The PhoneBoy Blog » check point

Old FireWall-1 Nostalga

PhoneBoy — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 06:56:28 +0000

Every once in a while, I will either run into someone who remembers the old FAQ site I used to run here about Check Point FireWall-1 or I will get a fan letter about it. Both have happened this week.

I’m going to tell you a little secret about that old site. I really didn’t know all that much about Check Point, especially when I started doing it. I just wrote down what I learned both from my own experience and others. More importantly: I shared it.

Obviously doing the site helped me to learn the product back in the day. It also helped countless others and I do appreciate all the feedback I get from folks about it. I really do.

Anyway, a while back, I decided, for various reasons, to put up an old version of my FireWall-1 FAQ up on a hidden page to take a couple of screenshots. By posting a link here, decided to make it available again by posting a note about it here. It is for nostalgia purposes only, given that most of the information is older than many people’s IT careers (circa 2000). Also, links are likely to be broken, etc.

Hopefully you’ll enjoy the walk down memory lane…

This work originally came from The PhoneBoy Blog and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Fingerprint: e37ac627f3d973694c212ff9430d215a

Check Point: R75.20, SecurityPower, and New Appliances

PhoneBoy — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 17:11:28 +0000

By now I’m sure you’ve seen, heard, or read Check Point’s official announcements made at NASDAQ this morning. This is by no means a regurgitation of the official press releases, but it is my own personal take on what was announced. If you want to see the announcement for yourself, check out the recording!

(Just to be clear, I work for Check Point and these are my own thoughts.)

Check Point R75.20

This release (press release, download) brings a number of new features. One of the most anticipated ones is the ability to inspect outgoing SSL traffic. Not just for Application Control, where it is most needed given the proliferation of sites requiring SSL, but in all the various software blades we support. And its included as part of the relevant software blades license (i.e. it’s not a separate charge).

SSL inspection is done by essentially doing a “man in the middle” on the traffic. The gateway dynamically generates a certificate for the destination website, which is presented to the client when they connect. This allows the Security Gateway to see the traffic “in the clear” and make the relevant security decisions. The connection is encrypted as it leaves the gateway with SSL. Since SSL inspection is more intensive than inspecting HTTP traffic, and potentially creates potential regulatory issues by its use, you will have granular controls as to when this feature is invoked.

Another new feature in R75.20 is a completely revamped URL Filtering blade. While Check Point is still selling this as a separate product, it is actually integrated with Application Control. Applications and URL Filtering categories are given equal billing in the now combined Application Control and URL Filtering rulebase. You can do user-level URL filtering (with Identity Awareness) and can take advantage of our UserCheck technology to inform users of the policies. We can also handle HTTPS websites and custom categories. The categories themselves have also been substantially updated.

Unlike with previous versions of URL Filtering, where the entire URL filtering database was stored locally on the Security Gateway, the new engine makes use of the cloud. Commonly accessed URLs and their categories are stored in a local cache on the gateway. Over 99% of your web traffic should be met by the local cache on your gateway. When someone accesses a URL not in the local cache, the URL Filtering database in the cloud is consulted, with the result being stored in the local cache for future use.

The Data Loss Prevention (DLP) blade also gets a substantial update in R75.20. HTTP performance is substantially improved in this release and you also gain the ability to examine HTTPS traffic as well. A large number of additional “out of the box” datatypes are now included. We also integrate with an internal Microsoft Exchange server so DLP can be performed on internal email as well as email leaving the organization.

SecurityPower

A common complaint I’ve heard from Check Point customers over the years is that the performance numbers we quote for our appliances don’t reflect what performance you’ll get in the real world with real world traffic patterns. This is because performance numbers have been historically quoted for a single firewall rule (any any any accept) with the most optimal traffic pattern (1500 byte UDP packets). To be fair, this has been the standard industry practice for some time now. Every vendor of network equipment performs tests like this.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a good indicator of how an appliance will perform under real world conditions. With that in mind, Check Point has developed a new testing methodology for its appliances using a real rulebase (100 rules) with real-world traffic patterns (both based on industry standards and actual patterns seen at Check Point customer installations). This rulebase and traffic pattern exercises all of the various features and functionalities available in our Security Gateway. Based on those tests, Check Point has rated each appliance with a SecurityPower Unit rating (SPU).

One could call the SPU an arbitrary metric. What it gives you is a relatively simple way to compare appliances and the relative security load they can handle. More importantly, an SPU can be generated for a given set of requirements (required blades, throughput, number of connections, and so on). You can then compare that against the available appliances to ensure you choose the right security appliance for the right security task.

Check Point has developed a tool that does exactly this. It will be available shortly. Personally, I think this is a big deal.

New Appliances

Two new appliances are being launched today for the data center: the 21400 (press release, product page) and the 61000 (press release, product page). These appliances are aimed squarely at the data center, where tens or even hundreds of ~~megabits~~ gigabits per second of throughput are needed!

The 21400 is a powerful 2U platform that features massive port density (up to 37 1000-base-T ports, 36 1000-base-F SFP ports, or 12 10GBase-F SFP+ ports), 50 GB of firewall throughput, 21GB of IPS throughput, hot-swappable redundant power supplies and disk drives, and an optional Lights-out Management card. Everything you’d expect from a carrier-grade chassis. The appliance runs both R71 and R75 with SecurePlatform.

The 61000 series, on the other hand, is a monster appliance! It’s a 14U (DC) or 15U (AC) bladed chassis that, when fully loaded, will support 200GB of firewall throughput today and, with future hardware and software enhancements, will support over 1TB of throughput in the future! Aside from all of the various connectivity and redundancy options, the appliance acts as a single platform that, when new hardware blades are added, automatically configures itself to distribute the load between the blades! The platform currently runs a 64bit version of SecurePlatform based on R75.

Both appliances, which are referred to as Data Center Appliances, are available now on the Check Point pricelist.

Comments

2 August 2011, Most Important Announcement of the Year [2011] - Page 6 - CPShared Forums writes: [...] y'all are interested in my personal take on our announcement: http://phoneboy.com/4175/check-point...new-appliances __________________ http://phoneboy.com Email: my CPShared username @ gmail.com Unless otherwise [...]
2 August 2011, RStewart writes: Towards the end, I think you mean tens to hundreds of *gigabits*. Hundreds of megabits of throughput is easy. ;-)
2 August 2011, EF writes: Did you notice that they changed --AGAIN-- the price for software blades? The URL Filtering blade is now $1,500/$3,000/$4,500 depending on the appliance or container size, instead of a plain $1,500 per gateway.

ZoneAlarm’s Newest Security Solution: SocialGuard

PhoneBoy — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 19:57:37 +0000

From ZoneAlarm’s Newest Security Solution: SocialGuard:

SocialGuard, ZoneAlarm’s newest security solution, promises a groundbreaking new method of monitoring and preventing safety breaches on Facebook the most popular social networking site by a mile, with over 500 million users without “friending” your child and intruding on his/her social space. SocialGuard sends real-time alerts to parents via email–or the SocialGuard interface–whenever suspicious activity is detected on your child’s profile; parents can customize security settings and keywords to trigger such messages if the child is exposed to illicit or inappropriate content. SocialGuard monitors children’s Facebook accounts for threats including cyberbullying, age fraud ensures children are not befriended by adults outside of their network; friend requests, hacked accounts, and link safety flags dangerous/offensive links contained in messages.

The product, available now, can be purchased here.

Check Point, my employer, is behind this. I’ve used the betas of this product and they do precisely what they say without being a huge burden on you or your computer. The price: $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year, makes this a no-brainer if you have kids using Facebook!

See what Check Point’s Head of Consumer Business has to say about SocialGuard.

Gil Shwed: “The [security] industry needs to change a little bit”

PhoneBoy — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 19:24:41 +0000

From Reality Check – Features – Malware – Computer Business Review:

“The industry needs to change a little bit,” [Check Point Software Technologies CEO Gil Shwed] says. “Our software blade architecture is the right direction but it’s not enough. I think the real change is actually understanding that security is not a bunch of technologies that people need to deploy but understanding that it needs to be treated like a business process. It starts with the well-defined policy of what a company wants to achieve and what is allowed or not allowed, continues with educating – or not educating but involving the users – and the enforcement side is only the last part of it.

“Most of our customers have a lot of check lists but not one clear policy. Everybody is trying to keep the users aside from that, but if users are not aware of their expected behaviour they become the weakest link in security. Then it goes to enforcement, which needs to apply these principles. We’ve just launched 3D Security that has three elements – policy, people and enforcement – and I think that would be a major change in people’s mindset when they think about security.

While Check Point certainly has some great security technology–I should know, I work there–if it’s not applied according to a process and policy with defined business goals, the result will be less than satisfying. I’ve seen it again and again in my work over the years.

CPshared and CPUG: A Couple of Observations

PhoneBoy — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 06:40:13 +0000

On the two Check Point user community sites CPUG and CPshared, I made a couple of interesting observations today:

CPshared already had more active threads today than CPUG. This includes all the public boards, which I verified by loading up both sites in Google Chrome’s “Incognito Mode” to ensure I wasn’t logged in.
The number of Check Point employees already participating on CPshared is far more than I’ve ever noticed on CPUG in the past two years.

Keep in mind that the CPUG forums have been around since August 2005. CPshared was only “officially” announced last week–it had been privately tested for about 4 weeks before that.

Again, these are just observations. They may be completely meaningless. You can come to your own conclusions here.

Announcing CPshared: The Open Technical Forum for all things Check Point

PhoneBoy — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 07:33:39 +0000

I’ve been a participating in the Check Point user community in various places for a long time now. Heck, I ran a Check Point community of my own for a while. It’s not often the community gets a new place to congregate, so it’s worthy of an announcement.

Presenting CPshared: The Open Technical Forum for All Things Check Point. In the NG days, this was a base “package” in the Check Point suite that handled communication between management and modules. It was also called the SVN Foundation. This is where the name comes from, and I think it’s an appropriate name.

CPshared was started by an ex-Check Point employee and a long-time member of the Check Point community. It is designed to be an alternate approach to information dissemination to more established forums like CPUG–a forum I kickstarted by donating my own content to in 2005. CPshared includes a blog (with contributions by others), a web-based forum, a Twitter account @cpshared, and a web-based chat system.

CPshared has been under private beta for the last few weeks with a number of other long-time members of the Check Point community, including a few Check Point employees. It was formally announced today. If you use Check Point products, give it a look and join the small, but growing community!

PhoneBoy on Check Point’s Official Forums

PhoneBoy — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 18:09:56 +0000

I think this picture speaks for itself.

Check Point R75 Now Available

PhoneBoy — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 02:08:26 +0000

Anyone who’s following the Check Point Twitter, Facebook page, or has been peeking around in User Center has probably seen the release of R75–Check Point’s next major release. DLP, Mobile Access, Identity Awareness, and Application Control are all now available as Software Blades–modules that can be enabled as needed.

Over the past several months, as part of my normal duties at Check Point, I have talked with a number of the people involved in this release. I’ve learned about some of the technologies that went into this release, and I have to say, it’s quite amazing how it all comes together!

Take R75 out for a test drive. Even if you don’t immediately use the new features, there are some usability enhancements in the SmartConsole applications, an improved IPS engine, and, of course, AppWiki, which is a great resource to find out about applications–even if you’re not using our Application Control Software Blade!

Gil Shwed says Check Point isn’t for sale

PhoneBoy — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 22:58:08 +0000

From Check Point isn’t for sale, says Shwed – Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News:

Two months ago, antivirus systems giant McAfee was sold to Intel for $7.7 billion. At the time, a number of analysts suggested that Check Point Software Technologies would also be an attractive target for takeover. Gil Shwed, the company’s founder and leader, yesterday shrugged at the idea in conversation with reporters, after the company filed its third-quarter financials.

Anything’s possible, Shwed said: but he’s been very consistent in his position for the last 17 years, which is that Check Point isn’t for sale. “We are very proud of the fact that we are an Israeli company, an independent one,” he said.

Why would Check Point put themselves up for sale when the financials continue to be strong and only getting better? I think it’s just “wishful thinking” by the analysis.

Disclaimer: I work for Check Point.

Check Point and Crossbeam Expand Partnership

PhoneBoy — Tue, 04 May 2010 17:17:50 +0000

Crossbeam has issued a press release about their expanded strategic partnership with my employer, Check Point Software Technologies. The key paragraph in that press release:

Customers can now purchase integrated solutions from Check Point, complete with maintenance and support delivered by Check Point’s award-winning global service organization. Check Point will provide support for both its software products and Crossbeam’s X-Series platform. This simplifies the ordering process and promotes closer product, sales and technical collaboration between Crossbeam and Check Point to support customer needs.

The kind of customers that will buy Crossbeam X-Series platforms are the kinds of customers who want what we used to call “first call, final resolution” back at Nokia. This is exactly what this provides: a single point of contact for purchasing and support of Check Point software on Crossbeam hardware. What’s not to like?

One Year Later

PhoneBoy — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 20:03:58 +0000

A year ago, I worked at Nokia. That changed when Nokia’s Security Appliance Business got sold to Check Point. The deal officially closed one year ago today. Now I work for Check Point, and though my official start date at Check Point is my original Nokia start date, tomorrow will be the one year anniversary of Check Point signing my paychecks.

That year seems so long ago. The weeks and months leading up to the eventual close of the deal were some of the more difficult times I’ve been through personally and professionally. The number of unknowns were simply staggering.

One year later, it’s a much different picture. Based on my past experience with Nokia acquisitions of other companies that were integrated into our business unit, I’d say that Check Point did an excellent job. The fact that so many of my former Nokia colleagues are still at Check Point speaks to that.

Personally, it’s been fantastic. The stuff I’m getting to work on now is stuff that I wanted to work on at Nokia, but could not for various reasons. I can’t talk about all of it, of course, but it’s a good balance of customer/internal projects and social media-type activities. Yes, this means I’m posting on CPUG a fair bit as well as continuing to build our Twitter and Facebook presences and working with various parts of the company on how we can better utilize these communication mechanisms. I’m definitely not bored and there’s plenty for me to do

Speaking of which, back to work…

What A Long, Strange Trip 2009 Has Been (phoneboy.com)
Designing Social Media Engagement Programs (socialmediatoday.com)
Social Media is Everywhere by Ellen Heydt (hilarytopper.com)
Check Point: Partners to profit from DLP move (channelweb.co.uk)
Check Point empowers users with data loss prevention tools (v3.co.uk)

Comments

15 April 2010, Ronen K writes: Very happy to read!

Check Point Abra: Your Office In Your Pocket

PhoneBoy — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 02:44:10 +0000

One of the products I was most excited about finding out shortly after I joined Check Point was Abra. I’d be more excited if we were shipping the product–that is expected to happen at the end of March–but at least it’s announced so I can talk about it a bit more freely

The product is pretty simple: you can walk up to any computer, plug your USB stick in, and access a secure virtual environment complete with connectivity to your corporate Intranet, access to applications installed on the host computer, hardware encryption, and simple, centralized management. Abra gives you all this and more!

The technologies that are being employed here are not entirely new. What is unique is how it is all tied together. SSL VPN products (including Check Point’s own Connectra) have had the concept of a “Secure Workspace” for quite some time. When you connect to the SSL VPN gateway, you are allowed to run local applications and connect to remote resources. However, the apps operate in a kind of sandbox that restricts how you can get data into and out of the sandbox and what happens to the sandbox after the connection terminates (usually, it disappears).

Now, instead of writing the sandbox data on the local drive, move that onto a USB thumb drive that contains both hardware and software encryption. Add autorun capabilities so that when you insert the thumb drive, you are immediately prompted for authentication, taken into the secure workspace, and automatically connected to the corporate network. Meanwhile, the secure workspace and VPN settings are centrally managed using your existing Check Point Security Gateways.

I’m really excited about the future of this product! You can find out more on the Check Point Abra product pages.

Comments

18 March 2010, Francisco writes: Phoneboy, I follow your posts since your days with MR @ Voxilla. I´m sure future computing will go in this direction. The PC will be in our mobiles. And mobiles will have a universal docking station. Wherever we go we'll find a screen, a keyboard, and a docking station (wired or wireless link). And our mobile with "some kind of Abra" will open up all our stuff in the cloud, with all the security issues involved.
24 March 2010, Ram writes: Is this license cost involved into abra purchasing.. What are the other costs involved in this abra ?

Of Stone Tables and Communities

PhoneBoy — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:47:13 +0000

Here’s a fun tweet I picked up recently:

phoneboy.com has been here for more than 10 years, you might say? Well not the way this person remembers it.

And, of course, he’s right. A lifetime ago in Internet time, phoneboy.com was a different place. The most popular thing on it was an FAQ on FireWall-1, a product made by my current employer, Check Point Software. At the time, I did not work for Check Point, they didn’t have a knowledge base (at least that customers could access), and the product was MUCH simpler then. One person might actually be able to keep track of everything related to it

Since then, the product suite has grown substantially. Before, it was just firewall. Then VPN. Then Floodgate. Then a whole bunch of other add-ons (which have been renamed “Blades”), not to mention appliances, Provider-1, VSX, and now VE (Virtual Edition). Keeping it all straight, along with all the things that can go wrong, is a bit of a challenge.

So what does this have to do with Stone Tablets and Communities? A lot.

Stone Tablets

Back when I ran an FAQ on FireWall-1 on my personal website, I was (at first) using static web pages. Yes, I edited them in VI or using Netscape’s web page editor, depending on my mood. They were static documents that changed only if I decided to change them, either because of personal experience or because someone gave me updated information about the issue.

This is what I like to call the Stone Tablets approach (or Ivory Tower documents, if you prefer). Some wise person comes up with “the answer.” It’s written down, 10 commandments style and is considered gospel. It doesn’t change unless new information comes out (and the “wise man” decides to update it).

Note that this is pretty much how all knowledge bases operate, including Check Point’s SecureKnowledge and the Knowledge Base that I edited for Nokia’s Security Appliance Business.

Communities

Before the stone tablets were written, there was a community. At least in the Check Point world, this was mostly centered around the fw-1-mailinglist, which surprisingly, still exists today (albeit a shadow of its former glory). I got frustrated with the signal to noise ratio on the mailing list, so I created my own moderated list in July of 2000, which I eventually shut down last year. There is also CPUG.org, whom I donated the previous phoneboy.com FireWall-1-related content to during the summer of 2005.

The idea here–and the idea behind many of the attempted FAQ site redesigns I did before–was that communities were, collectively speaking, smarter than the stone tablet guys. Anything that would enable the community to “speak up” would, therefore, be a good thing. If I made my documents editable (or at least they would allow public comments), maybe others would contribute to their goodness?

The part I miscalculated, and the part I now understand after having been through a similar experience helping to build the Voxilla forums is that getting a community built around your site is a lot of work. For every 100 people that visit, 90 will participate mostly in read-only, 9 will participate occasionally, and 1 will participate often.

Those numbers are with forums. With Wikis and the like, it’s more like for every 10,000 people that visit, 9 will occasionally edit things and 1 will be a hardcore editor. In short, my attempt at being a sort of Wikipedia for all things Check Point was an abject failure and I let CPUG see if they could do better with forums.

Why Stone Tablets Are Hard, But Popular

I like stone tablets. A lot. Not because I’m religious–far from it, in fact–but because there is an indescribable feeling one experiences when they see their problem written down on a stone tablet along with a succinct solution. Customers often demand that their obscure problem be written down on a stone tablet–or a knowledge base or some other official document of the day–and made available for everyone to see.

The problem is that things change. That which made the content of the stone tablet true may have changed (e.g. a software upgrade). The guy who wrote the stone tablet may have been wrong in the first place. To make matters worse, the guru who knew about the topic may have disappeared or no longer wants to write things on stone tablets. There’s also people for which the older “truths” are still true (i.e. they’re still running the older software).

Mutable truth is the hardest thing to write on stone tablets. It takes ruthless dedication, an infinite amount of time and patience to extract the truth from those who know it, and of course, the ability to write it down in a coherent fashion. Few people have all of these qualities.

Will I Ever Do An FAQ Page on Check Point Products Again?

While I will never say never, my current circumstances make it highly unlikely I would undertake such a task again. At least independently.

At the time I started the FAQ page, I was doing technical support related to the Check Point product line, which at the time was FireWall-1 and SecuRemote. The main reason I started the FAQ in the first place was so I could keep track of the problems I solved so I didn’t have to solve them again. Granted, I started it with some content from my employer (a Check Point reseller), who had an FAQ page on FireWall-1. I took that content (with permission), updated it and put it on my own site. It ended up being a smart thing since that company got bought by another company who ultimately had nothing to do with Check Point.

In 2010, I work for Check Point. I am also a bit more removed from the realms of technical support. Check Point also has this thing called SecureKnowledge, which did not exist back when I started the FAQ page. SecureKnowledge contains many “stone tablets,” including the collection I wrote/curated during my 10 years at Nokia. While it is nowhere near my current job responsibilities anymore, I have written a couple of SK articles since I joined Check Point. I do consult with the SecureKnowledge team periodically on various higher-level things as well.

Following the Conversation

PhoneBoy — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:25:07 +0000

I feel bad, in a way, that I haven’t been posting to my blog. Then again, I think I know why. The conversation is, for the most part, elsewhere.

Does it mean my blog is a failure? Am I not getting the hits I want or the comments I want? Not really.

One of the things I’ve learned is not to try and treat all communication the same way. Not all conversations are the same. Not all mechanisms for conversing are the same.

The trick is knowing where, when, and how to have the right conversation. Sometimes, that’s my blog. Sometimes it’s Twitter, Facebook, a phone call, or in person. Sometimes you have to use all these forms together.

Right now, one of my major conversations is with Check Point Software’s customers. This conversation is mostly on CPUG, but I am also seeking out and having customer conversations on Twitter, Facebook, and other places. Yes, this is my job and my personal blog is not necessarily the right place to have that conversation

Meanwhile, this is the right place for this ephemeral thought. Or is it? Let me know what you think in the comments!

Comments

27 January 2010, Tweets that mention Following the Conversation -- Topsy.com writes: [...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jonathan Jensen, phoneboyblog. phoneboyblog said: New blog post: Following the Conversation http://phoneboy.com/3317/following-the-conversation-2 [...]
27 January 2010, ernst albus writes: Well, as you may see, I'm from "good old Germany"... Let me put it this way...First your conclusion isn't bad, but the reason why is people in most cases don't have even the idea of communicating on a "higher?" educated level. To me it looks like more than 90% of the people are just sloppy in using their brain...some call it simply DUMB!!! Just look around and you will know what I mean. So, take care, there are some people in the world feeling a bit like you... E.
5 February 2010, Shawn Smith writes: I went through your post and would like to comment on the communication part.We all have such problems and you aren't the only one, earlier I also had such thoughts but I made up my mind to loose it off and I succeeded. So, be cheerful...

What A Long, Strange Trip 2009 Has Been

PhoneBoy — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 09:42:50 +0000

The beginning of 2009 had a rocky start for me. My employment situation was up in the air thanks to my long-time employer Nokia selling off the Security Appliance Business I worked in to Check Point Software. While I had an idea that I would probably have a job with Check Point, I couldn’t really breathe a sign of relief until I had a job offer in-hand, which did not come until April.

Even before Nokia announced the Security Appliance Business was getting sold at the end of September 2008, I had maneuvered my career into a comfortable, but rather limiting position. My job was not at risk, but I also did not see a way out of it either.

In a sense, this forced employer change was exactly the kind of fresh start I needed. Even though the entire process was downright scary–change often is–I am happy with how things are going now.

Even though it took me a couple of months to get plugged into Check Point, which is typical anytime you change employers, my true mission was known to me almost immediately. There wasn’t a whole lot of discussion about it, either. I just started doing what comes naturally.

I began the process of reconnecting with a community I helped to build many years ago, but more or less walked away from to pursue other interests. I spoke at Check Point events. I established Check Point’s official presence on Twitter, Facebook, and CPUG. I engaged our customers, looking for trouble, finding it, and did my best to find solutions.

What surprised me was that so many people remember the work I did all those years ago, both inside Check Point and in the larger Check Point community. The appreciation and generosity everyone showed was quite humbling. It made the transition back into the Check Point world that much easier.

Then again, I never really left it. Even though I spent a lot of years at Nokia supporting “everything but,” there was always the occasional need for obscure bits of Check Point knowledge that only I had. I also supported various aspects of the IPSO operating system and was the go-to guy when it came to analyzing security vulnerabilities. And yes, I had my hands in the knowledge base almost the whole time I was at Nokia

Mobile Change Happens, Too

One thing that ended with my employment at Nokia was easier access to “free” mobile phones. Between our normal replacement cycles and my contacts, I was able to get a few handsets a year to play with for varying lengths of time. This means, going forward, I have to buy my own stuff. However, for the first time in a decade, I am able to own something other than a Nokia device without feeling like a traitor

So what did I do? I bought an iPhone 3GS, of course. It was a bit of a leap of faith, as I wasn’t sure how I’d like it after playing with it in the Apple Store, but now I love it! It completely changes how and when I use my mobile phone. Not that my Nokia devices didn’t have all this same functionality ages ago, but the laser-like focus Apple puts on user experience, the speed of the iPhone 3GS hardware, and the plethora of applications really showed me what a mobile device could be!

And yes, I agree that the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music–a device I received as a “parting gift” from Nokia–touched more lives than Apple’s device did. It’s no iPhone, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper and easy to get without a contract. However, the iPhone was the mobile device that rocked my world in 2009.

Increasing Social Currency In 2010

One thing I learned in 2009 was that relationships really matter. It is a form of currency–social currency, if you will–that everyone has, regardless of their station in life.

Meanwhile, my friend Ken Camp has a great piece on transforming the world by looking in the mirror. I encourage you all to read it and really let it sink in. My way of transforming the world will be by increasing the social currency in the world–one relationship at a time.

Increasing your social currency is easy. You improve your relationships with others through your words and deeds. Conversely, as you neglect your relationship with words and deeds, your social currency decreases.

The beautiful thing about social currency is that everyone can have it in limitless amounts. When you give your social currency away, you often get it back–with interest.

Comments

7 January 2010, Mobile phones writes: I agree with you now a days mobile revolution is at its peak! number of competitors are ready to compete each other. In such conditions Nokia has made its unique place in mobile market.

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