Good Guys Bring Down the Mega-D Botnet

Chalk up one for the defenders. Here’s how a trio of security researchers used a three-step attack to defeat a 250,000-pronged botnet.

Emotions from neurobiologist António Damásio

Consider this comment on emotions from neurobiologist António Damásio:

“...emotion is not a luxury: it is an expression of basic mechanisms of life regulation developed in evolution, and is indispensable for survival. It plays a critical role in virtually all aspects of learning, reasoning, and creativity. Somewhat surprisingly, it may play a role in the construction of consciousness.”

7 Qualities of Leadership

Remember, when you are looking for a good leader don't be too quick to count yourself out of the running. The leader you are looking for may be you.

The seven qualities you need to be a leader or perhaps the qualities you look for and expect, in others.

Let's say you need to find a candidate who can not only lead and transform your organisation but also motivate, drive and carry all before them.

You have to be;

1. Smart and insightful when dealing with complex problems (cognitive complexity)
2. Mature and emotionally stable. Able to deal with ambiguity and complexity
3. Strong willed and possess self-awareness and self-management skills
4. Strong people person with great interpersonal awareness and interpersonal acumen
5. Able to build flexible and robust solutions
6. Able to instill confidence in others
7. Continually learning, growing and looking for ways to improve one's self, others and the organisation.

Leaders can follow others. Practice supporting and leading from behind, at a distance or remotely. Trust people to do their job and to know better.

Leaders treat change as an opportunity, an adventure and an experiment to carry you to the next level.

Change is something to embrace, to learn from, rather than something to fear, or fight against and conquer.

Allow your people the courage to try and fail. Be there to gather them up, put them back together and then let them try again but this time with more guidance.

A View of LinkedIn - Optimisation info

Here’s a quick way to optimise your Linkedin profile so that you’re website, blog or business are on display and available to the every attentive Search engines.

• Step 1. Log into your LinkedIn Account
• Step 2. On the right hand navigation menu, click on Edit My Profile
• Step 3. The dropdown box for Websites Let’s you choose between “My Website, My Company, My Blog” and
• Choose and use Other.

Next in the box to the right add a title for the site you want to promote. Remember to use a real title and not just the generic 'url:link' e.g. 'Smart Guy Web-Blog'.

Now, add the URL of the page you want the title to link to and check the link works because broken links are not only damned annoying but also reflects badly on your claim to have the ability to 'work to tight deadlines and have an eye for details.'

Lastly, check where people are landing in your site. Make sure it is at the 'optimum point' on your Web-blog site and satisfy yourself that they are seeing the best of you and your site.

How Slideshare Can Help Your Business

How Slideshare Can Help Your Business : Marketing :: American Express OPEN Forum

Visual communication may have been an art form, but these days it seems that it is one being adopted by more than just a select few.

Whether you count yourself among the converted when it comes to visual presenting or not, there is a site called Slideshare that you need to pay attention to. Often described as “the Youtube of Powerpoint” – the site has thousands of presentations from independent businesspeople, consultants, large brands and authors. On the site, you can learn just about anything – including what is really happening with healthcare reform, and what to blog about if you happen to start your own blog.

Get free business advice from experts. By far the best benefit Slideshare has to offer is great thinking from very smart people, all for free. On the site you can get visual advice on how to use just about any social media site (like Flickr, Facebook or Twitter), learn how to advertise effectively, see examples of what other businesses are doing, and even understand better some of the external forces impacting your business, such as government policy or consumer behaviour trends. All of this information is readily accessible, shareable and highly useful.

Share your story visually. There is nothing people like better than a story, and chances are you have a fairly interesting one to tell behind the founding of your business. Not everyone can produce flowing lines of great prose to describe why their company is great, but if you think about your company presentation as a story – then all you need are the right images to piece that story together. For example, what did your original business plan look like? Or where was your very first employee group photo taken? These images can help you to tell your story in a visual and compelling way that is much more interesting than a few paragraphs on your about page. And once you do it on Slideshare, that presentation is easy to embed onto your own company website (just like a YouTube video).

Use contests for free promotion. One of the things that gets the most attention on Slideshare are the contests that they consistently hold. They are typically judged by business visionaries, and heavily promoted across the entire site. Contests give you a chance to compete with others to have the best story to tell, and help you to connect your story with more people. Along the way, chances are the process of putting a story together for your business will help you to get better at telling it too.

Demonstrate your expertise. If your business has anything to do with offering some sort of service or expertise, Slideshare can be a great way for you to share your expertise. In addition to uploading your own presentations on any topic, you can also be a content curator and find presentations on any topic of your choice and aggregate them together. This aggregation can be highly useful for people in your target audience, and help to position you not just as an authority with their own smart thinking, but as an expert who can help sift through a flood of information online and identify the most useful.

Get leads directly from presentations. Slideshare just introduced a new feature on their site where you can integrate lead generation into your presentations – so now the white paper model of getting data for sales leads can be embedded right into your presentation. This can allow you to create an easy integrated way to get more information from the people you might reach through your presentations, and extend a model for marketing that you might already be using if you are a services based business.

War is Over - Yoko Ono and John Lennon

A Xmas message from Yoko Ono and John Lennon!

Click on the picture for a multilingual presentation

How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room | Mark Lynas | Environment | The Guardian

How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room Mark Lynas Environment The Guardian

Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait.

The failure was "the inevitable result of rich countries refusing adequately and fairly to shoulder their overwhelming responsibility", said Christian Aid. "Rich countries have bullied developing nations," fumed Friends of the Earth International.