R.I.H-P

She started it

PALO ALTO, Calif. — The Hewlett-Packard Company disclosed today that it may be too stupid to survive. In announcing its fourth quarter and full year results for 2012, the hardware company said it would write off $8.8 billion of the $10.5 billion it spent to acquire a software company just last year.

Beginning in 2001, under then-chief executive Carleton S. Fiorina, HP has spent $66.25 billion on acquisitions – and that’s just counting the deals valued at $1 billion more.

HP’s total market capitalization today: $23 billion. By any measure, that’s a stunning destruction of shareholder value.

He bought it
He sold it

HP said the $8.8 billion write-down today followed its discovery that the software company it bought just last year was worth only a fraction as much as HP thought it was. (HP accused the company, Autonomy, of a multibillion-dollar accounting fraud. Autonomy’s former chief executive, Mike Lyons denied HP’s allegations.)

It’s her problem now

If HP’s assertions about Autonomy are true, the question is: How did an $8.8 billion accounting fraud get past HP’s accountants and lawyers? How did it get past the HP board of directors?

And as long as I’m asking questions, here’s another: What the heck is Autonomy, anyway? Here’s what it says on the company web site:

Autonomy, an HP company, is a market-leading software company that helps organizations all over the world understand the meaning in information. A pioneer in its industry, Autonomy’s unique meaning-based technology is able to make sense of and process unstructured, ‘human information,’ and draw real business value from that meaning.

Too bad HP was not able to use that software to draw real value from its string of disastrous acquisitions.

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It’s Complicated

ENCRYPTION: IT IS VERY COMPLICATED, CUMBERSOME, AND THERE’S A LOT OF NUMBERS INVOLVED WITH IT.

Someone snuck into the South Carolina Department of Revenue database in August and made off with the names and Social Security numbers of 3.6 million South Carolinians. (To put it in perspective, the population of the entire state is 4.6 million.) Some 387,000 of those names and Social Security numbers were paired with credit card information.

All of the Social Security numbers and thousands of the credit card numbers were unencrypted.

Why would any government agency — or private company, for that matter – store such sensitive personal information in an unencrypted database?

While the breach occurred in August, it was not discovered until Oct. 10, and not made public until late last week. At a news conference this week, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley explained:

The industry standard is that most Social Security numbers are not encrypted. A lot of banks don’t encrypt, a lot of those agencies that you think might encrypt Social Security numbers actually don’t, because it is very complicated, it is cumbersome, and there’s a lot of numbers involved with it.

I have no idea who is in charge of data security for the state of South Carolina, but I cannot imagine him or her saying, “Governor, let’s not encrypt sensitive taxpayer information because, you know, it’s just too darned complicated and there are too many numbers involved with it.” More likely, the numbers were preceded with a dollar sign and the budget overseers said no.

EXCEPT FOR HACKING, APPARENTLY

Gov. Haley, whose autobiography is titled “Can’t Is Not an Option,” also insisted that stopping hackers is not an option.  ”If the CIA can be hacked into, anybody can be hacked into.”

“This is a situation where a sophisticated, intelligent criminal got into a database and it’s unbelievably creative how they did it,” Gov. Haley said. “This was a sophisticated hacker who creatively looked at the system. This was no simple breach.”

Really? The investigation is under way and the authorities have not yet disclosed the modi operandi of the hacker(s). But my bet is that the hacker simply pwned a state employee into giving up his or her legitimate user ID and password to the Department of Revenue database. We’ll see.

The bottom line is this: If you assume that your system is going to be hacked — probably a good assumption if there are human beings involved — and you have sensitive information to protect, then it is absolutely essential to use strong encryption. If the thief makes off with encrypted data, all he will get is gibberish.

UPDATE Nov. 16, 2012: From ThreatPost: “NASA has enacted new policies to protect employee and other sensitive information after a laptop was stolen from an employee’s locked vehicle, exposing records of personal information on a “large number” of NASA employees. The laptop was not protected by whole disk encryption, NASA officials said, putting an undisclosed number of employees at risk for identity theft and other abuses of personal data. . . . In March 2011, a laptop was stolen that contained algorithms used to control the International Space Station; one of 48 laptops stolen between 2009 and 2011. As of Feb. 1, one percent of NASA laptops were encrypted.”

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Die Große Lüge

Hitler

While observing and participating in many early online discussions, my friend Mike Godwin in 1990 created “Godwin’s Law,” which states:

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

The concept of Reductio Ad Hitlerum applies to offline discussions as well. This political season, both major parties and their affiliated PACs (political attack committees) have been accused of “The Big Lie,” a principle first described by, yes, Adolph Hitler. In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that:

. . .  in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

(Hitler was employing the logic of Reductio Ad Judaeus; in any prolonged discussion by anti-Semites, the probability of blaming everything on the Jews approaches 1.)

GOEBBELS

Hitler’s propagandist Hermann Goebbels, perhaps believing that Winston Churchill was Jewish, applied the Big Lie to the British:

The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

 

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Negative Politics

A mean-spirited half-breed …
… A hideous hermaphrodite

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some say this quadrennial presidential campaign is disappointing, focusing too much on negative personal attacks rather than serious discussions about important issues.

George Friedman, a political scientist and chief executive of the open-source intelligence agency Stratfor, puts things in historical perspective:

Thomas Jefferson’s campaign said of John Adams that he had a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.” Adams’ campaign stated that Jefferson was “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” And Jefferson and Adams were friends.

 

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