Branding David

I have always been told to secure my wireless connection, and while I have never enjoyed the idea of locking everything down due to the various issues that pop up with wireless devices, I have worried about the security of my data and what that means for both my personal life and my business.

Locking down your wireless Internet connection has always been relatively easy, but could it soon be a waste of time? A great report that I recently read talked about how graphics cards for computers could be used to crack the highest security connection passwords on wireless Internet connections in one ten thousandth of the time it traditionally takes to do so.

A dedicated person with the right equipment could access your wireless connection in minutes or hours rather than the previous assumption of days or weeks. The barrier for entry is also getting lower with the equipment costing less and less as new releases cycle out nearly every quarter.

David Hobson, managing director of Global Secure Systems has recently said that, “brute force decryption of the WPA and WPA2 systems using parallel processing has been on the theoretical possibilities horizon for some time - and presumably employed by relevant government agencies in extreme situations - but the use of the latest nVidia cards to speedup decryption on a standard PC is extremely worrying.”

If you are not using a VPN for your business based wireless Internet connections, then you might as well consider yourself open to attacks and data mining.

Maybe it is time to go back to using wired connections, or finding ways to strictly limit wireless connections by making them only available inside of buildings, and using only computers with certain MAC addresses among other basic security implementations that go above and beyond just enabling one of the types of encryption.

A blog that I really enjoy, ReadWriteWeb, recently surveyed some bloggers and consultants to see what the upper limit people are earning for their work.

They seemed pretty much on the money regarding blogging as a job, but it surprised me to see what consultants are earning.

No one we surveyed named an hourly consulting rate below $150 per hour. $300 per hour was the most common rate named. Some listed monthly rates of $2k to $4k per engagement, which we assume probably means 20 to 40 hours per month.

It is even more interesting to me, as I set my rate below the $150 an hour mark, despite creating value far beyond that rate.

I also find it funny as Jim Kukral, a very successful consultant has decided to give away, for free, a half a day, each wednesday, towards local businesses, entitled Bail Out Cleveland, in hopes of helping them to deal with the current market conditions.

Are consultants worth hundreds of dollars per hour? Well, it really depends on their experience and ability to distill and transfer their knowledge in a useful and actionable way.

I do think that some people might want to adjust their rates to make their knowledge easier to access during these rough times. I would also love to know how other consultants in any industry calculate their hourly rates, so if you are or have been a consultant, please comment below with the factors that you built into your rate sheet.

I have been to a few different conferences, and one of the biggest issues I have seen is how people put together their slides. It seems like everyone wants to write a novel or pack in as many words per slide as they possibly can, and in doing so, their slides become absolutely useless.

There is a simple rule to try to keep the number of words to around twenty-five per slide. Only around five bullet points, and one or two images. It makes it easy for people to read, understand, absorb and truly act on.

If you aren’t following the above rule, you are starting your presentation off on the wrong foot. Keeping it simple is always the best route, and with all of us suffering from various levels of information overload, please be kind and reduce the number of words, pictures and other distracting elements on your slides.