Saturday, May 24, 2014

Netiquette - Core Items Which Annoy Recipients - Via Netiquette IQ


Netiquette is, as most of us know, a combination of Internet and etiquette. Many people forget their basic etiquette when using electronic communication. They in turn will do things via email they would never do face to face or even on the telephone. Strive to be mindful of this and it will enhance your Netiquette quite quickly!

By the way, a word formed by two other words is referred to as a portmanteau.  
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Nine Guaranteed Ways to Enrage People Over Email
Adam Grant
May 17, 2014 time.com
 LinkedIn Influencer Adam Grant published this post originally on LinkedIn. Follow Adam on LinkedIn.
On email, though, it’s the Wild West. The internet and social media have made it effortless to contact strangers: even many influential people are just a click away. When I speak with influencers, they are often shocked by the everyday rudeness in emails from strangers. What does it take to avoid alienating the very people with whom we’re hoping to connect? Here are nine rules for polite email outreach:
Don’t ask strangers to…
1. Acknowledge that they received your email
Electronic return receipts are a thing of the past, and I know many people who interpret them as a sign that you (a) are paranoid, (b) have an inflated sense of your own worth, or (c) have just emerged from a 20-year coma and are unaware of mailer-daemons and delivery status notifications. If your message goes unanswered, you can always resend it a couple weeks later.
2. Share your content on social media
What if they don’t like your material? An explicit request to circulate puts people in an awkward position: they can say no and look rude, or drop the ball and look disorganized. It’s more polite to just send them your content along with a sentence about why it’s up their alley, and end it there. If they like it enough, they’ll share it—and they’ll do it more enthusiastically, because it’s based on intrinsic motivation rather than obligation.
3. Provide feedback on something you’ve created
If you’re seeking input on a product, service, technology, document, or idea, it’s an awful lot to ask a stranger to engage with your work and comment on it. Whereas feedback requires a lot of effort, advice can be much less time-consuming. Try asking for guidance on a specific question or dilemma that you’re facing, and you’ll be more likely to get a response.
4. Jump on a call today or tomorrow
If you’re asking the favor, the onus is on you to be flexible. Ask if they might be willing to talk sometime in the next month or two, and let them suggest some times.
5. Name some times for a meeting
It’s a red flag when people feel entitled to a face-to-face conversation. A friendlier option is to ask strangers if they’re willing to meet, or if there’s a more convenient way for them to communicate with you.
6. Introduce you to specific people in their networks
It’s not fair to ask people to put their relationships on the line for someone they don’t know. Instead, ask if they know anyone who might be a good source of insight on a particular topic, and they may suggest a person who they feel comfortable connecting.
After strangers respond to your initial message, don’t…
7. Email them every day—or even every week
Stalker alert! People sometimes interpret a polite reply from a stranger as an offering of friendship. If you’re tempted to reach out too regularly, try saving your points in a draft email, and then prune at the end of the month. Intermittent reinforcement can be a powerful thing.
8. Immediately introduce them to someone else
This can come across as using your newfound access to gain status or influence with the third party. The safe bet here is to simply ask for permission first: “I thought you two might enjoy a chat for the following reason. Are you interested in connecting?”
9. Invite them to collaborate
You just proposed marriage on the second date. Try having a dialogue first, and explore whether working together might prove mutually beneficial.
All I Ask Of You
Thanks for reading this post—I just have a few requests. Will you please like it so I know you read it, and share it on all of your social media platforms? I await your comments on the best parts of this post and how I could have improved it; let’s discuss by phone today.
I’ll drop by your office Monday for lunch. That will be the perfect time for you to introduce me to your boss’s boss.
To firm up the plans, I’ll check in with you again tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ve sent an email introducing you to my dentist. He’s great, and I know you’ll be very interested in his work, so I gave him your cellphone number. Oh, and we should totally write together—you’ll learn a lot from me.
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Here is a special item on our blog site! Take the official McAfee phishing quiz at the following link:

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It is not easy, see what I mean!
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In addition to this blog, I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, "Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

 www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki


 If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio  and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and  Yahoo I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and  PSG of Mercer County, NJ.

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Netiquette IQ Quote of The Day From The Art of War



 Here is a wonderful quote. Think of it in terms of an email when excessive compliments occur.

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"When envoys are sent with compliments in their mouths, it is a sign that the enemy wishes for a truce."
Sun Tzu
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Here is a special item on our blog site! Take the official McAfee phishing quiz at the following link:

McAfee Phishing Quiz

It is not easy, see what I mean!
 ================================
In addition to this blog, I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, "Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

 www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki


 If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio  and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and  Yahoo I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and  PSG of Mercer County, NJ.

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Netiquette IQ Security Alert - Great Topics From US-CERT

As many of this blog's readers know, I publish new security alerts on a regular basis. This a particularly informative one. No matter what your technical skills may be, it is critical to have a basic understand of all the threats from cyberspace. Many of these arise from email and its vulnerabilities or abuse.
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National Cyber Awareness System:
01/17/2014 03:22 PM EST

Original release date: January 17, 2014 | Last revised: February 09, 2014

Systems Affected

Certain UDP protocols have been identified as potential attack vectors:
  • DNS
  • NTP
  • SNMPv2
  • NetBIOS
  • SSDP
  • CharGEN
  • QOTD
  • BitTorrent
  • Kad
  • Quake Network Protocol
  • Steam Protocol

Overview

A Distributed Reflective Denial of Service (DRDoS) attack is an emerging form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) that relies on the use of publicly accessible UDP servers, as well as bandwidth amplification factors, to overwhelm a victim system with UDP traffic.

Description

UDP, by design, is a connection-less protocol that does not validate source IP addresses.  Unless the application-layer protocol uses countermeasures such as session initiation, it is very easy to forge the IP packet datagram to include an arbitrary source IP address [7].  When many UDP packets have their source IP address forged to a single address, the server responds to that victim, creating a reflected Denial of Service (DoS) Attack.
Recently, certain UDP protocols have been found to have particular responses to certain commands that are much larger than the initial request.  Where before, attackers were limited linearly by the number of packets directly sent to the target to conduct a DoS attack, now a single packet can generate tens or hundreds of times the bandwidth in its response.  This is called an amplification attack, and when combined with a reflective DoS attack on a large scale it makes it relatively easy to conduct DDoS attacks.  
To measure the potential effect of an amplification attack, we use a metric called the bandwidth amplification factor (BAF).  BAF can be calculated as the number of UDP payload bytes that an amplifier sends to answer a request, compared to the number of UDP payload bytes of the request.
The list of known protocols, and their associated bandwidth amplification factors, is listed below.  US-CERT would like to offer thanks to Christian Rossow for providing this information to us.
Protocol
Bandwidth Amplification Factor
Vulnerable Command
DNS
28 to 54
see: TA13-088A [1]
NTP
556.9
see: TA14-013A [2]
SNMPv2
6.3
GetBulk request
NetBIOS
3.8
Name resolution
SSDP
30.8
SEARCH request
CharGEN
358.8
Character generation request
QOTD
140.3
Quote request
BitTorrent
3.8
File search
Kad
16.3
Peer list exchange
Quake Network Protocol
63.9
Server info exchange
Steam Protocol
5.5
Server info exchange

Impact

Attackers can utilize the bandwidth and relative trust of large servers that provide the above UDP protocols to flood victims with unwanted traffic, a DDoS attack.

Solution

DETECTION

Detection of DRDoS attacks is not easy, due to their use of large, trusted servers that provide UDP services.  As a victim, traditional DoS mitigation techniques may apply.
As a network operator of one of these exploitable services, look for abnormally large responses to a particular IP address.  This may indicate that an attacker is using your service to conduct a DRDoS attack.

MITIGATION

Source IP Verification
Because the UDP requests being sent by the attacker-controlled clients must have a source IP address spoofed to appear as the victim’s IP, the first step to reducing the effectiveness of UDP amplification is for Internet Service Providers to reject any UDP traffic with spoofed addresses. The Network Working Group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) released Best Current Practice 38 document in May 2000 and Best Current Practice 84 in March 2004 that describes how an Internet Service Provider can filter network traffic on their network to reject packets with source addresses not reachable via the actual packet’s path [3][4].  The changes recommended in these documents would cause a routing device to evaluate whether it is possible to reach the source IP address of the packet via the interface that transmitted the packet. If it is not possible, then the packet most likely has a spoofed source IP address. This configuration change would substantially reduce the potential for most popular types of DDoS attacks. As such, we highly recommend to all network operators to perform network ingress filtering if possible.  Note that it will not explicitly protect a UDP service provider from being exploited in a DRDoS (all network providers must use ingress filtering in order to completely eliminate the threat).
To verify your network has implemented ingress filtering, download the open source tools from the Spoofer Project [5].
Traffic Shaping
Limiting responses to UDP requests is another potential mitigation to this issue.  This may require testing to discover the optimal limit that does not interfere with legitimate traffic.  The IETF released Request for Comment 2475 and Request for Comment 3260 that describes some methods to shape and control traffic [6] [8].  Most network devices today provide these functions in their software. 

References

Revision History

  • January 17, 2014 - Initial Release===========================================
    Here is a special item on our blog site! Take the official McAfee phishing quiz at the following link:

    McAfee Phishing Quiz

    It is not easy, see what I mean!
     ================================
    In addition to this blog, I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, "Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

     www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki


     If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio  and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and  Yahoo I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and  PSG of Mercer County, NJ.

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Friday, May 23, 2014

Netiquette - Sending Email to Improve Your Health and Well-Being! - Via Netiquette IQ

The following is an interesting theory. It couldn't hurt!
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Happiness Researcher Shawn Achor Says Sending This Email Could Help You Live Longer
Posted: 05/22/2014 10:47 am EDT The Huffington Post

Happiness Shawn Achor Happiness Super Soul Sunday Shawn Achor Shawn Achor and Oprah OWN Video Happiness Research Happy Happiness Harvard-trained researcher and Before Happiness author Shawn Achor says that sending one simple email a day, for 21 days, will immediately increase your happiness -- and may even extend your life.
"Write a two-minute email, or tweet, or Facebook message, or text message praising or thanking one person you know," Achor says. "It's so simple. Two minutes. It's usually two or three sentences, and you do a different person for 21 days."
In experiments with such an approach, which Achor details in Before Happiness, test senders immediately felt happier. More importantly, after 21 days, the senders felt an incredibly deep social support. "And social support, as I was mentioning, is as predictive of how long we'll live as obesity, high blood pressure, and smoking," he shares on his upcoming "Super Soul Sunday" appearance.
"We fight so hard against the negative and we forget to tell people how powerful a two-minute positive e-mail could be," Achor says.
Giving a compliment the old fashioned way works, too. "Phone calls are even better," Achor says. "Even better is face to face, that eye contact."
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Here is a special item on our blog site! Take the official McAfee phishing quiz at the following link:

McAfee Phishing Quiz

It is not easy, see what I mean!
 ================================
In addition to this blog, I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, "Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:

 www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki


 If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio  and an online newsletter via paper.li.I have established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and  Yahoo I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and I have been contributing to the blogs Everything Email and emailmonday . My work has appeared in numerous publications and I have presented to groups such as The Breakfast Club of NJ Rider University and  PSG of Mercer County, NJ.

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