The idea behind Freecycle is sound. It is an online forum where you can give away unwanted items and not dump them in a landfill site. There are local Freecycles around the world – I've used one in Auckland, New Zealand.

In my case, I've listed items I no longer need in the forum. People who want the items email their interest, arrange a meet up and the item is then given away. There's an alternative approach where people who need things can ask for them.

It sounds simple enough and I've used it to unclutter my garage ahead of a house move, but I've run into a number of problems with Freecycle, which make me question its value.

Problem 1: Can't be bothered. I've offered a number of items on Freecycle, had them requested and then found the person at the other end of the deal fails to pick up the item. I'm guess here that because an item is free, it has little perceived value by the recipient. Maybe there are other reasons. Either way, my first three forays into Freecycle resulted in receivers not picking up the items they had requested from me.

Problem 2: Slackness. This is closely related to problem 1. Receivers make appointments to pick up items, I wait at home for them, they don't turn up. Then they start to mess me around making more broken appointments etc. While  rescheduling is fine, we're talking about people who constantly shuffle appointments. It's rude and, from my point of view, costly.

Problem 3: Greed. I've noticed some of the receivers turning up to pick up items ask for more. In one case the picker-up wandered into my open garage asking if he could take items than were clearly not for recycling. This makes me uneasy with the process. I also don't like it when I offer item X, and get tons of emails asking if I'll also be giving away a loosely related item Y.

Problem 4: Inefficiency. When someone requests an item, I post a taken message on Freecycle. The matter should end there, but emails pour in for days and weeks after, asking if the item is still available. Not taking notice of "Taken" posts is just plain rude.

Problem 5: Venality. Some of the stuff I've distributed via Freecycle has turned up for sale on TradeMe (if you're outside New Zealand this is the local equivalent of eBay). On one level I don't care when happens to the items I've given away. Once they've gone, they've gone. On the other hand, I suspect some Freecycle users are professional scavengers – which disturbs me. Apart from anything else this undermines the idealism of the project.

Have you run into problems with Freecycle? Or are you happy with it? I'd love to hear your opinion.

A review copy of Reality Check turned up on my desk in 1996. The book by Brad Wieners and David Pescovitz (ISBN 1-888869-03-8) is published by Hardwired, the book division of Wired magazine.

According to the review at Amazon.com:

Reality Check is based on the popular and amusing futurism section in Wired magazine. It makes bold predictions about when we will see some of the wonders suggested by pundits, thinkers, science fiction and today's technological revolution.

Wondering when we'll finally see universal picture phones? Electric cars? Contact with extraterrestrial life? Tricorders? Predictions for all of those are here, along with when the two-party system will die and–of grave importance–when we'll all have virtual sex slaves.

You have to hand it to the authors for putting their reputation's on the line with the predictions listed here. Few people are so public with forecasts.

Here at the start of 2010 we're about halfway through the book (in terms of pages). So far  the authors have had more misses than hits – that's only likely to get worse as time goes on.

According to the authors this year will bring:

• Smart drugs. The description in the book is hazy, but so far, to my knowledge this doesn't look like being on the agenda.
• Robot surgeon (in a pill). While there is some robot surgery and some advances of this nature, I think the idea of swallowing a robot pill which swims through your body fixing up ailments is still a way off being an everyday reality.
• The Audio CD becomes a format of second choice. In reality this happened four or five years earlier, but seeing as the book was written in 1996 we can give the authors a big tick for this prediction. What they failed to predict is in many places the Audio CD is now third behind digital music and vinyl – but that's another story.

If you're writing an about page on a web site, compiling a brochure or putting the finishing touches to a business proposal, don't fall into the trap of adding a lengthy company history.

It is best to avoid histories altogether. If you must have one, keep it short and either stick it at the bottom of the printed page or link to the information on another web page.

Certainly don't start the page with a history lecture.

Hardly anyone cares when or where your company started.

Too many about pages begin with something like: "In 1997, three clever guys had the idea of forming a widget business and set up shop at 101 Boring Street, Dullsville, Arizona". Yawn.

Not only does a company history bore readers, it sends a message that you are self-obsessed, maybe vain, possibly even narcissistic.

Worse, Google and other search engines will pick up on this information – particularly if it is near the top of your company about page – and regard the history as more important than the valuable information potential customers search for.

This rule doesn't apply if you are selling history. For example, if you run a café in a historic building.

In 2005 I wrote about FileMaker Pro version 8 for The Sydney Morning Herald – you can read it below.

The piece is short. The SMH commissioned just 350 words. It is written for general business users and not geeky types.

Most of what I wrote at the time still stands today with FileMaker Pro version 10. On most levels FileMaker is easier to use than Microsoft Access if you're not a programmer or otherwise geeky.

I've recently discovered some aspects of Access are simpler than FileMaker. In particular, Access makes it easier to turn two straightforward flat file databases into a relational database. FileMaker can do the job, but it is far from an intuitive process.

I can't say for certain why Access beats FileMaker in this department, but I suspect it is because Microsoft designed Access from the ground up as a relational database while FileMaker was originally a flat file database. Its relational capabilities were bolted-on later. If you know of a better explanation please add something to the comments below.

FileMaker 8 by Bill Bennett

Unless you happen to have the kind of brain that is politely described as ‘antisocial’ storing, tracking, sorting and retrieving large amounts of information is best left to a machine.

In fact, data processing is what computers were doing for most of the past 50 year before they escaped from their air-conditioned bunkers and made their way on to our desktops and into our homes.

These days, the database software handling these tasks can run on standard PCs. But there’s a big problem with most of the programs designed to help you sort digital wheat from electronic chaff; they are either so complex you need a PhD in computer science to use them or they are too simple to be of much help outside of very limited applications.

Microsoft’s Access sits at the difficult end of the spectrum. There’s no doubt the database packaged with some versions of Office is incredibly powerful. You need to be comfortable with programming code to perform even the simplest tasks. And a lot of Access’ features are geared towards IT departments, not individual users. Which means it’s strictly for the professionals.

Most easy-to-use databases tend to be geared towards specific functions, such as contact managers and helping you keep track of music collections. They’re useful, but not very flexible and you need to buy a different product to manage each task, which can get expensive.

FileMaker Pro (now on version 8, $499) bridges the gap. It manages to be both powerful and relatively easy-to-use mainly because it has stayed focused on usability and not packing-in every conceivable feature.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, the company behind the product is owned by Apple, which knows to build computers and music players capable of hide complexity behind simplicity.

Creating a database in FileMaker Pro is largely a matter of manipulating items on a cleverly designed graphical screen. It’s mainly about building tables then dragging, clicking and filling in forms.

To get you started the software comes with 40-odd pre-built template databases for different home and business situations. Some of these will fit your needs out of the box. More often, a template will need  tweaking – this generally won’t present too many problems for most people. FileMaker is the kind of software that lends itself to tinkering, so set aside some time to learn its ways and you’ll be rewarded.

One interesting aspect of FileMaker is its close ties to Microsoft Office – for example you can pull data from an Excel spreadsheet into FileMaker as a way of kick-starting a database. It’s also easy to move information from FileMaker to Office applications. The software can also output information as .PDF files.

Building simple databases from scratch isn’t too hard. But sooner or later you may need to get to grips with the software on a more technical level. FileMaker is a relational database, this means it can use multiple tables and link information between them. So you might keep people’s names and address in one table and things they buy in another. Making the most of this functionality can get tricky, although it is worth the effort.

But the great thing about FileMaker is that creating databases doesn’t have to get complicated. It’s mainly a great tool for non-programmers to build quick and dirty database applications. And that’s what matters.

FileMaker and Microsoft pitch their database applications at everyday PC users as "easy-to-use".

While there's little doubt the two programs are less complex and frightening than many alternatives, they aren't easy. At least not in the sense most of us understand the word.

I recently returned to the two programs after many years away from database programming. I discovered neither is entirely satisfactory. Although both are good in parts.

My project is simple. Take a look at my New Zealand media people on Twitter list. I wanted to take this list and turn it into a simple relational database where each name has one or more tags. So, for example, someone like myself who has worked as an editor and journalist in newspapers and magazines could be listed under all four tags and not in the existing nebulous group headings.

I'll report back on the exercise in more depth later. The short version of my foray into modern PC databases is as follows:

Easy Access

Microsoft Access 2007 was surprisingly easy to use. I pulled the html from my web site into Excel 2007 and exported the list directly into Access. Once there it took only a few hours to build a basic relational database.

A reprocessed version of my original list now appears online as  New Zealand media on Twitter – beta. The tagging still isn't perfect in this example, but the relational database aspect of the Access exercise went like clockwork. There were difficult moments looking things up in the extensive, but not always navigable online help. It doesn't help that Microsoft slips into its own personal language making it harder to extract help information than you'd expect.

Access lost the plot when it came to turning data into HTML.

If you looked at my example you'll notice there's a weird box around the table, the text TwitterAddresses Query and three column headings. These weren't optional. I could have removed them manually – but that's not the point. Getting the data out of Access and on my site was harder than expected.

FileMaker's dirty HTML

If anything, it's even harder to get clean HTML out of FileMaker Pro - although I have discovered workarounds. What I haven't yet found is an elegant way of making what is, after all, an extremely simple relational database work properly.

When you have two lists and want to marry them in a one-to-many relationship it should be straightforward, but after two days of playing around I still haven't found an elegant way of joining the two databases and creating social media-like tags.

Filemaker has a quirky way of allowing you to store multiple items in a single field as a return separated list, but converting this to a tidy HTML table isn't trivial.

So there you have it two "easy to use" databases that aren't that easy to use in practice.

I've had a few suggestions from people to dump Access and FileMaker for something like MySQL. This certainly makes sense from a web publishing point of view. It's a path I may yet travel down, but in the meantime I plan to persist with the popular applications for a while longer.

At first sight F-Secure's Health Check 2.0 seems a useful addition to a PC owners' box of troubleshooting tricks. It is OK, but it is nothing to get excited about.

The online application is a Java program. Itworks with Firefox or Microsoft Internet Explorer to check a computer's security status then reports on potential risks.

On the plus side it is free, quick and simple to use. The code loads directly from the Health Check web page and after the fuss of accepting terms and conditions it takes next to no time to download even on my erratic broadband connection. I clocked the first download at seven seconds.

Once leaded the software steps through a familiar wizard-style process with four stages. The first stage is automatic. It checks you have anti-virus, anti-spyware and a firewall installed and up-to-date.

The 'next' button moves things along to stage two which investigates back-up – we'll look closer at this in a moment. Stage three checks key programs are up-to-date. The last stage is a summary screen with links to 'solutions' to identified problems.

Even if everything was perfectly hunky-dory, which it isn't, PC Health Check 2.0 is of limited use.

For a start alternatives do the same job either as well or better. For example, Secunia offers the free Online Software Inspector and the more complete downloadable Secunia Personal Software Inspector.

But my big problem with Health Check 2.0 is it is mainly a crude promotional device for F-Secure's products and services. It's compromised by its commercial function.

My computer failed the second stage back-up test. The software told me it didn't find any back-up. This is wrong. There are three back-up applications on my computer. I back up regularly to an external disk and to a server.

When I clicked on the Health Check 2.0 'solve' button to troubleshoot the 'problem' found by the software it told me I could protect my "valuable content" with F-Secure Online Backup. And gave a link to the F-Secure store.

I live in New Zealand. My computer has almost a terabyte of data. I'm theoretically on an unlimited broadband plan, but with shaped bandwidth for almost the entire working day. In other words, online back-up isn't realistic. And yet PC Health Check tells me it is.

If the application gets this advice wrong – what use is the rest of its information?

Lastly, when the program finishes, there's the opportunity to register an email address with F-Secure. Now why would I want to do that?

For an alternative view see F-Secure refreshes online PC Health Check by Stephen Withers at iTWire. His found other shortcomings, but reached a similar conclusion.

You see a lot of passionate people if you spend time on social networks or services like Twitter.

Earlier today someone "passionate about search engine optimisation" followed me on Twitter. In recent months I've come across people passionate about real estate, online marketing and customer service management to name just a few.

They are either liars, deluded or insane.

I don't know which is worse.

Sorry. Nobody is passionate about search engine optimisation. They might enjoy working in the field. They may enjoy it a lot and be excited by the money it pays.

But they are not passionate. Not if they are mentally healthy.

The term is meaningless. It's tired. It's a cliché. It tells me the person using it is an unimaginative idiot.

If you want to say you like something a lot, think up a new way of expressing the idea and we might listen.

And while we're on the subject, the same applies to sexy.

Computers are not sexy. Pieces of software are not sexy. Attractive members of the opposite sex are sexy.

It is a simple idea.

Set aside one day a week when you don't switch your computer on. A day when you don't check email, update Facebook, or tweet.

No firing up the desktop for game playing either.

It doesn't need to be the same day every week. You may have to trim things according to needs and deadlines. You may only be able to manage one day a fortnight.

The idea is to go off-line and let the brain rest. Or, if not rest, then allow it to change gear.

Take a break instead of constantly responding to incoming messages and data just let them pile up.

There's always tomorrow.

You can de-stress. And before you comment here saying you find it stressful not being in constant touch with cyberspace, think again. You know that isn't true.

Remember, the online world will go on without you.

Read books, chat to friends, play sport, enjoy the sunshine or bake muffins instead.

That way, when you get back online, you'll be refreshed. It's like a mini holiday. It may sound like a cliché, but I work better after taking a day-long break from my computer.

Digital sabbath not original

The digital sabbath is not an original idea. If you are religious, it came at the end of the first recorded week. The Biblical creation story says God rested on the seventh day.

Ancient Jews worked for six days then strictly observed the Shabbat when many everyday things were not allowed. They knew this was mentally, and physically, healthy.

I first heard about the idea of a digital sabbath in an online forum many years ago – sadly I don't recall who or where the original idea comes from.

Problems

It is harder to take even one day's rest from the digital world if you are a hard-core digiphile with a web browsing smartphone, an ebook reader or if you use the computer as an entertainment hub for music and video. And you may have a job, or some other responsibilities that make going off-line difficult.

Nevertheless, I suggest you do what you can to give it a try and reconnect once a week with the analogue world.

I'm not perfect

I'd like  to report I take a full day away from my computer every week. The truth is, I don't always manage it. In fact, although I try to schedule a full day off each week, I generally only get a couple of full-blown digital sabbaths each month.

It is no longer brave, rash or insightful to suggest printed newspapers will play less of a role in the future. But it counts for something when the scion the world's largest newspaper company says so.

James Murdoch talks about being in "the business of ideas" and says journalism plays a role (phew!) but it won't be on the scale of News Corp's broadcasting and entertainment operations.

James Murdoch sees smaller role for newspapers.

On one level the email staff memo republished by Bob Sutton on his excellent web site is funny. It sounds as if Fawlty Towers was run by someone with Lenny Bruce's vocabulary.

On the other level, it is disturbing just how bad some managers can behave. And it must harm the business.

Bob Sutton: Asshole Boss of the Year?. (Warning, the language may cause offence).

Listening is an underrated skill. And make no mistake, it is a skill. Dan Erwin looks at some researched-based facts about listening in:

Brainware – 10 Things You May Not Know About Listening.

In my experience, it is important to give people your full attention when listening, although this is hard in today's world where there are so many interruptions. I think the people I've worked with know if I want to hear what they have to say I'll take them away from the work place – either to a quiet room, or better still a café.

The other important listening strategy is to put people at ease, then get them to talk about them. Their lives, their feelings and their ideas. I guarantee if you can do this, you'll lean more.

My New Zealand media on Twitter list is still available on this site. It has been updated many times with two new entries yesterday and four updates. If you think you should be on the list, or if you are on the list and think your entry needs to change, please get in touch.

In addition to the HTML list I've also created a Twitter list:@billbennettnz/new-zealand-media-people.

Everyone who is on the HTML list is now on the Twitter list.

Update: The list name has changed to NZ media on Twitter

Writing for Australia's Nett magazine Donna Page offers some timely advice as we approach Christmas. The magazine targets small business owners, but her Holidays are good for your health applies equally to knowledge workers.

She writes:

There is no doubt holidays are good for us; studies have linked overwork with anxiety, depression and workplace accidents. But the fact remains that very few small business owners take a breather from work.

Does this sound familiar?

As she says, "no leave, no life". So make a deal with yourself now to take a good break over Christmas. If you're in the antipodes, that means to set aside two weeks of summer for rest and recreation. If you are in the Northern Hemisphere, take a shorter Christmas break, but make sure you set aside time when the weather is more suitable.
Work vs. life: why you need holidays.

Last week the Bennett family toaster died. Its last moments were spectacular with arcing, sparks and flames.

I suspect it was dangerous.

It is a Tefal model we bought last year. When it gave up the ghost we did the usual sales receipt hunt so we could take it back to the shop and get a warranty replacement or refund.

Although the toaster is 13 months old and the company claims it isn't covered by the warranty, New Zealand's Consumer Guarantees Act says otherwise.

A new toaster should toast for more than a year.

The issue is moot because we lost the sales receipt.

I called Tefal's 0800 700 711 customer support line.

When I explained what happened the representative told me  to take the toaster to a repair centre.

I hadn't mentioned the missing receipt although, technically I could argue proof of purchase isn't the point. Goods should be fit to do whatever they are sold to do regardless of paperwork.

But that's not my point. The toaster only cost $80 – which I had already written off. In fact by this point we had already bought a new toaster – though not from Tefal.

I wanted to report the dangerous arcing to the customer service representative. My aim was to give them valuable feedback that could save people's lives and help the company build a better toaster.

But the customer service representative wasn't interested.

I also had a very clear impression she was trying to get me off the line as quickly as possible.

When pressed she said she was "transferring me downstairs" whatever that means.

The call transferred to a voice mail line where I left a short message and a telephone number where I could be contacted. The phone hasn't rung.

So the only conclusion I can draw from this is that Tefal isn't interested in a potentially dangerous problem with its products.

This scares me.

Moreover, what is the point of a business having customer relations when this kind of information isn't collected? Or am I completely out of touch with realty expecting a manufacturer to care about these things?

Marshall Goldsmith says you need to take five steps to become an effective leader.

Goldsmith drew on a study of 86,000 people working in major corporations before devising his list – so this might be better titled "increase your corporate leadership effectiveness".

Goldsmith says the jury is out on whether great leaders are born that way (in fact he asks his readers for their opinions on this). He says the essential skills are not hard to learn.

One tip I particularly like is:

Periodically ask co-workers for suggestions on how you can do an even better job in your selected behaviors for change.

I may not always like what I hear when I get feedback, but good or bad it is always welcome.

Plaxo is part social media tool, part address book. It is useful for keeping contacts names and addresses up-to-date.

Useful, but not as elegant or as handy as alternatives such as Linkedin.

Plaxo has a chequered history. In the early days Plaxo messages would turn up in my email all the time. They looked like spam and were annoying. The company climbed aboard the cluetrain and the unpleasant stuff stopped.

While Plaxo needs to make money – don't we all? I'm not sure the company's current approach will work. It certainly doesn't work for me.

Plaxo operates a so-called "Freemium" business model. The basic product is free, if you want to do more with the tools you have to pay. In theory it is a good business model and there are many cases where it works well.

I've recently come across three ways Plaxo aims to get money from me. I don't think I'd pay for any of these:

1. Outlook sync. This was free, with a paid-for version allowing more features. Now sync is part of Plaxo Premium and costs US$60 a year – around a NZ$100.
2. Then there's Plaxo Pro available in three versions; Basic, Plus and Power. The Power version is a whopping US$250 a month and essentially provides you with a way to spam Plaxo members. It includes Premium.
3. Then there are e-cards, basically electronic birthday cards and similar stationary at a cost of US$20 a year.

You can forget the e-cards. Why would I ever want to pay US$20 to send them?

I've no need or inclination to spam people, which rules out Plaxo Pro.

Which brings us to Plaxo Premium – paying for support is fair enough. Paying for the ability to back-up is reasonable. Paying to remove duplicates is a bit on the nose, but we'll let that go. I can't use the sync to Windows Mobile and I used the Sync to Outlook when it was free and was not overly impressed.

Plaxo is an OK online address book. It's not a useful to me as Facebook or Linkedin. It has around 15 million users – Linkedin has 43 million, mainly business oriented users, Facebook has 300 million.

Which one of those is the most valuable? Certainly not Plaxo.

Lijit looks useful. It is a search application installed on this site as a Wordpress plug-in. You can see the Lijit search widget about halfway down the sidebar on the right of this screen.

In theory Lijit improves Wordpress search and drags in social network content. I've seen no evidence of this.

So far, after a month or so of using the plug-in it's been used a total of 16 times. Over that period there have been more than 5300 visitors to the site, so the strike rate is incredibly low. No-one has clicked the button in past week.

There was a fancy-looking Lijit widget, but this was the slowest-loading part of my site, so I switched back to the plain text version. This may explain why there's so little activity.

I'm going to persevere for a few more weeks, but unless I can find a good reason to stick with Lijit, I'm going to drop the application.

Is there something important about Lijit I'm not getting here?

Update: I've removed Lijit since writing this.

Rob O'Neill's front page story on today's Computerworld draws on research by US-based Objectwatch saying the total cost of IT failure in New Zealand is $5.4 billion a year. The story is not online at the time of writing.

Objectwatch's CTO, Roger Sessions calculated the cost globally, for the US and for New Zealand saying the number includes the indirect costs as well as direct costs.

The number seems unusually large for two reasons:

• First. For a country with around 4.3 million people Sessions' waste amounts to around $1280 per person or roughly three percent of GDP* – in plain English that means IT failure wastes one out of every 20 dollars earned in New Zealand.
• Second. According to IDC numbers in a press release issued in August New Zealand's total IT market was worth $5,911 million in 2008 and is growing at 3.6 percent. So Sessions' statement could be interpreted as saying the money spent on IT is wasted.

On this basis we'd be better offer dumping computers and switching back to trusty old adding machines.

* That's my calculation. I used the Investment New Zealand estimate of GDP.

Willie Sutton understood.

When asked why he robbed banks, Sutton said it’s because “that’s where the money is”.

If Sutton were alive today, he’d be plugged in to the net.

Sutton’s heirs reached the same conclusion. Criminals cottoned-on to online early in the piece. They've been active almost as long as computers have used telephone lines to swap data.

In fact the early computing underground grew out of phone phreaking – a murky, highly technical game where the aim was to access the world’s telephone lines without paying tolls.

Computer crime started in the 1960s

The first widely reported cases of computer crime Came in the 1960s. During the early days, electronic misdemeanours were usually inside jobs.

An explosion in online communications over the past 15 to 20 years has seen the problem grow in size and scale. Insiders remain a large part of computer crime, but these days the emphasis is more on external activity.

United States Department of Justice statistics show that reported online crime cases increased 43 percent between 1977 and 1999. However, the statistics also note that online crime is notoriously under reported. This means nobody knows for certain, but anecdotal evidence says that many companies are paying blackmailers and sweeping theft under the carpet in the hope that other online criminals don’t notice their vulnerabilities.

Some hope.

Online crime is everywhere

The tentacles of online crime reach everywhere. A 1998 report by Pricewaterhousecoopers (pwc) found 73 percent of US companies experienced a security breach in the previous year. Incidentally, matching this figure against reported online crime confirms companies only report a fraction of incidents.

The numbers have stayed at roughly the same level for the past decade. A survey conducted earlier this year Forrester Consulting on behalf of Veracode found two-thirds of UK companies reported a security breach in the past year. More recently Beverly Head at iTWire in Australia reported; "Small and medium Australian enterprises are particularly vulnerable to computer security breaches, with the average SME breach costing $37,661″.

Insiders give way to outsiders

It’s interesting to look at who is behind the attacks. The ten-year old pwc report found that authorized employees were responsible for 58 percent of the reported breaches in 1998.

In a later report by the same company, pwc technology risk specialist Mark Lobel noted in 1999 hackers accounted for only 14 percent of reported security breaches. By early 2000 hackers accounted for 50 percent of all online break-ins.

There’s a clear shift away from online crimes committed by disgruntled employees – other surveys have found a correlations between corporate restructuring and internal compromises of computer security – to crimes committed by outsiders.

In part this move away from insider jobs reflects better security rules, tighter control and more all round professionalism on the part of corporate IT departments. However, like any effective local policing operation, the main upshot is that the criminals have moved elsewhere.

Yet amazing companies are still in denial about the external threat. Last month SC Magazine reported Businesses skeptical about external hacking. Iain Thomson writes:

A global survey of IT managers from IDC and sponsored by Dimension Data has shown that the vast majority think that having the company hacked from the outside is highly unlikely.

Changing nature of computer crime

The nature of internal security breaches is also changing. In the past employees would either vandalise their employer’s systems as an act of revenge or use them to steal money.

For example, in May 2000 network administrator Tim Lloyd was found guilty of sabotaging the company network he spent years of his life building. The cost to his employer, Omega Engineering, was more than US$12 million. Lloyd plotted the destruction as his standing in the company diminished. Then, three weeks after his sacking, the system ground to a halt after a software time bomb deleted almost all the company’s programs and data.

These days, external problems are more likely and are criminal money-raising exercises, not retribution.

Called to the dark side

There’s another force coming into play. The kids who were hackers back in the glory days of 1980s were mainly idealistic. They hacked for fun, the approval of their peers or just to show off their skills. Today these people are middle-aged They have mortgages, schools fees and other bills to pay. Many are successful. A minority are not. The temptation to go over to the dark side is strong.

In February 2000, Mark Rasch of Global Integrity Corporation appeared before an US senate appropriations subcommittee and told politicians that today’s employees are more likely to steal sensitive customer or market information before they head off and form and float their own dot.com company. I've personally witnessed this in the last few years – it's not funny.

Underlining his point, Rasch said that theft of proprietary information and intellectual property increased by 15 percent since 1998. He also testified that unauthorized access by insiders has increased 28 percent and system penetration by external parties increased 32 percent from 1998. Both statistics support other data showing the threat is moving outside of companies.

ERP is risky

In his report for pwc, Lobel writes that trade-secret theft and information loss is three times higher in businesses employing electronic supply chains, ERP or e-commerce and that revenue loss is seven times more likely to hit e-commerce sites than non-e-commerce sites.

He writes;

About 60% of those who sell products or services on the Web report at least one or more security breaches a year, 22% experience information loss and 12% suffer data and trade-secret theft. More than half of those with non-transaction sites report one or more incidents. And the number of hits from outsiders is on the rise.

Reports from organizations as diverse as the Australian Federal Police, the Computer Security Institute, the FBI and the United Nations all confirm the rising menace of cybercrime. At the same time as online crime increases in value and number of attacks, it is also increasing in its scope.

Today the range of activities is wider and wilder than ever. For example the early part of the decade saw the rise of denial of service (DOS) attacks. These are events where e-commerce sites are effectively rendered unable to do transactions because a large amount of dummy traffic jams incoming data lines. A spate of DOS attacks in late 1999 and early 2000 took high-profile sites like Yahoo!, ebay and Amazon.com offline.

International crime

Another disturbing trend is the cross border nature of computer attacks. Five years ago almost all computer crime was local – that is criminals and their victims were in the same country. Today crimes are remote. The most visible hot spots are Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union.

And then there's China. Some experts suspect, with some justification the country's government is either sponsoring or turning a blind eye to organised computer crime. And China isn't the only suspect.

Authorities everywhere have finally caught up with the technology. They now recognise the potential to commit crimes using computers and other information technology tools is one of the greatest law enforcement problems of our times.

They could have reached that conclusion quicker if they remembered Willie Sutton – because online is where today's money is found.

An interesting piece at Computerworld about the father of modern management and the first person to use the phrase "knowledge worker".

I'm not sure about describing Drucker as a life coach – it is a term I've learnt to mistrust.

Peter Drucker as Life Coach: Book Shares His Wisdom.