, CC: and BCC: functions work in email and how they can help or hinder efficient email communication.

The TO: field is used when the addressee is required to action the contents of the email.

TO: Sean Heuchert

FROM: Director of Education

SUBJECT: New Policy

Sean – please make sure your staff are aware of the new cell phone policy

The CC: field is used when the addressee may be interested in something or needs to be aware of an issue that does not require action. The CC: allows users to see who the email was addressed to and see instantly who is required to act on the email (TO:) and who is simply being advised (CC:)

TO: All CUPE Staff

CC: All Principals and Managers

FROM: Human Resources

CUPE members – HR is looking forward to welcoming you to the Professional Development Day next week!

The BCC: field should ONLY be used when it is desirable to obscure who the email is sent to. The most common reason to use it is when you are sending an email with many addresses in it and you don’t want everyone to be able to see the other addresses. This is a good way to protect other people’s addresses. Here is the problem with BCC:, by design, it doesn’t let you see who got the message so it is tempting to forward it to other people because you may not be sure if they were included…DON’T! You should assume that if people were meant to see it, the author included them in the BCC list.

TO: Newsletter Mailing List

BCC: Sean Heuchert

FROM: Communications

Attached is the latest Communications Newsletter.

If I forward this to my colleagues/staff they may receive it twice…I can’t think of a single instance when it is appropriate to forward a message received by BCC…don’t do it.

You would think that by what feels like the 100th iteration of Microsoft Office that Bill and co. would have figured out that pasting text without formatting is a pain in the butt. There is no keyboard shortcut, even the Ctrl-Shift-V combo only brings up the paste special menu. Finally, after reformatting some old policies I got frustrated enough to do something about it. Google showed a number of solutions but the most elegant imho was on the M$ power user site.

Create a new macro called PastePlain and paste the following just before the End Sub in the new macro:

Selection.PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText

Click “Close and Return to Microsoft Word” and then follow these directions from the site:

-On the Tools menu, click Customize.

-Click the Keyboard button.

-Make sure the Save changes in box displays Normal.dot.

-In the Categories list, click Macros.

-In the Macros list, click PastePlain.

-Click in the Press new shortcut key box, press and hold the CTRL and Shift keys, and then press and hold the V key at the same time. The Press new shortcut key box displays Ctrl+Shift+V.

Click Assign. Click Close and then click Close again.

The Microsoft directions show you how to set it to Ctrl-V but why would you? Set it to a different key combo and then you can use either as the situation dictates!

Recently I had the opportunity to hear one of my learned colleagues explain why teachers shouldn’t use email to communicate with students and parents. He cited many reasons, including the fact that an email could be forwarded, shared, posted, blogged about and/or published as a full page ad in the Globe and Mail.

At the time I didn’t say anything because there wasn’t really anything to refute. Everything he was saying was true. But, I got thinking (my loyal three readers are surely thinking to themselves: uh-oh). Did future presidents swear off using the telephone after tapes of Nixon’s telephone conversations got him impeached? Did early cave men stop using fire because they got burnt a few times? I mean, are the people making these arguments filling their cars up with apple juice? We all know gasoline is flammable…just pour it in the car, not on your clothes.

There is absolutely a place for teacher’s use of email. I also believe that a great deal of caution is warranted because it can be fraught with complications but teachers should not be barred from using this tool by their unions or their employers. Come on people, we have done this before, fire..telephone…gasoline..all means to an end that have associated risks that need to be managed. That is the message people need to be sending, instead of barring them from a tool with so much potential.

 My board is holding a Computer Conference for Secondary School teachers (~400) on November 20th in Peterborough.  We are looking for teachers using technology in their classroom to share their experiences and introduce one of their ideas to others at the conference.

 If anyone here is interested in joining us, please let me know.  There are three one hour time slots, one of which you would be presenting in and the other two you would have free to hear others.  We also have Jesse Brown (formerly of CBC's Search Engine) as a keynote.

I have a modest budget to help with mileage/defray travelling costs if necessary.

email - sheuchert@pvnccdsb.on.ca

Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=133101001609

Twitter - follow pvncit 

Thanks!

Sean 

We’ve been fighting a lot with spam lately…new firewall has spam blocking built in but it is like the corkscrew in a swiss army knife..it works, it comes with the package, but it’s not great. We’re working on making it better and hoping that we can borrow some rules from other school boards. Since school started we have received about 600 000 spam messages and about 40 000 legitimate messages. I tried to explain the problem to someone like this…blocking spam is like having a fire hose turned on you and you are trying to keep yourself dry with a dinner plate. I’d like to refine that a little…the person with the hose is a little bit drunk and can’t be counted on to hold the hose still. Further, about 100 times an hour someone behind you will ask you to reach into the stream and grab a very specific drop of water. If you’re getting spam in your inbox, please be patient…your IT department is fighting a moving target while still trying to make sure you get all your email.

If you feel their pain, you just might have managed an IT project: Samoan Traffic Switches Sides.

They thought of everything…instituted an alcohol ban during the first critical days of the changeover, timed the changeover for a national holiday when commuters would be off the roads, police were at key stations throughout the highway system. There was even a national prayer service the morning of the switch. They have moved an entire country from right sided driving to left, and it has been a week with only one injury and no fatalities.

But, there is always that one thing that may have been considered in the project plan but everyone holds up as an example of poor planning or even no planning. The transit bus doors now all open on the wrong side, forcing riders to load from the middle of the street. Forget the expense of changing, forget that there may be a long term replacement plan, it is that one thing that tarnishes a well managed and successful project and gives nay sayers a huge issue to hang their hat on.

I am hoping my next IT project avoids the Samoan Transit Bus Syndrome.