My involvement with the EFF and AVNation have also included comments about privacy: AVNation Privacy & EFF Mail Links.

Something I realized while thinking about this subject is that if one sends very few encrypted e-mails, the ones that are encrypted will stand out in the mail being sent. Now you might wonder what I am doing that requires encrypting. It is more practical than you might think, a simple example is to transmit financial information.

I have an additional reason now, confuse the government and anyone else monitoring traffic. This idea is discussed in Cory Doctorow’s book Little Brother http://craphound.com/littlebrother.The section below is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license. This quote below came from line 1826 in the HTML version available on Mr. Doctorow’s website.

“So how come you weren’t on Xnet last night?”
I was grateful for the distraction. I explained it all to him, the Bayesian stuff and my fear that we couldn’t go on using Xnet the way we had been without getting nabbed. He listened thoughtfully.
“I see what you’re saying. The problem is that if there’s too much crypto in someone’s Internet connection, they’ll stand out as unusual. But if you don’t encrypt, you’ll make it easy for the bad guys to wiretap you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve been trying to figure it out all day. Maybe we could slow the connection down, spread it out over more peoples’ accounts –“
“Won’t work,” he said. “To get it slow enough to vanish into the noise, you’d have to basically shut down the network, which isn’t an option.”
“You’re right,” I said. “But what else can we do?”
“What if we changed the definition of normal?”
And that was why Jolu got hired to work at Pigspleen when he was 12. Give him a problem with two bad solutions and he’d figure out a third totally different solution based on throwing away all your assumptions. I nodded vigorously. “Go on, tell me.”
“What if the average San Francisco Internet user had a lot more crypto in his average day on the Internet? If we could change the split so it’s more like fifty-fifty cleartext to ciphertext, then the users that supply the Xnet would just look like normal.”
“But how do we do that? People just don’t care enough about their privacy to surf the net through an encrypted link. They don’t see why it matters if eavesdroppers know what they’re googling for.”
“Yeah, but web-pages are small amounts of traffic. If we got people to routinely download a few giant encrypted files every day, that would create as much ciphertext as thousands of web-pages.”

My action is a relatively small action and is rather simple to do. However, the fact that it will change the traffic view could be helpful for others. It will prevent other PGP/GPG encrypted traffic from being such an outlier as to be noticed. As EFF posted on Data Privacy Day, privacy is a team sport. There are additional directions for how to do this task at https://ssd.eff.org/, hover over the tutorials section. If you want to test if it worked, My public key identifier is C93A52C6. You can download my public key from directly from my site. I also will freely admit, I am not sure if it will make a difference, but it could not hurt.

This post was published on AVNation.tv on January 25, 2018. Bradford is a Director of AVNation Media LLC.

During and after CES the topic of diversity in the electronics industry has been discussed. I think that this is an important topic to talk about. It is something that all of us can facilitate and participate in . It does not have to be big grandiose actions, although they are encouraged. It is just as important to do small day to day things. These topics do not go away after the trade show does. We, all of us, need to be aware of them everyday. We need to make small incremental steps constantly. There are all sorts of platitudes I can put here. I want to put two simple ones here:

During and after CES the topic of diversity in the electronics industry has been discussed. I think that this is an important topic to talk about. It is something that all of us can facilitate and participate in . It does not have to be big grandiose actions, although they are encouraged. It is just as important to do small day to day things. These topics do not go away after the trade show does. We, all of us, need to be aware of them everyday. We need to make small incremental steps constantly. There are all sorts of platitudes I can put here. I want to put two simple ones here:

  1. Always try to make the world a better place.
  2. Change never comes if you are happy with the status quo.

With that in mind, I have a request for all presenters in the AV industry. This applies to Integrated Systems Europe, InfoComm Worldwide shows, Avixa classes, manufacturer training, mini trade shows… etc. Any place there is a presenter and a question and answer session. Answer one question from a woman, then one question from a man, then one from a woman… repeat as necessary. It could just as easily be, one caucasian, one person of color. Basically make efforts to help the underrepresented get represented.

I cannot take credit for this idea, Cory Doctorow stated it during an interview with Edward Snowden at the New York Public Library. You can view or listen to the event on the New York Public Library’s website.

The reason I like this idea is that it is simple. It is something an individual can do independently. It would be great if organizations made it a formal process. Don’t wait for that. Do it now, start now. Do it in meetings at your office. Do it when having webinars.

Here is my simple request, for those presenting at ISE2018, just implement it. Don’t wait for anyone to do something formal, start making the world a better place on your own.


The opinions expressed here are Bradford’s and AVNation’s. He does not speak for his employer.

Originally posted at AVNation.tv on January 11, 2018

As many of you know, I was laid off from Harman Professional on December 21, 2017. This column is about what I have been doing since then. If you are looking for a post talking bad about Harman or spouting all sorts of venom, keep looking. This article is not the article you are looking for. I also am not going to be using this as my personal blog talking about playing in the snow and going to the movies … etc. This article is about what I have been doing within AVNation.

As some of you know, Tim takes an annual vacation during the Holiday Season. This year, he made a mistake. He left me in charge, and in fact deputized me to make improvements in our processes; all processes. We have cobbled together over the past six and a half years AVNation’s processes and data management on an ad hoc basis. As we needed things we added them. Sometimes without thinking toward the future. (That is the polite way of saying they didn’t ask me.) As a result various pieces of data are stored on different services or someone’s hard drive. In addition there were things besides Sugar Plum Fairies in Tim’s head. He had agreements, show topics, projects, blogs, and thoughts of the Bears. I put on my digital janitor outfit and went about the organizing and cleaning.

I am confident we are not the only entity that needed to do this process, every company should go through this process on a regular basis. It frees companies from the quagmire from the phrase of, “We have always done it this way.” Instead it allows people to ask, “Why do we do it this way?” I know from experience there are times new software is implemented so that it acts just like the old software, whether it is a best practice or not.

The first question I asked myself, was “Self, what makes doing AVNation stuff hard?” I came up with a list. Some of these might also be an issue in your organization. The list was longer then I thought it would be. I also included comments from Tim as we were evaluating our software contracts.

  1. Stuff is all over the place!
    1. Slack
    2. Trello
    3. Google Drive
    4. Dropbox
    5. Amazon S3
    6. Email Threads
    7. Google Hangouts
    8. Google Chats
    9. Zoom Meetings
    10. People’s personal computers
    11. Internal wiki
  2. Scheduling meetings
  3. Helping people with their email
  4. Collaboration tools
  5. Managing shared tasks
  6. Project Planning
  7. Where source files are located
  8. Who are the active underwriters
  9. Finding scopes of work for each underwriter
  10. Locating logos for each underwriter
  11. Poll topics & schedule
  12. What is the editorial calendar
  13. Documenting the process of…
    1. titling podcast episodes
    2. posting an episode
    3. getting reimbursed for money I have spent
  14. Making the other team members aware of website stuff
  15. Letting other people tell me about website issues
  16. Tim’s List
    1. Email Lists for newsletters
    2. Management Tool for newsletter subscriptions
    3. Landing pages for links in newsletters or for other special events
    4. Customer Relationship Manager for the Sales/Underwriting portion of the business
    5. Intergration with e-mail – nice to have
    6. Tracking lists – nice to have
    7. Tracking Deals – nice to have

I am pretty sure that evaluating other companies, most people would come up with very similar lists. I know that we are not the only ones trying to figure out these issues. These issues are not unique. So I did what every person does, I went to the Googles. Actually I use Duck Duck Go, the reason is simple: “Our privacy policy is simple: we don’t collect or share any of your personal information.” I started searching for “collaboration software”, “file sharing”, “revision control”, “group scheduling”, and “Shared Tasks Lists”.

There were lots of solutions available via open source. Some of these looked promising, some were not worth the time it took to download them. Having used various tools in my career I kept comparing everything to Microsoft Exchange for many of the features; email, contacts, calendaring, task management, shared calendars, shared tasks, shared contacts. I went in search of a hosted Exchange solution. One that we can afford, which is where Software as a Service is helpful.

Previously I had used Rackspace e-mail for my personal mail. I was happy with it. The reason I stopped, Apple broke it. TApple did an iOS update and e-mail longer was a push. I know their support is excellent. I also know it would solve group scheduling issues as part of the service. I also knew that they offered hosted Microsoft Exchange. Off to Rackspace to order up Exchange. Then came the surprise of the day, SaaS came through again. For the same price as hosted Microsoft Exchange, one could subscribe to hosted Office 365, including Exchange and SharePoint 365, you can see it here.

I reviewed my list comparing it to the applications within Office 365.

  1. Stuff is all over the place! – OneDrive, 1TB per user
  2. Scheduling meetings – Exchange calendering
  3. Helping people with their email – emailhelp.rackspace.com
  4. Collaboration tools – SharePoint, Planner, ToDo, Skype for Business,
  5. Managing shared tasks – SharePoint and Exchange
  6. Project Planning – SharePoint templates and sub apps
  7. Where source files are located – All in OneDrive can manage in SharePoint
  8. Who are the active underwriters – SharePoint
  9. Finding scopes of work for each underwriter – OneNote or SharePoint
  10. Locating logos for each underwriter – OneDrive
  11. Poll topics & schedule OneNote or Sharepoint Page
  12. What is the editorial calendar – Exchange or SharePoint
  13. Documenting the process of… – SharePoint, OneNote
  14. Making the other team members aware of website stuff – SharePoint, Yammer, Exchange
  15. Letting other people tell me about website issues – SharePoint, Yammer, Exchange
  16. Tim’s List
    1. Email Lists for newsletters – Excel, Word, and Outlook
    2. Management Tool for newsletter subscriptions – Excel
    3. Landing pages for links in newsletters or for other special events – WordPress already being used
    4. Customer Relationship Manager – SharePoint, Exchange, OneDrive
    5. Intergration with e-mail – Microsoft Flow
    6. Tracking lists – SharePoint or Exchange
    7. Tracking Deals – SharePoint

Yup, Microsoft had done their research and figured out what most businesses need. They had lots of ways to work built in, as well they had recommended practices that made things work easily. They also added solutions for when they didn’t have the proper solution. Microsoft includes Microsoft Flow, an easy to use automation tool. That was where it really shines. Automation that includes connections to other services that we use. For example, the e-mail list solution using Microsoft Office is not as powerful as MailChimp, we can create a link between our Microsoft data and MailChimp easily. The same for SurveyMonkey, Twitter WordPress, our main website engine. It also has allowed Tim to customize his workflow process to meet his needs; I do not have to make any changes to my workflow or the base solution.

Through this review I found out lots of things. I found cost savings, almost US$10K. The vast majority of this cost from ending our subscription to our CRM and Social Media Management service. The service is powerful, too powerful and does not actually meet AVNation’s needs. It would not have been realized if I hadn’t sat down to review our needs, our process, and our software to see if they all still align. Ours did not. I was able to come up with a solution that simplified our day to day operations (one location for information) and saves us money. Spending the time to review how we are working is something we can all probably benefit from. Both on a personal and professional level.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to document the changes so that the rest of the AVNation.tv knows what I have done. The great thing is that I know exactly where to put it now.