Wes Kussmaul's Kolabora Weblog

A few days ago I got an unusual edition of the Daily Dose newsletter. Normally, Daily Dose concerns itself with human health, but this issue was about the health of the banks that hold your hard earned money. It starts with

Dear Reader,

You see, there's something really bad going on at one of the world's largest banks... A bank you probably deposit money at.

The newsletter goes on to compare the unnamed bank to Enron, the very large company that evaporated overnight after some accounting sleights of hand that were intended to build confidence in the balance sheet inevitably had the opposite effect.

The thought of a very large bank becoming unstable is disturbing. What's more disturbing is that we needn't analogize with a company from years back in another industry to illustrate the problem. Every day's news has a story of yet another large player in the banking / financial industry writing off huge chunks of bad debt and going hat in hand to capital markets, shoring up the balance sheet with a fire sale of equity.

First there was the UK's Northern Rock Savings. Then there was Bear Stearns.

Following those disasters and the ongoing troubling news about widespread financial instability, wouldn't it be nice to read that housing prices were stablizing, the crisis seems to be abating?

Unfortunately, it seems to be getting worse.

Who's next?

It may be time to ask yourself: how safe is my "money in the bank"?

The many user centric identity initiatives that are underway are a step in the right direction. OpenID, Concordia, iName, InfoCard et al will enable us to participate in online collaboration facilities with more ease than is currently the case.

That's great for the user; now what about relying parties? You know, the other people in the room who are depending upon you being who you say you are.

What are needed are reliable identities, and that means reliable enrollment processes.

...if a biometric access control system is done right, that is. Most, however, are done wrong. A big part of the reason is that very few people - journalists included - have been exposed to the right way to do biometric access control, as witness this article with a common theme:

http://www.zdnetasia.com/toolkits/0,39047352,39376855-39094240p,00.htm

Never allow your fingerprint - or iris or retina image for that matter - to be sent over a communication line.

Of course most biometric access control systems do just that. Your precious identitfying information - which, unlike a password, cannot be changed if it is compromised - is sent over networks to be matched with biometric records in a database. If the image of your fingerprint or eyeball is stolen in that process, you're hosed.

So what's the right way to do biometrics?

Dear Governor Romney:

Microsoft should not be the world's government.

Think about it. As your experience of the world comes more and more through that little glass screen on your information appliance, who governs that experience?

Consider that little lock icon for a moment. It involves something called a "certification authority." OK, who's the authority? The UN? The ITU? Some other instance of duly constituted public authority?

While the question had been bandied about for years in the roadhouses of the chat-forum-blog culture, Nicholas Carr's lightning rod article in the May 2003 Harvard Business Review was the first time it had been posed in respectable circles.

Does IT Matter?

Elaborating, defending, and expanding in response to the firestorm of responses from mainstream IT pundits (those who think "change" means a new version of Cisco's router OS, not a sudden replacement of whole professions), Carr invoked the well-worn metaphor of industrial production capacity. You know, companies devoted capital, space, and staff to things like generating their own electricity until economics and enlightenment caused private power plants to be supplanted with electric utilities; now information infrastructures are following the same path.

Yes of course.

The public information utility was predicted by Ed Lias of Univac in the 1970's as I recall. By 1981 we at Delphi (along with H&R Block's CompuServe, Reader's Digest's The Source, plus Telenet and Tymnet) were offering access the first public information utilities. Ten years later when the brilliantly devious Commercial Internet Exchange scheme forced the feds to permit commercial traffic over the NET, we at Delphi quickly adapted our information wallplugs to the new Internet information utility.

Here we are fifteen years later and we're talking about a coming great leap forward from steam driven corporate information plants to the plug-in information utility for companies. Of course there's hugely more complexity to this particular version of the great leap forward: how do you make the information utility fit the immense assortment of established business processes without really messing up those processes?

I'm glad I don't have to manage a big public company through a transition like that, because I think the answer is: you don't. You might attempt what the big airlines tried to do, you know, Delta knew that its uncompetitive nature was so entrenched it had to start over with a new airline called Song.

But Song isn't just new paint on old planes, it's new talk on an old walk. Face it, they just can't think and act like Ryan Air, not just because of old ways of thinking but because of old commitments and old relationships. Wise management can only comfort itself with the thought that the outcome of these Greek tragedies is knowable.

From the latest issue of Sun Net Talk - arrived in my inbox 9/17/04:

OS Security: Solaris 10 Breaks New Ground

Dear Wes Kussmaul,

Keep the bad guys out; let the good guys in. No operating system does it better than Solaris and with the upcoming release of the Solaris 10 OS, the bad guys might want to think about a new line of work…

My response:

Dear Scott McNealy,

Keep the bad guys out? Let the good guys in?

Gee, Scott, things must have changed since the last time I visited a Sun Microsystems building. I recall seeing subdivided office facilities, allowing different groups and individuals to have access to only the information they needed. But according to the new Sun view of things you must have switched to one big undivided open space, with desks and files accessible to anybody wearing a good guy badge.

So you have only good guys inside your buildings, and as we know good guys can be trusted with anything. Sun Microsystems is just one big, happy family. Just before someone leaves the family to become a bad guy, do they erase everything in their head that should only be accessed by good guys? (Scott, have you been getting management tips from Rev. Moon?)

Let’s face it, Scott, the same things that make for secure physical facilities should be used to make secure online facilities: licensed architects and contractors, building codes, occupancy permits. In the physical world, you know, where open outdoor highways connect to bounded spaces called buildings, architects are licensed by public authorities rather than by commercial enterprises trying to foist security technotrinkets on FUD-jaded CIOs. Licensed architects design facilities around the idea that people having specific roles in specific groups have needs for specific categories of information.

Most important: architects take direction from an enterprise’s management, which after all knows what kinds of facilities are needed. An architect would never try to tell a CEO that since she doesn’t understand the technology of construction materials she cannot make decisions about what kinds of facilities are needed.

Scott, since you have solved the security problem by reliably identifying good guys and bad guys, I know how you can increase your sales volume in firewalls, intrusion detection systems, intrusion prevention systems, and other such good guy – bad guy stuff (where you don’t sell much now.) Here’s the idea, free of charge: license the Power Rangers characters and put their images on your products. I can tell you for a fact that all of the four year olds in my neighborhood have yet to buy their first intrusion detection system. If you put the Power Rangers characters on your latest model it would fly off the shelves at Wal*Mart! You’d own Check Point before they knew what hit ‘em!

When will vendors stop selling the naïve and downright silly Power Rangers view of security? The answer is simple. It will happen when customers start realizing that facilities are facilities and highways are highways, whether physical or online. All of the “guys” driving vehicles (packet vehicles or wheeled) and entering buildings (in physical space or online space) are both good and bad. It’s the way life is. Have your facilities designed and built accordingly.

And whatever you do, don’t have a construction materials vendor design your building.

Read about the how online space should work like physical space at www.village.com.

Throughout the blogosphere we're regularly admonished to Share The Wealth and reminded that Information Wants To Fe Free.

Fine, but I've also heard that People Want To Eat.

Allow me to introduce a new concept to certain members of the broader open source community, which includes writers as well as coders.

The concept's name is "Economics."

Economics was invented when caveperson Og discovered that he made out better when he traded things of value with his neighboring caveperson Ug than when he tried to kill Ug to gain the latter's things of value. Eventually he learned that he could trade information for futures contracts: Og agreed to tell Ug about the location of a bunch of wooly mammoths in exchange for an allotment of mammoth sirloin.

Economics has been around for a while. It works.

Now, stay with me -- you're not going to read another apologia defending proprietary software and the practice of manipulating perceptions for quick profit at the expense of effective and secure information facilities. Quite the opposite. Open source must prevail, because proprietary stuff has absolutely failed us. The backbone of our systems of commerce and finance and communication and education is vulnerable to the malicious intentions of the totally anonymous builders of worm-borne botnets. It is vulnerable because proprietary products engender a widget-FUD approach to solutions, which always introduces vulnerability.

Open source business models typically predicate themselves on the subsequent sale of services to those who downloaded the product for free. That works -- occasionally. Some open source organizations have the capital and management know-how to emulate masters of services revenue such as IBM, PwC, Accenture, etc. But if you can do that why spend valuable resources developing the product in the first place?

The problem isn't just one of opportunity cost; there's a fundamental disconnect in the prospecting portion of the services-follow-on model. The problem is that its practitioner has selected by definition those prospects who are willing to explore, download, and tinker to arrive at their solutions. They are smart enough and adventurous enough to know how to do some significant portion of it themselves. And they know how to save money.

Contrast that with the typical proprietary IT services customer. To them, the tradeoff is between putting energy into IT versus putting energy into the main focus of their enterprise, whatever that happens to be. They want one direction in which to point a finger when things don't work right, and otherwise they don't want to be bothered thinking about it. To help them avoid thinking about it they open their wallets early and often.

Open source needs a new business model. It can't survive on services customers whose focus is on saving money by doing as much as possible themselves. (Customers like my own company, for example.)

As it happens, there is a model -- a delightful, beautiful, effective, perfect business model staring us in the face. It not only delivers economics to its practitioners, it delivers security and manageability to its clients.

This entire business model is embodied in one of the most wonderful documents ever conceived by mankind. That document is the occupancy permit.

A valid occupancy permit attests to right of a building to be occuppied, of course. But a lot of other attestations are required to constitute that right. The occupancy permit attests to the fact that:

The building was designed by an architect who was duly licensed by the proper public authorities.

The architect has been paid in full, or is satisfied that she is likely to be paid in full.

Assuming it's a commercial building, the same goes for the engineers.

Ditto the general contractor. And its subcontractors.

The building inspector, who represents the duly constituted municipal or regional authority, is satisfied that the structural, electrical, plumbing, gas, and other subsystems have been built to code, that is, to standards that have been established by a duly constituted authority.

Duly constituted environmental, zoning, health and roadway authorities have signed off on the building's compliance with their duly constituted codes.

Literally dozens of professions are involved in the permitting of a building. Each profession requires its practitioner to have a valid, revokable credential. A goal of each profession is, of course, a real estate infrastructure that meets standards of quality, reliability and manageability.

The less frequently articulated, but no less important, goal of each of these professions is to ensure that its members are well compensated for the use of their time, talent, and liability.

Now there may be some intellectual property issues involved in the construction of buildings, but IP is not a big piece of it. A brand of sheetrock may offer some patented feature, but only the sheetrock producer's competitors need be even be aware of it. The patent is of utterly no concern to anyone else in the real estate food chain. It's rare for an intellectual property issue to be a significant par of the process of issuing an occupancy permit.

The key to viable open source economics is the application of public authority to the licensing of open source work product, through the use of occupancy permits.

What if our online facilities were required to carry occupancy permits in order to connect with the highway, that is, the Internet? In order to do so their owners would need to demonstrate to the permit granting authorities that the project is in compliance with public standards, meaning not only that it is secure and manageable but that the professionals involved have been properly compensated for the use of their time, talent, and liability.

So who are these public authorities? The Internet can't be governed by any nation or other geographically-based jurisdiction.

We may draw our answer from the two oldest international governance bodies in the world. Predating not only the United Nations but even the League of Nations, the International Telecommunication Union and the Universal Postal Union have been quietly creating and enforcing telephone, broadcast and postal standards through world wars, cold wars, acrimonious stalemates in General Assemblies and Security Councils and heated ideological debates about the role of international governance bodies. Hey, their role is no more ideological than that of City Hall. We may disagree about birth control for the Third World, but we all know we need a building inspector.

The world needs a City Hall.

Stay tuned right here (Kolabora.com), to find out how this is actually getting underway.

I've been in the business of hosting online meeting rooms ever since we at Delphi discovered in 1982 that communication generates more follow-on sessions than does information retrieval (Believe it or not, Delphi was originally called the Kussmaul Encyclopedia!)

In the mid eighties we provided a full-featured collaboration system (full-featured as long as you don't consider graphics to be a feature.) Most significantly, we could offer your professional group or other organization a fairly strong assurance of the identities of the people in your private space. You might have a foyer (Web site predecessor) open to the public, and different areas within your private space with fine-grained access controls and privilege controls.