Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog | Vlad Mazek on IT, Business and Technology

Grumble Grumble Grumble

Posted: 3:36 pm
January 7, 2009

ExchangeDefender, OwnWebNow
2 Comments

This was originally intended for OWN Blog, but I could not quite manage to make the post respectful or free of profanities, so Vladville it is.

I want to let you in on something I’m thinking about.

The most exciting product I have is ExchangeDefender. There are days when I just sit there, logged into one of the clusters and watch the lines pop up a few times a second: Detected 112 SPAM, 5920 SureSPAM [Quarantined].

Each time a line pops up on my screen, a little dream of a spammer dies.

It’s the best job you can have on the Internet while still keeping your clothes on.

When I started writing this software in the 90’s I never thought we’d make it to year 2000 doing this, much less 2009. But here we are in 2009. Now we have new enemies, it’s not just Vlad vs. Spammers.

Our users are getting progressively more retarded. (#2)

Our partners are getting dumber by the minute. (#1)

Our battle is no longer against the Spammers. (#3)

The reality of the situation is that we’ve reached the level of technology use in business where education is not enough to keep stupidity away.

#1 Lot’s of people made lot’s of money with ExchangeDefender. It seems they invested it in hiring people dumber engineers because not a day goes by that I don’t hand myself a full faceplant reading some of the feedback and support requests. It’s as if people actively try to shoot themselves in the foot, screw their customer, and ask us to find a more lenient way for them to cover it all up. This leads to #2:

#2 I have lost the number of counts I have personally had to explain to people that the UPS message that we blocked as SPAM was actually a forged SPAM and not really from UPS. I am not a violent person, but I wish I could jump through the phone and choke the stupid fuck, who had the above explained to him, that still wanted the attachment just in case.

#3 The most dangerous people happen to be semi-technical ExchangeDefender users that think they are smarter than the average bear. You know, the CPA network managers (happy new year dear!) who think they have this invisible shield around their network that guards their users from running around the room with scissors and impaling themselves twice a week.

Our threat portfolio has now grown beyond the realm of email.

My personal problem with the above is that it’s not our job to protect users from their stupidity. Web filtering is clearly a realm of local area network policy management, not cloud service provider who takes the brunt of the attack.

Here is a way to simplify the situation: When you are being attacked by thousands of Russians, Chinese, organized criminals and mobsters you do want to have a 500 lb gorilla in front of you. When your dumbass employee wants to download TV shows at work, you beat them with spare office furniture.

That’s just my opinion. Check the local laws, it may not be legal. God bless Texas.

Nobody gives a flying f… what I think:

So we’re extending our ExchangeDefender portfolio to include web filtering.

The ExchangeDefender Desktop Agent (www.exchangedefender.com) will have a new beta available mid-January with a web filtering addon that will explicitly protect users from malware. We’re going to try our best to make this free.

Depending on the reception, we will extend it to include policy management and other categories, though that product will come at an additional cost (approximately double what ExchangeDefender currently costs). Almost the entire fee will go to pay for the definition files because, believe it or not, people that browse around pr0n sites to categorize them as pr0n charge for a list of those web sites. A lot.

It has been my firm belief that no infosec company should ever behave like a mob and deliver “as much protection as you can afford” so it comes as a bitter change of course for us to offer an expensive addon to the service.

Anyhow, just thought I’d let you know what’s on my mind. If anyone on my staff would like to take a crack at this blog post and make it sound better than “You all suck, so we have to change our approach to protecting you” please let me know 🙂

Got Class?

Posted: 9:16 pm
January 5, 2009

Gators
1 Comment

What a fantastic year it has been in the world of college football. University of Florida dominated the scene again, only to be shamed by an unranked team that has always been able to dial it’s number. It’s great to be a Florida Gator.

Earlier this year we went to Atlanta to watch the Gators take on University of Alabama. I have to admit that I have never seen that many polite and courteous people in one place. They dressed as if they were going to a formal dinner. Hats, jackets, all very tasteful. Not a single Nascar-looking fan among them all.

Florida fans… well, I’m one of the more reserved and respectful UF Alums. That ought to tell you something! When Florida fans get off the bus it looks like the insane asylum just had a kegger. God I love my people!

Katie did feel bad about how nice all the Alabama women looked. I tried to comfort her, it’s hard to find a tasteful piece of clothing in blue and orange. No matter how nice it is, you come off looking like a lunatic.

So here is one to the Bama fans. Very classy.

Now it’s on to Florida to defend the South. Tickets in hand for the game on Thursday and we are heading to Miami baby! Tim Tebow jersey and all. Bring out the crazies! Just to give you an idea of how demented UF folks are, here are some Tim Tebowisms. Enjoy:

# When Tim Tebow holds the Heisman, it puts down its stiff arm.
# The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a freight train, it’s Tim Tebow.
# God wanted to create the world in 10 days, Tim Tebow gave him 6.
# Life doesn’t give Tim Tebow lemons. Life asks him which fruit he wants.
# Tim Tebow doesn’t bowl strikes, he just knocks down one pin and the other nine faint.
# Tim Tebow’ house has no doors, only walls that he walks through.
# When Tim Tebow was denied an Egg McMuffin at McDonald’s because it was 10:35, he threw a football at the store so hard it became a Wendy’s.
# Tim Tebow pummels that bridge when he gets to it.
# Superman is the Tim Tebow of superheroes.
# Tim Tebow doesn’t punch in to work. He stiff arms.
# Tim Tebow can eat five times his body weight in tigers.
# Tim Tebow won the Tour de France on a unicycle to prove to Lance Armstrong it wasn’t a big deal. He thinks yellow wristbands are gay.
# What color is Tim Tebow’s blood? Trick question. Tim Tebow does not bleed.
# Tim Tebow ordered a Big Mac at Burger King, and got one.
# Tim Tebow can get Chick-Fil-A on Sundays.
# If at first you don’t succeed…you are not Tim Tebow.
# Superman’s only weakness is kryptonite. Tim Tebow laughs at Superman for even HAVING a weakness.
# When the bogeyman goes to sleep every night, he checks the closet for Tim Tebow.
# Superman wears Tim Tebow pajamas.
# Tim Tebow has been to Mars. That’s why there’s no life on Mars.
# In the beginning there was nothing. Then Tim Tebow stiff-armed that nothing in the head and said “Get a job”. That is the story of the universe.
# When Tim Tebow wants popcorn, he breathes on Nebraska.
# When Tebow spikes the ball, he strikes oil.
# Jimmy Hoffa is buried under the Meadowlands because he tried to tackle Tim Tebow and got run over.
# The speed limit on the University of Florida campus is 20 because that’s how many defenders Tim Tebow runs over on one play.
# When Batman is in trouble, he turns on the Tim Tebow signal.
# God has a Tim Tebow complex.
# Rome wasn’t built in a day because Tim Tebow wasn’t born yet.
# Barry Bonds didnt take steroids, he injected tim tebows saliva.
# Tim Tebow gets called for roughing the tackler.
# Tim tebow once sneezed at the line of scrimmage and knocked over a linebacker.
# A meteor didn’t kill the dinosaurs; Tim Tebow did in a pickup football game.
# Tim Tebow sleeps with a night light. Not because Tim Tebow is afraid of the dark, but the dark is afraid of Tim Tebow.

And my absolute favorite:

When Tim Tebow does push ups, he isn’t lifting himself up, he’s pushing the world down.

So here is one to the college football, tradition and the sense of community. Gator Nation baby!

Fail.

Posted: 11:12 pm
January 4, 2009

Vladville
1 Comment

I saw this at the book store yesterday and it damn near brought a tear to my eye:

That bull is the symbol of the American pride: confidence and hope in the American financial enterprise. It stands on West side of the New York Stock Exchange and is frequently surrounded by tourists, tapping it and taking pictures from every angle imaginable. That is the spirit of America, what all of us sacrifice hours of each day to contribute to: by working, by saving, by investing and by building this great nation.

Yet, for the second time in the history of United States of America, massive fraud and borderline criminal behavior has compromised the faith we, and the rest of the world, hold in the economy and the those at the very top of the commerce regulatory chain. Everyone from the crooked CEOs now in jail to secretary Paulson to Bernake to congress and sleepy W have smashed the American dream to pieces.

How do we rebuild the promise of America?

By doing our job, doing it as well as we can and not making the mistakes we’ve made in the past. Tomorrow many of us will go back to work after a long and well deserved holiday break, let’s remember what brought us to the leadership role and what will keep us at the top: AMBITION.

Vladcast is Back!!! #13

Posted: 7:01 pm
January 3, 2009

Vladcast
8 Comments

Welcome to 2009! Ok, so doom and gloom up front: It’s going to be a tough year. We’ll still move forward, we’ll still make a lot of money, it’s just going to be tougher all around.

In this podcast I describe the practice I’ve put myself through during the past 4 months since coming back to work @ OWN full time. It runs about 17 minutes and really good stuff starts at 5:20 mark.

But is that such a bad thing? No. It’s when we are tried the hardest that we perform at our very best. It’s also the judgement time for those who spent their more fortunate times without regard for how to design a business that performs. I have been talking to people all over the world and the response is unanimous: It’s getting tougher but we’re doing well.

I believe we’re very lucky. Yes, lucky. This is the time to take a hard look at ourselves, punishing look at those that are no longer with us, and gain some strength from the whole affair. What can we do today to be stronger tomorrow so we can rock out in 2010 and beyond? Opportunity knocks every day.

Play VladCast: [audio:http://www.vladville.com/media/Vladcast13.mp3]

Listen to my attempt. For some reason, people love this format. As Susan likes to remind me: I love your sensual voice Vlad! I’m going to say what’s on my mind, and much like V… I hope you talk back and give me ideas. I would love to be fortunate enough to have enough time to talk and argue with each and every one of you. No such time, for any of us, I’m afraid. But hey, shoot back from your office chair and let’s see if we all can’t help one another out.

I’m taking the first step. Hear it out, tell me what’s next: vlad@vladville.com

Add feed to iTunes / File Attachment: Vladcast13.mp3

And now something new…

Posted: 9:53 pm
January 1, 2009

Podcast
Comments Off

One of my most critical failures of 2008 has been my role in the perpetual growing pain that is Own Web Now. The moment we had enough servers, we were again over capacity. The second we finally finished training the new staff, the new stack of resumes showed up. The moment everything worked just remarkably we added more hardware or added new features that caused new issues.

Thats life, thats business.

But it takes a toll on a man. So about two months ago I decided not to allow my business to run me an my agenda. There are weeks of my life in 2008 where I can honestly say I did absolutely nothing but keep the machine up and running, or as we say around the office: “I have been holding Internet together all day and my arms are tired.” When I did get the little meandering tasks in check I was so disoriented or had so little time before the next meeting that I never even got back to my agenda. So I made a lot of changes and the productivity went up. Took about two months to perfect it but now I’m ready to talk about it.

Tune in (really, it’s a podcast baby!) tomorrow on vladville.com and hear all about it.

P.S. Going to come back to the Mic in 2009 😉 Most of my close friends have told me that I don’t come off as great on the blog as I do in person so let’s see if I can throw in some extra entertainment value your way.

Welcome to 2009!

Posted: 11:44 am
January 1, 2009

OwnWebNow
Comments Off

Happy New Year, may all you’ve wished for come true.

If you want it, today is the first day to work on it. None of that “Oh, I’m tired” or “It’s a holiday” or “I’ll start it tomorrow, strong!” lazy talk. Success takes hard work and near compulsive dedication to it. It doesn’t matter what day or time it is, or what other plans you had.

Instead of beer during today’s SEC humiliation of some other team grab a Netbook and crank out some plans during commercials.

What works, works…

Posted: 10:34 pm
December 31, 2008

Awesome, OwnWebNow
Comments Off

Last day of the month, last day of the quarter, last day of the year.

On behalf of my family and my Own Web Now family I would like to thank all of you for making OWN products a part of your business. I absolutely love my job and considering it’s primary objective is to make you money… I’m thankful for you putting in so much into mine. 2008 was off the charts, literally, beyond all expectations. Thank you!

Today we were sitting around doing cleanup, looking over reports, charts and straightening out the automated billing and reporting systems. Two things seemed very interesting:

1) The strong got stronger. Much stronger.

2) The weak got smaller and quite often disappeared.

Now this is normal because the small fish is always the first to disappear. No need to explain that one, mostly because nobody cares.

The strong getting stronger is actually very interesting. When we plot the numbers we clearly see our large account and mixed account growth spike as the year goes on and take particular bursts – when the political runoff in US seemed to favor more moderate candidates, when the primaries were held, when the election started to look in Obama’s favor, when Obama was actually elected, when we lost 500,000 jobs..

Partners that bought different services and used our product mix and our support kicked it up a notch the worse the world appeared to get. This is because people with the mix and an assortment of tools are in business for one thing – to collect the money for serving the need.

Partners that only bought one line of services, or seemed to trial but never get beyond 30 days or even sign up a customer nearly disappeared. This is your typical analysis-paralysis, where they perhaps spent too much time trying to figure out the best of breed and in the process ran out of business or even talked their prospects out of things with tier own doom and gloom. Techies have a nack for talking way past the sale or finding ways to break it instead of closing it. Se la vi.

The only way we can explain the economic downturn of 2008 is in our ability to effectively guide our partners towards a business plan that capitalized on the new business fears and lack of desire for commitment. Lot’s of our clients clients didn’t want to build their own vaults, servers or security appliances.

I think this is what 2009 and onward will prove even more conclusively – that people who are in business of technology will continue to prosper because business responds to business demand. Geek Squadders of the world that are in technology business stuck in how broken technology and every aspect of it is – well, they’ll hopefully end up employed by someone who can use grunt monkeys.. as I say, we’re always hiring 🙂

Partners that realized that when prospects aren’t buying new servers there is money in the current infrastructure or in hosting made a killing.

If you were in that pile, congratulations on an awesome 2008.

Thank you for all your money!

Plans, Plans, Plans

Posted: 11:58 pm
December 30, 2008

OwnWebNow
Comments Off

The past week and really the bulk of my inbound mail activity since the first V… newsletter has concerned one topic: planning for the new year.

I have tried my best to respond to all of those messages (by the way, if you want to email me I’m at vlad@vladville.com and actually do enjoy the feedback) because most of them seemed both cautious about the economy and curious as to where I’m thinking.

Let me start off by saying that at OWN we operate on business plans. And when it comes to business plans, we look at the very least a commitment of 24 months. This takes into account the time to plan, build, deliver, support and think of the next stage of the product. Some stuff makes it, some doesn’t. But each has a clear agenda: 1) Make money 2) Build audience for future projects and business plans. One feeds the other.

Now business plans are what you make of them. And you can execute multiple business plans at the same time. As a matter of fact, you better have more than one. In the IT space, where careers disappear on a dime, being a one trick pony is a recipe for disaster. It also makes failure easier to deal with and ultimately survivable.

So what is going to work in 2009? 😉 Yeah, sure….

For us, the entire Q1 of 2009 is all about firming up what we are doing. Just about everything we’re currently involved in is firing on all cylinders and I’m really not looking forward to doing anything “new” at all. Not everyone has received their marching orders but we’re basically revisiting all our ducks and making sure all the bugs and kinks are worked out. Most of the Q1 is going to be about the doom and gloom of 2008, then about the new administration and finally towards some clarity about what the markets are thinking about the financial stimulus. I think the next quarter really clears up a lot of the holding pattern games we’ve seen.

Once that’s done, I want to be ready to fire on all cylinders.

New Years Resolution

Posted: 5:35 am
December 30, 2008

IT Business
1 Comment

~~Lose weight~~. ~~Be less ugly~~. ~~Change underware daily~~. Be realistic Vlad!

I’ve always seen New Years resolutions as these big optimistic goals, only to be crushed into reality somewhere mid-January.

I really love what I do. I know it sounds crazy. My wife has a running joke with me where she repeats one of C. Mongomery Burns’ lines (on his deathbed): “My only regret is that I didn’t spend more time at the office!”

And when I look at what we are doing today, it is really setting up the company to be a continued success years down the road.

So with the look to 2009, I’m not making a huge ambitious goal of a new resolution.

I am instead looking at the biggest disappointments of 2008.

If anything, I think I’ve been too negative in 2008. Though it turned out to be right, it still seems like dancing at a funeral.

So here is to 2009, looking forward to it being a good one. Where is my Obama check!

What’s on sale?

Posted: 4:03 pm
December 28, 2008

IT Business
1 Comment

So here we are at the end of 2008, facing an ugly report from the retail sector and it all seems like a neverending car commercial. You know the kind, “It has never been a better time to buy a Toyota, you will not see discounts like this soon” followed by the “Surprise Factory Overstock” and “End-year model clearance” and “Toyotathon” and..

What can we learn from these fools who have finally either run out of consumerist steam or finally convinced their entire audience they are blatant liars?

First, our marketing has to change in the field of technology. Specifically, in a way that demonstrates the real value of services that are clear, objective, comparable and measurable. You can’t take “trusted advisor” to the bank, nor can you sign someone up with “Over 10 years of experience”

What are you selling? What will it cost me? What will I make out of it?

Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog