GOD's silent hand from 1988 took Erick Uner through "a lot of strange classes like fractal geometry and chaotic dynamics, which I never thought would amount to much. But I ended up using them working on encryption technology at my first job at Motorola."
 
Q. What did you do at Motorola?
A. I worked on small teams as a software engineer on problem projects -- things that were already very late or had other serious problems. I got out of college and went right into firefighting mode and have been there ever since.
   Motorola had a very different mentality from the rest of the world -- no bugs, no defects. Only when something was done bug-free were you done.
   On one of my first projects, my manager sent me down to Florida to upgrade the software for a handheld radio system for the Florida State Police. I found myself climbing up a 60-foot tall hurricane-proof concrete tower in the Everglades, brushing aside every kind of living creature you can imagine, just to go insert this little tiny chip. When I got back I asked what the purpose of my trip was, and my manager said, "well, you won't want to update the software again anytime soon, will you?"
[... essential business philosophy for space portals]
 
Q. Why did you leave Motorola after five years?
A. I had worked in small teams in stressful situations with a small bunch of engineers including Eric Hauk. He and I became good friends rather quickly. We had the same sort of engineering mentality even though we came from different backgrounds. We actually went from project to project together by choice, and in 1995 we left to start Virtual Media.
 
Q. What was the idea behind Virtual Media?
A. Eric and I had so much fun working in firefighting mode that we decided we wanted to be a software SWAT team.

We built a really good reputation, but when the Internet took off we found ourselves doing a lot of system administration work, where we were getting paged at 3 a.m. because people couldn't check their e-mail.
 
   We started running out of time to develop software and finally reached our breaking point in 2000.
 
Q. What was the idea behind Bodacion?
A. We thought we would take the knowledge we gained from working on embedded systems like cellular phones, radios, pagers and other kinds of small devices, combine that with a development methodology, and try to solve our own problems. The whole thing was designed to make [technology] more reliable and keep people from getting paged at 3 o'clock in the morning. We would then make our own products.
   The secret sauce in almost everything we do is these algorithms we developed. We call them "bodacions." The algorithms generate special numbers that have no connection to each other and no pattern. This is the holy grail of mathematics and very important to cryptography. We have used them in projects from remote programming, ISDN cameras, and in our government-approved cryptography for generating very random numbers.
 
Q. How did Bodacion get focused on security?
A. We started off using our algorithms not for security, but to detect errors or anomalies in our systems. We realized the security implications of our products one day when retired Gen. Michael Davidson showed up in our conference room and told us we were thinking about our product all wrong. He said, "You don't have a product that's reliable, you have a product that's secure." All of a sudden we realized the two of them are the same thing.
   Since then we've moved in a lot of government circles.

The External Threat
    In today's marketplace, most businesses/companies are at least aware of the existence of evil hackers that use viruses, worms, and trojan horses to attack/penetrate computers connected to the internet to steal or modify critical data and/or shut down entire networks. In response to this threat, most companies employ inferior firewalls and network/computer intrusion prevention and detection hardware and/or software in concert with inferior anti-virus software, all designed to protect or shield the inherent vulnerabilities in today's mainstream server/workstation operating systems and other programs. Bodacion Technologies' Hydra WIPS is the only system on the market today that is verifiably bug-free (so never requiring patches and fixes to function properly) and has proven itself to be 100% effective in stopping any/all hacker-attacks. For companies truly interested in total protection against external threats to their networks, the choice is simple.

The Internal Threat
    The threat that many/most companies may have not yet recognized nor taken steps to protect themselves from is that of an internal threat. Any employee that has access to your network is a potential threat. A disgruntled employee, an employee using a roaming laptop that unknowingly picks up a virus while checking e-mail outside of the office only to bring it back and spread it around inside your network, even an employee turned terrorist mole all have the ability to inflict serious damage to vital internal systems, albeit purposefully or accidentally. Once again, Hydra is able to help in this scenario provided that all internal network traffic is routed through the Hydra before reaching other systems.
 
    Thus, the Hydra Web Intrusion Prevention System by Bodacion Technologies is the only viable solution for businesses/companies interested in protecting their networks from external and internal attacks. Is your network safe?

    What we consumers need is a simple, unified protection plan to counter all of these threats. And the computer, software and Internet industries have badly failed us in this regard. They would rather dump the security mess in the laps of users than solve it at the level where a solution really belongs -- in the operating system, or the hardware or the online provider's servers.

    Not only that, but members of the techie class that runs these industries, and the IT departments at big companies, have been quoted recently as blaming the security problem on average, nontechnical users. If only these stupid users wouldn't open e-mails with hidden viruses, the techies say, the trouble would go away.
 
    Well, I have a word for these contemptuous techies: Save your energy for solving the problem instead of blaming its victims. Mainstream users shouldn't have to be IT experts to operate their computers.

    Instead of lectures, consumers need Microsoft to build into Windows an effective, free, constantly updated security service requiring little or no user intervention. This service would fend off all kinds of threats and invasions of privacy, including viruses and spyware, without getting all tangled up in academic distinctions.
 
    I don't mean the kinds of software-security suites now available -- bundles of individual programs. I'm talking about a truly unified, seamless service, controlled and maintained over the Internet, that would take on the whole problem.
 
    Microsoft has made untold billions from the court-certified monopoly it holds in operating systems, and its poor security designs have contributed hugely to the problem. Plus, the company fought for, and won, the right to keep adding new functions to Windows, in the slap-on-the-wrist antitrust settlement it was granted by the Bush administration. So, it owes its customers a solution to the security mess.

Reference your "solve the security problem" article in the Sun-Times 3/13. Bodacion Technologies (B.T.) has built a hacker-proof, virus-proof security device that eliminates Internet threats.
 
We see this as the 1st step in providing a professional Internet that must incorporate a new, secure protocol, satellite-based hosting for secure data flow, dish with B.T.'s security device, and of course, a flawless OS for satellite-based servers and earth-based PCs. This must take place to allow companies that are leery of today's flawed systems and have retained technologies from the 60s and 70s (such as mainframes), to move forward to 21st century WWW-based systems.
 
For example, we spoke with a gentleman that worked for Bell Labs back in the 60s. He told me that they created what would be considered today as a LAN. The one protocol that they omitted was TCP/IP because it was insecure. Consequently, a new, secure protocol must be developed, enabling all competitive businesses to move into the 21st century and turn the Internet from a toy into a professional marketplace tool.
 
The following web-sites will give you ample evidence to prove the above:
 
Bodacion Technologies
https://www.bodacion.com/
 
Inspired Companies
https://www.inspiredcompanies.org/
 
We look forward to your thoughts on the above.
 
Sincerely,
 
Robert Bristow, President
 
Alexander Poole, Director
 
Cc:
 
William A. Godfrey III

    WASHINGTON -- Researchers have uncovered a serious flaw in the underlying technology for nearly all Internet traffic.
 
    The British government announced the vulnerability in core Internet technology on Tuesday.
 
    ''Exploitation of this vulnerability could have affected the glue that holds the Internet together,'' said Roger Cumming, director for England's National Infrastructure Security Coordination Centre.
 
    The Homeland Security Department issued its own cyberalert hours later that attacks ''could affect a large segment of the Internet community.'' It said normal Internet operations probably would resume after such attacks stopped. Experts said there were no reports of attacks using this technique.
 
    The flaw affecting the Internet's ''transmission control protocol,'' or TCP, was discovered last year by a researcher in Milwaukee.

Paul Watson said he identified a method to trick personal computers and routers into shutting down electronic conversations by resetting them remotely. Routers continually exchange important updates about the most efficient traffic routes between large networks. Attacks can cause them to go into a standby mode that can persist for hours.
 
    In recent weeks, some U.S. government agencies and companies operating the most important digital pipelines have fortified their own vulnerable systems because of early warnings. There were few steps for home users to take; Microsoft Corp. said it did not believe Windows users were too vulnerable.
 
    On Thursday, at an Internet security conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, Watson is expected to disclose details. He predicted that hackers would understand how to launch attacks ''within five minutes of walking out of that meeting.''

    A new Internet worm is burying businesses in e-mail. The appropriately named "Mydoom" is the fastest-spreading online outbreak in history. Estimates are that in its first two days Mydoom hit 142 countries, and was to be found in one in 12 e-mail messages. As many as 100,000 Internet-connected computers world-wide are infected, and more are becoming so all the time. If nothing changes, eventually a worm like Mydoom will cause serious damage. Perhaps a power grid will go down; or an air-traffic-control system will go awry; or a 911 system will collapse. It's only a matter of time.
 
    So, why does this keep happening? Anti-Microsoft sorts blame that company, saying the dominance of Bill Gates's company has created a software monoculture. In biology, such single-species systems are prone to infestations and well-adapted predators. Similarly, they argue, software monocultures are susceptible to Internet worms and viruses.
 
    The argument is largely sour grapes from Microsoft competitors and EU regulators. While Microsoft's software is dominant, that dominance comes with immense productivity benefits. People can sit down at almost any computer anywhere and immediately become productive using software with which they're familiar. That wasn't possible 20 years ago in a world fractured by a dozen widely used varieties of computers.

    The supposed monoculture aside, there are two main reasons -- one social, one economic -- for the continuing worm problem. The first is that you can't train people to stop doing dumb things. E-mail users have been told over and over not to open unknown attachments, and yet they continue to do so. But short of making it impossible for people to send documents around in e-mail, you can't legislate against stupidity.
 
    The second cause has to do with the supposed solution. Antivirus vendors have built sizeable businesses around selling tools that screen for viruses. You pay a yearly subscription, and for that privilege, antivirus companies send you regular updates as new worms and viruses are spotted in the Internet badlands. The trouble? The model doesn't work. It is like the cops using a gallery of pictures of prior criminals to stop crime. What happens when someone new comes along? If the real world were like the online one, the police would blithely watch as recent arrivals break into a house while waiting for their photo list to be updated. In the rapid-fire world of online viruses, that doesn't work. Mydoom infected thousands of computers in the hours it took for antivirus vendors to update their signatures (mug shots) of known viruses.

    So what's the solution? The virtual world can learn from the real one: Instead of waiting to see a known criminal, police departments watch for suspicious behavior, like skulking in alleys. Software, too can watch for hackle-raising actions long before we're hit with widespreading infections. This isn't a new idea. Researches have long known that this proactive approach would save companies time and money. So why hasn't it happened? In part because it isn't easy, but also because it isn't as lucrative for antivirus vendors. Subscriptions are more profitable than one-time software sales.

    But before something bad really does happen, we need to take online crime prevention seriously. Antivirus vendors can remain part of the problem by playing at being police online. Or they can start acting like real cops.
 
Mr. Kedrosky teaches business at the University of California, San Diego.

    SEATTLE -- Destructive computer viruses are back.
 
    Last week, Mydoom.F began replicating itself on tens of thousands of home and business computers.
 
    Like other viruses, it spreads by tricking PC users into opening a viral e-mail attachment. It then e-mails a copy of itself to all e-mail contacts found on the PC, and opens a back door to receive more hacker commands.
 
    But Mydoom.F does something viruses have not done since 1999: It begins systematically deleting files.
 
    "Viruses that destroy files happen rarely," says Alan Paller, research director at security think tank the SANS Institute. "They are very worrisome."
 
    Mydoom.F isn't spreading as fast as its predecessor, Mydoom.A, which has infected an estimated 2 million PCs worldwide since late January. But it could wreak more havoc, experts say.
 
The virus deletes Microsoft Word documents, Excel spread sheets and Access database files, along with digital images and movies. It appears to target files that typically represent extensive cumulative work.
 
    "It's about pure malicious intent," says Mark Sunner, chief technology officer at security firm MessageLabs.
 
    Mydoom.F will especially hurt those who make back-up copies of important files sporadically or not at all, security experts say.

    Hudson Shores Realtors, in Irvington, N.Y., got hit by Mydoom.F last Wednesday. It had been a month since co-owner Peter Gottlieb last backed up his network of five Windows PCs. He won't be able to recover business documents, spreadsheet analyses or office memos created or worked on since then.
 
    "It's painful," says Gottlieb. "There are things missing we won't know about until we need it."
 
    Mydoom.F puts big companies and organizations that make backup copies on a daily basis under a cloud, as well. Any worker whose home PC or laptop gets infected with Mydoom.F poses a threat to rapidly delete files stored on network computers, where groups of workers store data. Retrieving backups is no small chore.
 
    Rogue infected PCs "aren't just a nuisance anymore," says Corey Merchant, spokesman at security firm LURHQ. "It's more of a present danger ... you can destroy a co-workers' files."
 
    Even longtime PC users are getting fooled. E-mail subject lines are no longer sophomoric. Another recent virus, Netsky, tricks victims into opening a viral attachment with subject lines such as "approved your credit card" or "you use illegal file sharing."
 
    Many PC users avoid opening e-mail attachments from strangers. But the latest virus strains typically arrive from a compromised computer owned by someone known to the victim.

    If you thought setting a personal goal was tough, try coming up with a strategic vision for a company and everyone in it.
 
    Everyone has something different to say on the subject, but top chief executives past and present seem to agree that passion and inspiration must lie at its heart.
 
    A strategic vision should be a goal that the leader wants the organization to achieve. Experts say it should do many things: challenge the status quo, find thy enemy, idealize, be forward looking and expose the company to risk.
 
    A closer look, and you find the best visions do much more, says Leslie Gaines-Ross, author of "CEO Capital." "It is the rallying cry around which a company will mobilize. Without passion, a strategic vision will amount to nothing more than an empty string of words."
 
    She offers insight from several leaders:
 
Meaning Vs. Money
    David Pottruck, CEO of Charles Schwab & Co., points out that the passion for adding meaning to people's lives is what drives the Schwab vision.
 
    "If you don't have something that gives you meaning, then you probably end up solely focusing on the money," he told Gaines-Ross. "And I think that people will work really hard for money, but they will devote their lives to meaning if they find meaning. And to me, if you can work in a field that provides meaning to employees and you can inspire them to have passion, to really love work every day, the money is the reward for doing that job well."
 
    Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, said the message should be repeated over and over until you nearly "gag on the words.

It must maintain interest and be inspiring enough to keep you on track in putting it into action."
 
    For former Boeing CEO Phil Condit, the ability to forge a strategic vision was almost spiritual.
 
    "It is the ability to see nonlinear fundamental shifts," he told Gaines-Ross. "It is hard to see what is driving those changes and then position the company to take advantage of those fundmental shifts."
 
Sun's Inevitable Rise
    Scott McNealy, chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems, provides a classic example of a CEO with a dynamic strategic vision. Gaines-Ross says.
 
    After McNealy and his Stanford buddies began the Stanford University Network (SUN) in 1982, they came up with a simple yet compelling vision -- that all computers will and should be networked.
 
    "Sun as a company was born to be an Internet company almost 20 years ago," McNealy once said. "Every computer we've ever shipped (since 1982) has been an IP (Internet protocol) computer."  
    "His commitment to this strategic vision was passionate; he embraced it with almost religious fervor as the wave of the future," wrote Gaines-Ross. "By making such a commitment, which was certainly contrary to conventional thinking, McNealy risked his reputation and the company's market position. His vision, however, was perfectly timed and ready-made for the emergence of the Internet -- almost as if Sun had been waiting for the Internet to be invented." Robin Grugal.

   If now we enlarge our viewpoint, so that instead of considering only a few individuals, we regard the social group in its entirety, free competition is seen to be that situation in which men are voluntarily cooperating. All of the group, by purchasing what they prefer, encourage those best qualified to provide the desired economic things including services. Each of the group who is offering things in the markets voluntarily seeks to cooperate by performing in that economic role where he can most effectively serve his fellows and thereby maximize his own reward in the marketplace.

   In practical effect, under perfectly free competition, producers cooperate with consumers by endeavoring to provide the best of whatever is desired at the least cost. Thus "competition" and "cooperation" become, under such conditions, merely different labels for the same highly efficient economic behavior.
 
   Also important in this connection is the fact that the economic behavior we label "free competition" or "voluntary cooperation" results in the greatest possible total of benefits for all who participate.

   Palmisano has made Moffat the supply-chain czar, ruling Integrated Supply Chain (ISC), IBM's fourth-largest division, with 19,000 employees and a $40 billion purchasing budget.
 
   The future, as Moffat sees it, won't be so much a battle among companies as one among supply chains.
 
   If you are not part of this world, you need to know something about the lingo.

The "chain" in question stretches all the way from the raw materials at one end of a manufacturing operation to the customer's inventory at the other. In its broadest sense, it includes distribution and logistics; in its grandest aspirations, it contemplates having a customer's order trigger an instantaneous response in every ingredient.

    It sounds impossible, but Bodacion Technologies' Eric Uner claims to have discovered the holy grail of Internet security. Starting at a cool $17,000, businesses can buy Bodacion's "HYDRA" system to protect their Internet servers from every single virus, worm, or Trojan horse on earth. If you don't believe it, you could have tried to penetrate HYDRA to win Bodacion's $100,000 hacker prize. Tens of thousands of people signed up, but no one could, Uner says.
 
    HYDRA's "secret sauce" is the constantly changing algorithms that prevent any type of electronic intruder from getting through. Based around the same "nano-kernel" operating system that Boeing uses to ensure safety in 747s, Uner says his code is verifiably bug-free. His goal is one day to be able to announce to an audience of IT professionals that he can "stop every virus on earth" without provoking laughter.
 
    HYDRA is a Web intrusion prevention system that uses constantly changing algorithms to protect servers. We named it HYDRA because it constantly adapts. The codes disappear as soon as the unit is powered off or probed or analyzed or disassembled.
 
    HYDRA will stop viruses, worms, Trojan horses, all the network attacks from ever getting to Web servers.

It doesn't need to be updated. Put it in your server closet, forget it's there. That's the concept.

    HYDRA also has a lot of reliability because our operating system is very small and testable. It's just under 13,000 lines of code, compared to 1.5 million for Linux or 50 million for Windows.

"The data suggest that few companies ever grow successfully and repeatedly over long periods..."
 
Most Firms Can't Adapt
 
IBD: Is disruptive innovation like a torpedo?
Raynor: The history of disruption is not so much a story of people getting steamrolled by something they never saw. It's rather an issue of getting steamrolled by something they have watched all along and had convinced themselves was irrelevant. Once they realized it was relevant, it was too late. Western Union was once offered an opportunity to exploit the Bell telephone patents. They turned it down because they thought phone service would be useless.

IBD: Why are most companies unable to sustain stable growth for long?
Raynor: As Clayton Christensen said in "The Innovator's Dilemma," if you only serve your best customers well, you are doomed to fail. The things that enable a company to be successful can make them structurally incapable of exploring new disruptive growth opportunities. If you pursue only a sustaining trajectory, eventually and inevitably you will run out of steam. Therefore, sustained profitable growth must lie in the ability to repeatedly launch disruptive innovations.

    Q. If HYDRA is so incredible at stopping every single problem, why isn't it on every server on the planet?
    A. Because it works. A lot of people are not happy about HYDRA because it works and it's extremely simple. For example, we were at a government agency, and the woman there said, "I'm not going to use your product because if I use your product and I don't have any security problems at all, I can't explain my existence to my organization."
    But that is a very narrow way to look at it. If she used HYDRA, she could enjoy an increased security posture, have very little work to do and apply herself toward things that are a little more interesting than hitting the update button every five minutes to get the latest vulnerability patch.

"I'm not going to use your product because if I use your product and I don't have any security problems at all, I can't explain my existence to my organization."

    Q. What do you say to the people who say that your claims are just not believable?
    A. We've briefed the Department of Defense, we've been to the White House, and the reaction is always the same. "This is going to change everything. This is going to revolutionize the way people think about cyber security. This is the most fantastic thing that I've ever seen." Then you get down to the technical people and they say, "It's true. This is the most fantastic thing I've ever seen. It works perfectly. Now get the hell out of here as quickly as you can and I'm going to pretend you never came."

"It's true. This is the most fantastic thing I've ever seen. It works perfectly. Now get the hell out of here as quickly as you can and I'm going to pretend you never came."