Author Archives: Ed Mahoney

Jayashree – Epilogue

07 Sunday Mar 2010

Posted by in Other Stories, Storytelling

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

,

Jayashree was seated across the table from the customer representatives.  Raj was standing, delivering a PowerPoint on the scalability of Alibi Software’s backend content management infrastructure.  The customer referenced the competing system sold by Balamohan’s partners, stating how their portal seemed to provide more features.  Raj was now five minutes deep into a tangential discussion on data-centric vs application-centric content management programming.

“I’ve looked closely at their portal and agree it is very slick.  You can drag and drop just about everything.  And I think that tuning translates into the sense of being able to generate content, but think about it really.  It’s about the same level of control MySpace gives you in dressing up your web page.  It feels like there are so many knobs to adjust and it can be fun for awhile.  But how much data can you really retrieve?  And their output formats are limited to popular applications like PDF and CSV.  We give you web services APIs.  The APIs might be a bit complex for a novice user but with a limited understanding of URIs you can query terabytes of data and feed the results into your company’s own knowledge systems.  Admittedly we require about 30 days to develop new feeds for you.  But those feeds are rock solid stored procedures with sub-second response times.  The other guys give you maybe two pages of XML.  That doesn’t meet enterprise needs.  That’s little more than a toy for consumers.”  Raj paused to let that sink in.

Jayashree noted the reactions from the audience.  They laughed at Raj’s remarks and seemed to understand the difference between enterprise and consumer oriented products.  This was going to be another win.  The last year had been a whirlwind of success.  The investors were in negotiations to sell Alibi to Google and she was poised to retire if that materialized since her C-level position paid out 5 multiples of her salary in the event the company was sold.  That was Shankar’s idea.  Not that she would retire.  Jayashree was 27 years old and totally into programming.  She knew she was clever and driven but considered herself to have fairly junior skills.  She was a geek girl and planned to go back to school to get her PhD in software engineering after the Google deal closed.

The End

Jayashree – Proposal

07 Sunday Mar 2010

Posted by in Other Stories

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Jayashree asked the man she was fairly certain was the lawyer, “Will your partners be joining us?”

“No, I’m acting in the capacity of Counselor representing my clients,” he sat down as she did.  “I appreciate you being so flexible in your schedule.”

“No problem, but I’m a little uncomfortable meeting without my partners.”

“Understood Jayashree, but I don’t want you three becoming defensive and arguing amongst yourselves.  I will talk to Raj alone later today as well.  Of course I’ve already spoken to Shankar.  I assure you however that I’m not going to ask you to commit to anything without first gaining consensus among your partners.”  The lawyer paused to pour a drink of water and served a glass to Jayashree as well.  My first point is to express to you that this is just business.  You should not take this personally as my clients maintain the greatest respect for you and your team.  This legal mechanism is necessary because we are still two discrete companies.”

Jayashree was not listening close enough to catch the lawyer’s drift.  Or she didn’t really care yet.  “You’re suing us to take our company away from us.  Your clients are foot wipes to me.”

The lawyer found Jayashree’s language offensive but understood her tempestuous behavior to be typical of young software developers.  He remained professional.  “We are not stealing anything Jayashree.  Technically, you might consider this a hostile takeover.  And don’t think of that as such a bad thing.  It implies you will be recompensed for a very favorable sum.  Let me explain.”  He took a sip of water and knew he now had her attention since she didn’t retort back to him during his pause.  “During our last round of funding, we gave Shankar several share dilution options.  Did he explain this to you?”

“He just said the funding would last for about one year and that it diluted our shares down to 50% of the company.”  Jayashree was still hostile but the discussion was out of her area of expertise and any semblance of humbleness or cordialness was due to that fact.

“Well apparently he decided for himself, but we offered him various levels of dilution up to 100%.  Our offer to completely buy ownership was for $172 million rupees.  Don’t be upset with Shankar because now we are prepared to offer you $500 million rupees.  That will make you fairly wealthy.  But also, I meant what I said earlier about us still respecting your abilities.  We want you to stay on in your current capacities.  We recently doubled your salary to $512K rs per month.  That puts you on the very high end for software engineers in this country.  But we are prepared to pay you more in line with being a CTO.  We will offer you $2M rs per month.  We’ll quadruple Raj and Shankar’s salaries as well.  As upset as my clients are that we not only lost a bid to this Balamohan character and we now have competition; we are comforted knowing we have a pipeline of customers that ensures some very nice profits in our future.  So, that’s the deal.  Granted, it’s a hostile takeover, but accept it and we drop the lawsuit.  What do you think?”

“I’ll think about it.”  Jayashree left the building in a dazed ecstasy.  She was close to realizing her dreams.

Jayashree – Inglorious Basterds

06 Saturday Mar 2010

Posted by in Other Stories, Storytelling

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Jayashree walked into the Internet Café to find Raj and Shankar both waiting for her.  It gave her a sense of how important this issue was to them that they would arrive early.  She knew Raj wasn’t upset with her but hadn’t yet spoken directly to Shankar.  “Good morning guys.  I guess this is our first official day full-time on the new job?”

Raj replied, “Happy new job day Jayashree.  And this must be our new office?”  Raj seemed jovial.  That helped the mood.

“Well let me just start,” Jayashree began the meeting as she took her seat and gestured for the waiter to bring her usual morning tea.  “I met with Balamohan for dinner last night and he told me everything.  I was going to be coy but as soon as I said I missed him at the office Monday, he cut me off and came clean.  Not that he expressed any remorse.  He might have even been bragging.”

“Told you he was a jerk,” Raj again.  Shankar remained silent.  “So did he really start up a competing firm based on our idea?”

“Not exactly.  He fed our ideas to his partners, but they have one company and he has a separate business.”  Her tea arrived and she paused to thank the waiter.  “Balamohan is making money by recruiting the Ruby developers.  That’s what he mostly wanted from me – my social network of techies.  His partners might have formed their initial concept on their own, but they fleshed it out based on my blabbering.”

“So Balamohan made recruiting fees?”  Raj again the curious one.

“Not exactly.  He made his recruits purchase a bond to recompense their employers for their training and other expenses to cover their first two years of employment.  He charged a service fee for brokering the bond with a bank and received another fee from the bank for originating the loan.  Apparently he’s been doing this for several years and our venture helped him to go fulltime at it.”  Jayashree projected an incredulous facial expression.

“I’m not sure how I feel about that.  I don’t think it’s illegal because I’ve heard of the practice, but it sounds slimy to me.”  Again Raj with the response.  “He recruit anyone you know?”

“He wouldn’t say but I called 3 friends and they all confirmed he cold called and recruited them.  We can infer from this that their developers are local so we might have an edge on them with our Viet Namese labor costs.”  Jayashree was hoping to get Shankar into the dialog but he didn’t bite.  “My friends told me more.  He hired one DBA but no data mappers or architects.  They’ll manipulate most of the data at the application layer.”

“Hah, we got ‘em!”  Raj was suddenly very positive.  “Classic mistake, unfortunately made by just about everyone nowadays.”  Raj took on an authoritative tone as he explained.  “This is a huge data integration, or I should say content management, effort.  We built a data warehouse and focused on our data feed framework for the ETL processes.  We’re using Ruby for the front end, but we have stored procedures behind that written in Python.  Not to downplay the importance of the application layer  for aesthetics and usability, specifically the web services for ease of content accessibility; but we’re providing sub-second response time on our queries.  And we’ll scale at that speed for terabytes of data.  They’ll have to compromise on much smaller data sets – probably XML – can you say slow?  Their solution will be completely unscalable.”  Raj laughed and was enjoying himself immensely as he imagined the pending doom of this little competition.

Shankar finally interjected, “Well I should let you all know, our partners are suing us for malfeasance.  They brought forward the suit today demanding we forfeit all our shares to them.  Apparently this little company outbid our investors on a big contract.  And Balamohan has been talking enough to where our investors know more about our culpability for leaking intellectual capital than we do ourselves.  So we’ve got that going for us.”

Jayashree – Two Weeks Notice

05 Friday Mar 2010

Posted by in Other Stories, Storytelling

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Jayashree asked to speak privately with her manager Monday morning and told him of her plans to leave the call center in two weeks.  “I wish you success in your endeavors Jayashree,” her manager was sincere but he also wanted to talk.  “Can you tell me if you plan to work with Balamohan?”

Jayashree didn’t see that coming.  “What?  What do you mean?”

“Well, I know you two have been dating and well, he gave notice on Friday to start up some venture based on Ruby developers.”

“No.  No I don’t have plans to work with Balamohan.”  Jayashree was no longer listening to her manager.  He began discussing why it was necessary to walk her out today and then explained documents that she needed to sign.  She signed them without reading the details.  She left the tech center campus in a daze wondering what Balamohan was up to.  She would need to discuss this with her partners and arranged to meet them at the Internet Café below her apartment when they got off work.  Turned out Raj got walked out immediately after giving notice too, so they were able meet before lunchtime.

“No Raj, Balamohan and I weren’t that close.  We only had dinner together.  And only 5 times.”  Jayashree wasn’t defensive because she expected these questions.  “But I have to tell you, I told him everything.  I mean, certainly quite a bit about our plans.  I told him about our funding.  And about our target markets.  I should have known better when a guy would be so interested in listening to my geek girl babble.  I gave him everything but our source code.  I’m an idiot.  I’m so sorry Raj.”

“No Jayashree, you’re not an idiot.  You’re a beautiful woman and you deserve better than that foot wipe.  And this isn’t over.  Now we need to glean information from him.  You need to act like you don’t know and have another dinner date with him.  You need to learn what his plans are.”

“I can do that.  That boy is going to buying some dinners at some nice restaurants.  He’d better be well funded.”

Jayashree – Dinner Date

05 Friday Mar 2010

Posted by in Other Stories, Storytelling

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Jayashree was out to dinner with a guy she’d been casually dating for the last few months.  Being somewhat of a rebel herself, she liked the fact he’d go to work unshaven.  Balamohan worked at the call center with her and in addition to being fairly attractive, he seemed to enjoy spending his extra income on taking her to fine restaurants.  And he especially liked listening to her talk tech.

“When are you going to show me the data rack in your kitchen Jayashree?”  Balamohan said this quite nonchalantly as he spread butter on his naan.

“When you have a need to see it Balamohan.  It’s all very sensitive given the work I am doing now on the Alibi software.  I’m thinking of installing a biometric control to my apartment door.”  Jayashree enjoyed the coy dialog.  She’d have lost interest long ago in Balamohan if he didn’t express some forwardness.

“Well then, tell me my little princess programmer, when are you going to quit the call center and start fulltime on Alibi?”

Jayashree took a moment to finish chewing her bite of lamb vindaloo.  “Funny you should ask.  I plan to give notice on Monday.  You think I should give two weeks?  I’m not sure I want to.”

“You should offer two weeks.  It’s expected.  But it won’t matter.  They’ll walk you out the door immediately.  Ever since we signed that telecom client, they take zero risks.”

“Good to know, thank you.  You seem so plugged into everything at the office.”  It was a compliment as Jayashree was duly impressed by his political acumen.  “Would you excuse me please?  I need to freshen up.”

Jayashree left her mobile phone on the table as she rose and walked to the restroom.  Once she was out of sight, Balamohan picked up her phone and reviewed her recent call list.  He wrote down the numbers he didn’t already have or recognize.

Jayashree – Punch Drunk

05 Friday Mar 2010

Posted by in Other Stories, Storytelling

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

The 3 entrepreneurs walked out into the street.  The Ruby application designer, the Python content delivery specialist, and the guy with the smarts.  Jayashree began the dialogue.  “Shankar, you’re a good talker!”

“Thank you, Jayashree, but I didn’t really talk much.”  Shankar lit up a bidi.  He was the youngest of the three.

“Then you’re a good listener Shankar.  You’re good at something.  Good job in there!”

There was consensus among them that they did well and were positioned for success.  They could totally fail and they would still be making double what they could anywhere else.  Good times.

“So what did we agree to in there, Shankar?”  That came from a sobering Raj.

Shankar was on his game now.  He passed the bidi to Raj.  “We set the terms for our managerial discretion in a budget construct of 10%.  That’s juxtaposed to our ownership of 50/50, but it’s their money.  And it should be fairly easy for us to measure.  They funded us for what we both expect to last one year.  So they debit our commercial account once per month to establish the budget under our control.  We access that electronically so I’m thinking you could maybe give us some widget.  You know, like a mobile carrier gives you illustrating minutes used and remaining?  Can you do that?”

“Easily, although Jayashree would build the presentation layer.  And we’ll need people to claim their hours.”  Raj was quick to respond, thrilled at the spontaneous architectural discussion.  “I could download the balance twice a day.  We would compare that to our monthly plan budget.  Ideally it would always match but we will want to know when we’re over and under target plan.  It would be good to review that at least weekly so we would have room to stop development on either new feeds or support code based on maintaining the 90/10 split.  Yeah, this is really just more operational data.”

Shankar was just as excited.  He kept asking for more.  “Nice.  And make some headlights green, yellow and red when those programmers record their hours on time or are late.  We want to track that.  Can you provide access to this financial dashboard to our investors too?  That might demonstrate value?”

Jayashree – Conference

04 Thursday Mar 2010

Posted by in Other Stories, Storytelling

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Jayashree wore a black skirt above her knees, and a white button-down shirt.  The shirt was new, the skirt still fit her from prep school.  Raj and Shankar were similarly dressed in suits as they strode into the investors’ conference room together.  On Shankar’s advice, they took seats almost before looking at their hosts.  He thought sitting down would be better than standing.  Jayashree smiled broadly and spoke to the 3 investors, “It’s been six months since we all first met; how are all of you doing?”

“Oh we’re very well, thank you.”   The lawyer continued, “We only have a couple of discussion items.  And I understand you have an agenda to bring forward.  Do you want to start first, or…”

“Why don’t you go first, I suspect our issues might run parallel to yours’,” Shankar fended the first question for the team.

“OK then, I will.  We understand that as the operational management team, you’ve provided work direction to the development team counter to our initial direction,” the lawyer paused for comment.  No comment ensued.  “We’re actually fine with that.  We’re comfortable that you did this in a smart manner.  To disguise the support work as value-features we think is brilliant.  The reuse of operational information as dashboards for the consumer is a sustainable offering.  Well done.”  The lawyer again paused to allow a response.  This time one came from Shankar.

“Thank you for supporting us on that one.  Our issue is related to the development team itself.  We weren’t considering global resourced labor.  To adjust for the initial communication latency, we believe it prudent to recognize now that our target launch date should move to the right 20%.”

The lawyer interjected, “Are there any other concerns on working with the Viet Namese?”

Shankar was on point, “Not at all.  But our experience suggests timelines will slip a bit, at least the first year.  Might as well plan for it now.”

Another investor responded, “Shankar, we really are very impressed with your team’s managerial decision making.  We want you to know that you have earned our trust.  We want you to move forward on your projects that involve anything at all, and fit within 10% of our plan budget.  You don’t need to consult with us.  But we also want you to make resources sufficient to developing based on our market research and partnerships for the other 90% of the budget.  Does that sound like a viable plan?”

“The three looked at each other approvingly and Shankar responded for them, “It seems very doable.”

“Good,” continued the owner, “then let’s discuss our next opportunity.  Garmin is concerned about losing market share on their GPS navigational products to Google Maps mashups on the iPhone and other smart phones.  The want to feed us their street data.  It’s superior to Google Maps and they feel it will generate sales to their mobile navigators.  Down the road, they plan to provide us with streaming audio as well so that anyone can use their smart phone as a fully functional Garmin product.  In other words, their partnership with us is to move off their appliance model to a SaaS business model.  We haven’t worked out the licensing yet, but we’ll pay them a percentage of our SW sales for their content.  We told them we could deliver this in our first release.  What do you all think?”

Raj responded enthusiastically, “That’s brilliant.  I just need to add a few tables and this is very doable.”

The two teams discussed other business topics and finished their meeting on very positive terms.  It was now time to focus hard core on Ruby and Python development.

Jayashree – Plan Phase

02 Tuesday Mar 2010

Posted by in Other Stories, Storytelling

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Jayashree gathered pillows for her partners to sit on the floor.  They decided it best to continue their meeting at her apartment after the café proprietor chastised Jayashree for her profanity.  Raj restarted the discussion with a positive focus.

“Let me ask you this Shankar, is it too late to request some Python skills?”

“No, it might cause some delay but it’s not too late.  I’ll do that immediately.”

Raj continued, “Good.  I also imagine we would be managing these staff correct?”

“Yes, it’s expected, but the investors will set their initial expectations as part of the hiring process.”

“Of course.”  Raj was smiling and appeared quite comfortable now with their situation.  “We can easily direct these staff to work on what we determine.  They won’t be surprised that our tasks differ from what some suits told them.  We’ll still have to develop new data feeds but we should be able to focus enough efforts on audit logs and error checking to keep us on track.  We’ll be fine.  By the way, what are some of the new data feeds they want us to focus on?”

“Oh, I forgot to bring that up.  They already have agreements from a consortium of auto insurance companies to provide us with data they have on driver’s mileage and related information.  They want us to correlate it with other data and feed it back to them.  Apparently, there’s a lot of money in the insurance business.”

Jayashree heard this discussion from the kitchen where she was making tea.  She served the drinks now to her partners.  In truth, she’d become a bit distracted thinking about having doubled her income.  She was over her anger from earlier and was now feeling pretty good about things.  She picked up her guitar and played songs for her partners into the evening.

Jayashree – Selling Out

28 Sunday Feb 2010

Posted by in Other Stories, Storytelling

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Jayashree watched Shankar’s face as he stared into his tea cup.  “I really thought Raj would be here by now.  Just tell me the deal Shankar.  Raj probably had something come up at work.”

Shankar looked at her directly for the first time since he met her at the Internet Café.  “Well, that’s a nice segue into our investors’ feedback.  They expect you to both give notice right away.  You said you were cool with that, right?

“Depends.  How am I going to pay the rent?”

“As soon as you quit, you go on salary.  They’ll match your current rate with a 20% raise.  They would like to see your last 2 pay checks as artifacts.”

“No problem, Shankar.  What about our programmers?”  Jayashree was in an intense mood although the thought of a raise nearly distracted her.

Shankar looked out the window as he said, “You sure you don’t want to wait for Raj?”

“I’m sure.”

Shankar faced Jayashree again and looked at her for a few moments before finally saying, “Like I expected, they want to hire the programmers themselves.”  Shankar knew she expected this too but waited for a response.  Anything to delay the coming storm.  No response from Jayashree, just big round, unblinking, dark brown eyes.  “The programmers will all be skilled in Ruby.”  Did she blink?  She might have.  “They are being hired to expand our data feeds.  These guys said support features can wait until we need support.  They want to go to market with as wide a scope as possible.”  Shankar lost his train of thought as he saw Raj walking up through the window enabling Jayashree to respond.

“Holy cow Shankar!  You total foot wipe!”  Jayashree stopped as she saw Raj walk in and simultaneously realized the entire café heard her outburst.

Upon entering Raj noticed everyone in the café looking at Jayashree and Shankar, and was unsure whether to talk to them or the crowd.  He nodded toward his partners in a hushed voice, “Hey guys.”  They just stared at him quietly as he took his seat.

Jayashree maintained the hushed voice and pointed to Shankar with her left hand as she exclaimed to Raj, “Our partner just hired ruby programmers to develop ETL for new data feeds.”  She paused to let that sink in for Raj.

Raj stared at Shankar for half a minute before asking him, “Clearly, you lost the argument for developing a robust product, but did you not know that our ETL is in Python?  It’s just the web services and Jayashree’s stuff that’s written in Ruby.  This is a train wreck.  What else should we know Shankar?”

“Our ownership will now be diluted to half with these guys.  So Jayashree, you go from 35% to 25% and we each go from 17.5% to 12.5%.”

Jayashree broke the hush and shattered all sense of decorum as she shrieked, “WTF!  No deal Shankar!  No deal!  Are you hearing me?”

Shankar remained his composure and his hushed voice as he responded, “They said if you had issues with that, they could double your rate.”

East Boulder Trail Conditions: Muddy with a chance of cow paddy

27 Saturday Feb 2010

Posted by in Running

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

After several monotonous months of running 4.5 miles around the neighborhood, I finally broke out an 8 miler.  It wasn’t the best trail conditions, but I can’t run that far without something to look at.  The East Boulder and White Rock Trails are one of my all-time favorite routes.  The picture is of my MonTrail Cryptonites afterward.  I only saw one other runner on the entire 8 miles.  He was wearing some YakTrax for traction.  I’ve considered those but haven’t read any good reviews on them.  I’m curious though so let me know if you have tried them.  Consider this a 5 minute video blog…

Jayashree – Investors

27 Saturday Feb 2010

Posted by in Other Stories, Storytelling

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Shankar sat in the waiting area for 90 minutes past his appointment time.  He watched 3 groups of people come in after him and meet with his investors before he was finally called into their office.  As he walked through the door, he discovered the office was really a conference room.  His 3 investors were seated seemingly random around the table.  Papers and left-over food were everywhere on top of the table and he wasn’t sure where to sit.  And no one offered him a seat before beginning with questions.

“Are we ready to staff up Shankar?”  This came from the tall, thin businessman to his left.  Shankar understood him to be the lawyer of the team.

“Yes, I think so,” Shankar responded – striving for confidence but it came out sheepish.  “We have identified the skills we need to make us ready for prod…production.”  Shankar noticed the businessmen already each had a copy of his five bullets; apparently forwarded to them by the receptionist while he’d been kept waiting.

“That’s excellent Shankar, but you know of course we’ve already identified the skills.  We have acquiesced on meeting your demand for Ruby on Rails.  But understand the development focus will be on creating new data feeds.  Raj will need to start full-time to lead this team with data modeling and data mapping.”  This came from the stout, well-dressed man to his right whom Shankar understood to be the brother with the third man in the room who had yet to speak.

“We think we should focus on making the code more robust, more supportable…” Shankar wasn’t allowed to finish his argument.

“The focus needs to be on enabling more data feeds.”  This from the other brother who was speaking for the first time.  “More market opportunities.  We’re not going to be successful simply starting with the American criminal justice system.  What is it you guys are always saying?  Data is reusable?  Well, we need to reuse it.  We need to start off with as many markets as possible.  Once we have some rupees flowing in, we can turn our attention to perfecting the product.  Steve Jobs didn’t include copy/paste or a decent camera in his first rev iPhone.  If Alibi 1.0 is successful, then we can be confident of funding Alibi 2.0.”

Shankar knew better than to challenge these men, but as there was a pause he interjected.  “American crime is not a small market.  Texas alone could be lucrative.”

“You don’t understand Shankar.”  Again the tall lawyer.  “No market based in America is smart right now.  The rupee is steadily gaining value over the dollar and this will continue.  We need a stable currency or we’ll be chasing our tails for profit.  We have to go after AP.  And AP is seriously security conscientious.  That’s our target market Shankar.  Now, let’s talk share dilution.”

Jayashree – Balls Out

26 Friday Feb 2010

Posted by in Other Stories, Storytelling

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Jayashree and Raj sipped tea in the Internet Café waiting for Shankar to meet them.  “I see him.”  Raj had been scanning the sidewalk.  “Remember Jayashree, we need to be clear with Shankar on our priorities.  He can talk tech, but he doesn’t have the experience to understand what’s important.”

“Gotcha Raj.”  Jayashree shifted the chairs to better seat the 3 of them.

Shankar saw them through the window and nodded his head.  Upon walking inside he greeted them individually.  “Jayashree, good morning.”  He shook her hand as they weren’t very close yet.  He sat down before acknowledging Raj as they were childhood friends.  “Raj, you look tired man.  Been moonlighting?”

“Yeah, on this little project.  Here, we printed out our funding priorities for you.  It’s paramount that you communicate this clearly to our investors.  Feel free to show it to them.”  Raj handed Shankar a sheet of paper with 5 bullets on it.

Shankar was about to ask for soft copy when Jayashree took over the conversation.  “Let me summarize for you what we need with this next round of funding Shankar.  We can’t go prod with the present state of our code.  I know it passed all our test cases, but you have to trust me when I tell you that in prod, stuff breaks.  We need audit logs.  Especially on the ETL processes.  Then we need error checking on all our web services queries.  If a query fails, we need to control what the user sees.  We have to start on these things now because we won’t have the cycles to respond to all the potential issues after we go live.  But this isn’t complex stuff either, we can recruit junior programmers.  You think your investors are going to be good with us hiring?”  Jayashree stopped talking and took another sip of tea waiting for Shankar to respond.

“Absolutely.  They understood this second round of funding would be to staff up.  A couple of things you should expect though.  They are probably going to want to recruit these programmers themselves.  They have other businesses they want to support; so I’ll be surprised if they let us hire anyone directly.  Next, I expect they will want to begin funding you both fulltime.  You need to consider dropping your safety nets and committing balls-out to this.  Are you ready for that?”

Jayashree and Raj responded in unison.  “We’ve been ready.  Don’t mess this up.”

Jayashree – Alibi

26 Friday Feb 2010

Posted by in Other Stories, Storytelling

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

Jayashree was back at the Internet Café conducting end user testing.  She was the end user.  She logged into the web server racked up in her kitchen.  A Google Maps mashup of the city filled her browser.  She’d coded the mashup.  Her app paired Google Maps with either GPS coordinates or GPS-like coordinates generated from cell tower triangulation of people’s mobile devices.  In other words, her app was Loopt.  Jayashree didn’t claim to be an original thinker, she was into value-add.  Her market wasn’t consumer, it was the enterprise.  And she took the functionality into the security domain.

Raj worked at a company that made monitoring systems for criminals.  Ankle bracelets.  He administered the database for their customers’ sensitive personal information.  They used some off-the-shelf criminal justice software and it wasn’t very sophisticated.  But by having access and knowing what data fields were important, Raj was able to model a data schema that would map data feeds from the entire criminal justice industry – if one could call it that.  Considering there are roughly 2 million Americans incarcerated, it’s a healthy market.  But that’s just one market for this information.  As Raj liked to say, “data is the ultimate reusable resource.”  Using the same system, interested employers will be able to track their employees everywhere and maintain logs of their whereabouts.  Likewise, employees will be able to demonstrate compliance to industry regulations based on such logs.  Raj and Jayashree called their app, Alibi.

This software could be applied to almost anything involving people and geography.  Back in the Internet Café, Jayashree tracked Raj and Shankar on their GPS-enabled smart phones.  She then correlated their locations to a mashup of the neighborhood crime index and their eBay reputation scores.  The test results were looking good.

Jayashree – Home Data Center

25 Thursday Feb 2010

Posted by in Other Stories, Storytelling

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Jayashree looked up at the hazy Indian sky as she strolled through the marketplace.  The aroma of spices and vendors’ cooking made her think of her kitchen – when she used to cook at home.  She dropped off 200 audio CDs among the various vendors.  The payment arrangement was consignment, so she’d go back in a week and collect based on how many each vendor sold.  She expected this to provide a decent income source for the next couple of months.  Her job in the call center covered most expenses, but she chose to live in a nice neighborhood with steep rents.  And she had expensive toys.

In the space designed for the fridge in her kitchen, she had a floor-to-ceiling data rack.  Mounted in the rack were two 865 Watt APC Smart UPS servers.  Those powered a general web and application server, 2 database servers, backup DASD, and networking equipment.  A mini fridge anchored the data rack – and added some color.  The most expensive part of all was the monthly utility bill to keep these systems powered and cooled.  She originally hosted peoples’ websites to support her home data center; but now for security it was dedicated to her partner’s application development effort.  Raj knew databases and Shankar ran the business end.  She was the programmer.  Their project was her idea and so she owned 50% of the partnership.  Well, that 50% was now really only 35%.  Investors had diluted the shares somewhat with needed funding.

Jayashree – Ruby Hacker

25 Thursday Feb 2010

Posted by in Other Stories, Storytelling

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Jayashree checked her savings balance online while her program compiled.  Just enough rupees to cover rent, but what would she do for food?  She started up another little program of hers that queried all the shared iTunes playlists visible in the Internet Café where she was working.  The program then copied the top 20 songs based on quantitative parameters she defined – essentially popularity.  CDs from that were easy to sell in the market around the corner.

Technically as an interpreted language, her Ruby on Rails program didn’t need to compile – but she used that term out of habit.  Both programs completed at nearly the same time.  She began ripping CDs off the purloined iTunes playlists.  That would cover her food for the month.  The other program would make her rich.

Great Day to Run

14 Sunday Feb 2010

Posted by in Running

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , ,

Man, what a fantastic day to get outside for a run!  Fresh, white powder.  Crisp but no wind.  And intense sunshine.  I strapped on my MonTrail Cryptonites and played a James Blunt playlist – in honor of Valentine’s Day.  I slipped once on some ice under the snow on a street near my house, otherwise the shoes grabbed the trail with confidence.  Afterward, it was too nice to go inside; so Ellie and I went sledding on a hill at Sunset Middle School.

The Painter

26 Tuesday Jan 2010

Posted by in Storytelling

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Beautiful Young Woman PaintingMy 18 year old daughter is in NY this week with her mother, auditioning first at NYU and then Syracuse.  I wanted to wish her to break a leg as I dropped them off at DIA at 7:15 am Monday.  It should have been at 6:45 am.  That would have been better for my schedule of a 7am staff call, feeding the 7 year old breakfast, and making all my much more important obligations.  But Brittiboo pulled an all-nighter doing God-knows-what in her room and was late.  And then forgot her driver’s license so we had to turn around.  Plus she kept me up all night knowing she wasn’t asleep.  I really can’t put into words just how pissed I was at her other than to say I dropped Brit off at DIA for what is probably a hugely exciting event for her without saying anything nice.  Did 16 years of IBM make me such a dick, or have I always been this way?

My life was different at her age.  I didn’t work Sunday’s in a trendy coffee shop.  During the 100 degree summers in Texas, I painted houses.  Mostly new construction.  I expected to attend college and never pictured myself doing manual labor when I grew up.  But I never thought myself above my peers and worked hard.  That paint crew taught me to appreciate the quality of our work when we were finished.  We did mostly high-end homes on Cat Mountain and Lake Austin.  The thing about painting, or construction work in general, is afterwards you can see your end product – and feel proud.  But it was 10 hours each day of intense labor.

Something I learned from it, or developed, was work ethic.  I mean, you would think that’s what I learned.  But it’s more complicated than that.  I also learned something that took me years afterward to appreciate.  I had my first experience with the anti work ethic.  I say that because it’s not non-work, it’s a different credo.  I’m not sure how to describe this but I’m referring to how intelligence equates to laziness, or the inverse.  My 1st summer, I worked alongside a HS buddy.  I’d always be hustling, working my tail off.  I’d sweat off 10 lbs. from morning to end of day.  Rob generally worked as hard as me but this one time he questioned me.  We were carrying unpainted doors to another part of the house and I’d clearly outpaced him 2 to 1.  “Ed, what the hell are you doing?  We make $5.25 an hour, and when the day is done, we’ll still be making only $5.25 an hour!”  I’d been racing like some mad dog chasing a ball.  Rob was pacing himself because he’d considered the end game.  We had different value systems.  Or Rob had one and I was still developing mine.  That was over 30 years ago.  He’s a personal fitness instructor and volunteer search and rescue dude now.  He was in the search party for that guy who died from exposure in Oregon a few Thanksgivings ago.  He moved to Grand Junction recently to run some college athletic program and he’s got me into mountain hiking.  He got me to hike my first fourteener – Pike’s Peak.

So I worked hard through high school.  I worked every semester of college – usually delivering pizzas until 3am whilst running varsity Cross Country in the fall and Track in the spring.  I got through a Masters program and to where I am now – which is comfortable.  Brittany left a dirty room for me to clean – knowing the plan was to get the carpets steam cleaned while she was out of town.  But I don’t know.  Is my teenage daughter as lazy as I think?  Or even if she is, does it matter?  Can what’s important today be what was important for me at her age?  Rob taught me I didn’t exactly have a plan when I raced to the end of the day.  Brittiboo wants to be a performer.  On Broadway.  She practices her lines, her songs and her monologues.  She got the lead in her high school play.  She seems to know how to get what she wants.  And she has a plan.  I never did at that age.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not going to ease up on her lazy ass.  I’m a dick remember?  But I will try to appreciate that she knows what she’s doing and will very likely be a star at whatever she does.

Cyber War – Game Over

22 Friday Jan 2010

Posted by in cyber war

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , ,

“Are you kidding me!  WTF Sarge!  I mean, do you have any idea what you’re asking me to do?  You might as well just ask me to kill my first born!”  I/O was inconsolable, fairly incoherent and in a state of complete disbelief as he absorbed his Console Sergeant’s command to wipe the drives of all honeypots and pwned bots under the command of the Cyber Force.  This was over 50,000 computers world wide.  But it wasn’t the difficulty in carrying out the task.  Computers are automated if nothing else.  Apparently I/O had developed an emotional attachment to his bots.

“We’re withdrawing from this theater of conflict soldier.  Report back when it’s complete.”  The Console Sergeant turned and walked out of the war room.

Nearly everyone in the room was empathetic to I/O, except Tyler.  “Let it go I/O.  We have bigger concerns.  Game over man.  We all need an exit strategy.”

“What are you talking about?”  I/O was coming to terms and seemed ready to talk logic.  “Exit strategy for what?”

Tyler addressed the entire room, SecIntel along with the Ethical Hack team.  “You heard the Console Sergeant.  We’re shutting down operations.  And we never existed.  Most of us are within a year of returning to the private sector.  What do we do for resumes?  We can’t talk about it.”  Tyler paused but everyone stared at him with blank faces.  Clearly they must have understood his point but no one had a response yet.  “So, we need an exit strategy.  We need to latch on to opportunities where the employer has at least some implicit knowledge of our experience.”

Jane was the first to suggest a plan.  “My older brother went to work for the NSA after he left the Rangers.  And after two years there he had his pick of employers.  NSA will know what we’re about.”

Tyler liked that idea.  “Sounds pretty smart.  We all need to think about this.  This war might be over but it’s not like cyber warfare itself is going away.  And we’re not going away – in terms of our skills.  We need new homes.  And those new homes are going to need a new army of bots, so you might want to be selective in how you carry out your command I/O.”

The End

Cyber War – We Have Met the Enemy, and it is Us

19 Tuesday Jan 2010

Posted by in cyber war

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

Tyler planned to spend the day in bed – Jane’s bed – playing her video games.  And he began the day like that but as his attention drifted to Jane’s concern about a possible inside attack, he logged into the Cyber Force’s VPN to research some ideas.  He couldn’t authenticate initially and then he remembered the computing policy in effect that mapped everyone’s home ISP IP address to their user credentials.  He ran into this issue when he was working from I/O’s house and recalled the network admin assigned him a temporary account without the restriction.  He tried that user account and it still worked.  Unbelievable!

Once on the network, Tyler did a telnet to a machine with some of his personal utilities.  This way he could run the utilities from within the Cyber Force data center network rather than over the wide area.  He booted up a wifi sniffer that searched the local area network for wireless access points.  He scrolled down the list it generated until he found one that clearly did not conform to the data center’s SSID naming convention as it had the default name of Linksys.  This suggested to him that perhaps the admin login was also default, and it was.  No user ID and the password was admin.  Brilliant.

Tyler then reviewed the DHCP log  which contained the MAC addresses that had been assigned IP addresses.  MAC addresses are 12 digit hexadecimal numbers in the format of MM:MM:MM:SS:SS:SS where the first 6 digits refer to the hardware manufacturer of the network adapter.  Tyler knew the Air Force was in bed with Cisco and most of the MAC addresses looked to be them – but he double checked against a list of vendors and they were all Cisco.  The Cyber Force were all on Apple computers and he didn’t see any of those vendor types, but then he spotted two MAC addresses that looked different.  He checked and sure enough these were from a Chinese manufacturer.  He cross checked against yet another list he had of known Chinese hackers and they matched that list in terms of the hardware vendor portion as well.

So now Tyler understood how the hackers got onto their network and were able to bypass network intrusion detection.  They were very likely sitting in the parking lot jacked into the Air Force unsecured WiFi.  Brilliant.  Talk about shooting yourself in the foot! Tyler called his Console Sergeant and advised him to search the parking lot.

Cyber War – Insider Threat

18 Monday Jan 2010

Posted by in cyber war

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , ,

Jane was dressing with her back to Tyler, first her panties and then her bra.  She attached the snap in front of herself and then twisted it around to the back and lifted the straps over her shoulders.  As she put on her uniform blouse, she turned towards Tyler and buttoned it top down.  She stepped into her uniform skirt and said, “Tyler, I have to talk to you on a personal subject.”

“As opposed to?”  Tyler remained in bed because he had a full 24 hours off – even though it was her bed in her apartment.

“Oh, well, last night was personal too.  And very nice, thank you.  But this is actually work related, only I need it to remain personal – between us.”  Jane was hesitant in her speech and Tyler thought she might completely drop the subject, but she persisted after a moment.  “I think the black ice against us the other day might have come from inside.  Or at least it had some inside help.”

“Well, it doesn’t hurt to think that while you research it.  I’m not sure of the current percentages, but I believe most cyber crime occurs with inside help.  And if not, it can appear that way because of the first inside hop.  This would be pretty serious Jane.  We’re not talking about employee revenge about not getting a raise.  Everyone I know is completely dedicated to their work, and the cause.”  Tyler found this less likely the more he talked.  “Jesus Jane, that drone pilot is brain dead!  And the entire Ethical Hack Unit had their homes either bombed or targeted for bombs!”

“I don’t suspect the Ethical Hack team.  I think it’s someone on SecIntel.  And that’s why I can’t talk to anyone about this.” Jane had her uniform jacket on now and stepped into her heels.  “I have to go, but can we talk later?  I need someone to search some things for me in case I’m being monitored.”

“Wow, you’ve already put some thought into this.  Yeah, sure.  We can use secure chat.  I pulled a jailbreak on a pair of Magic Jacks to create a secure tunnel across our secure chat app in the war room.  So secure chat from your mobile to mine via the Mobile Jacks.  That way you can avoid any keylogger on your desktop.  I’ll give you one of them at the start of your 2nd shift when I get in.  But before you go, can you tell me why you think it’s an insider?”

“Well, suddenly we have five vulnerabilities?  Us?  There doesn’t seem to be anything before that.  No corresponding logs tracing the ingress vector.  It doesn’t add up.”  Jane grabbed her keys, turned and left.

Cyber War – Ethical Hacking

17 Sunday Jan 2010

Posted by in cyber war

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

Tyler was in his essence as he walked his Unit and Console Sergeant through his hack.  “The SecIntel from this new dashboard is much richer than we expected.  It includes the results of the Chinese vulnerability scans.  So we know the vulnerable IPs that North Korea will exploit.  We simply exploit them first and set our trap.  The beauty here is these targets won’t ever have their data exfiltrated because the first step of our hack – the code I’ve already developed – is to redirect the hacks to our virtual environment where we can control everything.  I’m calling this Project Quarantine.  Sergeant, please sign me up for a medal.”

The Console Sergeant didn’t have much patience for over-confident software developers.  “This is good work soldier, but let’s be clear.  There will not be any medals because Cyber Command not a legitimate member of the Armed Forces.  Remember in high school or college, where you have sanctioned sports teams like basketball and football?  And then you have some new sport trying to gain awareness, and they call it a club?  Well that’s us, we’re a club.  Our funding comes entirely from Google – a freakin corporation!  We ethically hack their foreign government adversaries to keep them out of the courtroom.  Which leads me to my point.  Google isn’t paying us to quarantine.  They want these hackers dead!  So Project Quarantine is a nice start but you better think of it more as a killing field.  Now get to work on some black ice!”

Cyber War – SecIntel

16 Saturday Jan 2010

Posted by in cyber war

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Four days earlier, Tyler found it difficult to distinguish late evening from early morning in the darkness.  Now that he was sleeping on a cot in a makeshift bunk in the data center, he was completely divorced from the notion of days and nights.  Most of his interactions with measured time were in the realm of UTC or Coordinated Universal Time, oftentimes referred to by laymen as the less accurate Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).  Tyler was -5 GMT, or  minus 5 UTC, so when he looked at a data event from a sensor located somewhere in the world and that event’s time was tagged with 7:00 UTC – Tyler understood that to be 2:00 GMT in his local time zone – or 2am EST.  Tyler was sleeping 4 hour stretches in 20 hour intervals; the same as the 5 other cyber warriors of his unit though everyone was staggered by 4 hours making it possible to share a single cot.  Tyler left the cot a few minutes before the next sleeper arrived, used the restroom, and rejoined the others in the war room.  The time was Sunday, 1:00 UTC, locally Saturday 20:00 UTC, or 8pm EST.

SecIntel was briefing his unit on some new dashboards.  Jane was speaking.  Her masculine voice seriously negated the effect of her curves under that uniform.  “On this dashboard, you typically monitor the volume of high severity sensor events from suspect North Korean ISPs.  I understand ya’ll like to cull the command and control channels for source IPs to target.  We’ll we’ve tuned out some of the noise by correlating it with traffic from our honeypots in Taiwan.  The Chinese cyber warriors are known to obfuscate their source IPs by routing their attacks through multiple hops in Taiwan.  This is why we’ve established honeypots there.  We’re not any closer to tracking their sources but we have recognized a 6 hour window between increased reconnaissance traffic through these honeypots and a corresponding increased level of high severity attacks from North Korea.  By analyzing the recon activity we can guestimate the exploits.  This takes us an hour.  That gives you approximately 5 hours to set traps ahead of the attacks.  Instead of merely using this dashboard to cull a pool of IPs to begin tracking, you can now use it to set traps based on the exploit’s anticipated signature without needing to know the source IP ahead of time.  What do ya’ll think about that?”

Tyler felt like a bank robber seeing the vault door left open.  “Man, ya’ll are good.”

Cyber War – Forensics

15 Friday Jan 2010

Posted by in cyber war

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

Tyler was back working in the war room.  The shift started with an operations review from the Console Sergeant while the unit went through the turnover checklist.

“This is what we know team.”  The Console Sergeant would randomly look different unit members directly in the eye as he talked.  He might turn to you once out of eight staff, or twice out of three – completely random.  But the duration of his stare was almost always exactly two minutes without ever looking at his watch.  “The attack wiped the hard drives to various degrees before our defenses pulled the power.  So Forensics focused on our virtual war room since backups were less than 24 hours old.  They discovered 5 vulnerabilities.  Technically two vulnerabilities, one on 2 machines and another on 3 other machines.  These were both Adobe vulnerabilities and there’s no excuse for that!  We’ll deal with that later.  Working on the assumption the attack emanated from one or both of these vulnerabilities, Forensics discovered the exploit.  The command and control function leveraged the DoD messaging system which has apparently been compromised for several months.  Now, I’m not saying we’re responsible for those systems but going forward I want more focus on defensive measures.  Forensics was able to track the exploit into our personnel system working from the assumption that in order to find your home addresses, they must have compromised that platform.  The compromise is confirmed but Forensics isn’t yet sure of the extent of exfiltration.  This is everything I know to date, any questions?”  The Console Sergeant took a sip of his coffee and looked over everyone’s heads.  That was his MO for when he didn’t want questions but Tyler was too tired to notice.

“Sir, what about the black ice that took down the Drone Pilot?”

The Console Sergeant looked into his coffee cup before setting it down and turned his gaze to Tyler.  “We don’t really know it was black ice that killed the Drone Pilot.  He might have suffered an aneurysm coincidentally during the attack.  I don’t believe that of course, but we don’t have evidence yet of the black ice; it was apparently a highly sophisticated Aurora APT.  Clearly, given the attackers were wiping our drives, we can assume they accomplished their objectives.  I assure you Forensics  continues to work around the clock on this.”

Tyler didn’t have any other questions.

Cyber War – NATO

14 Thursday Jan 2010

Posted by in cyber war

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

Tyler was falling in and out of sleep at the keyboard.  He was tracking 17 targets and had laid traps for 5 of them, but the usual adrenalin wasn’t there.  Eight hours earlier his house was bombed by his enemies.  He was spared from having to witness the head and limbs being separated from the UPS driver’s torso because first the flash blinded his video feed and then the blast blew apart the camera.  But the drama had left him drained.

After the blast he crawled out the egress window of his basement office and called his Console Sergeant.  The Console Sergeant immediately contacted the rest of the unit working from home and they successfully diffused additional bomb attempts.  So Tyler was now working at the home office of Cyberman First Class, Carl Weaver.  Carl’s unit called him I/O because the guy could hook stuff up.   Remember the movie Independence Day when David (played by Jeff Goldblum)  jacked his Apple laptop into the console port of an alien space ship – apparently with a universal serial bus cable?  Well in the real world, I/O was the guy who could probably actually do that.

I/O called over to Tyler to wake him, “Dude, you watching your dashboards?”

“Hmm, yeah, yeah.  I’m tired man.”

“Go lie down in my guest room, I got your dash.”  I/O paused but knew Tyler wasn’t moving and wasn’t likely to reply either so he struck up a line of conversation to see if he could stimulate him.  “You hear about the drone pilot?”

“No man, I just saw them carry a stretcher into their war room.  What happened?”

“Well they follow the same protocol as us but one of them was beta testing some new VR gear.  He’s brain dead.”

“What!  Are you fucking shitting me?  Holy shit!”  Tyler was alert again.

“I shit you not.  And here’s the deal.  Those drone pilots are Air Force man.  That theoretically  pulls NATO into this.  The  articles of NATO don’t cover cyber war – not that the President has ever acknowledged this as a war – but attacking the Air Force constitutes an attack on a recognized NATO member.  Up ’till now, NATO considered this a U.S. / China trade war.  The shit has hit the fan.”

Cyber War – Home Theater

13 Wednesday Jan 2010

Posted by in cyber war

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, ,

Tyler sat in his game chair booting up his home theater.  The console sergeant ordered the unit to work from home after some oriental black ice took out the war room.  No one on his team was injured but he saw them carry a stretcher into the Drone Pilots’ war room on his way out the door.  Good thing his transfer to the Ethical Hack team full time came through – SecIntel was going to take some shit for this.

The Chinese sourced most of their attacks out to North Korean cyber mercenaries, and those guys weren’t known to have black ice capable of causing physical injury.  Tyler’s team only had two confirmed kills and they’d been at this for awhile.  Their black ice manipulated the target’s monitor and other I/O devices to stimulate a heart attack.  It required the target be physically susceptible and that was a very small population, but it helped spread fear.  All’s fair in cyber warfare.

Protocol would have placed Tyler on a jet to their disaster recovery site, but a funny thing about the Internet.  DARPA created the Net as a measure of robustness for critical computing systems.  The idea that internetworking would add redundancy.  This irony is not lost on hackers.  Tyler’s DR site went down with the same attack that took out his war room.  In retrospect, it’s better to maintain a DR site offline.  But the U.S. Cyber Command is resilient, or at a minimum his unit subscribes well to the consumerization of I/T.  Tyler’s unit was able to work from home.  Home Theater didn’t refer to Tyler’s personal audio/video equipment, but to his home war room.

The system was now fully up and Tyler scanned his situational dashboards.  He heard the brakes of a truck pull up outside his house.  He didn’t have a window view of his front porch but had a video cam out there and brought that up on one of his dashboards.  UPS.  Tyler couldn’t recall any outstanding shipments and googled the UPS tracking site.  Meanwhile the UPS driver placed the package at Tyler’s door and clicked on his wireless PDA to indicate the delivery.  Before he could turn halfway to walk back to his truck, the package exploded, setting fire to Tyler’s house.  The driver became the 2nd official U.S. casualty of cyber war.