Tag: technology

Anonymity is an Illusion

On Episode 7 of The Edge of Innovation, we continue our conversation on what it means to be anonymous, and look at why it is not possible.

Transcript

Sections

Phones as Proof of Identity
Browsers to Use for Anonymity
What is a Right?

Introduction

Paul: This is the Edge of Innovation, Hacking the Future of Business. I’m your host, Paul Parisi.

Jacob: And I’m Jacob Young.

Paul:  On the Edge of Innovation, we talk about the intersection of between technology and business, what’s going on in technology and what’s possible for business.

Phones as Proof of Identity

Paul: So, again, we’re trying to talk about anonymity. So, I have pondered, “Okay, how do you become anonymous?”

Jacob: Sure.

Paul: Alright. One of the things that has been a prerequisite is to have a phone nowadays. You have to have a phone in order to receive a text message or a phone call, which is proof of who you are, a validation of who you are. Well, there’s unfortunately, a huge loophole out here, where you can go to Wal-Mart and buy a phone. And if you buy it with cash, there is no record of you buying that phone.

Jacob: Right. That phone’s not connected by Visa’s data to Paul Parisi.

Paul: Right. I have to usually buy a card to charge it, or something like that. You know, a SIM card with 100 minutes on it or something. But now I have that. Now, there could have been a surveillance camera that caught me purchasing something at Wal-Mart at that time. The thing that’s unknown to me, which I don’t believe is the case is I do not believe Wal-Mart or your local neighborhood convenience store says that at, you know, at 9:45PM somebody bought a prepaid cell phone. But if they did, of this serial number. Okay? I don’t think they’re registering that. They would be wise to, because then, when I go and make that, you know, that bomb threat with that call, there’s things called an IMEI number, and different codes that are recognized by the cell system, that can tell what phone made that. And it’s physically in the phone.

So, I could say, “Oh, my gosh. You know we have this phone out there that people, this person is calling and threatening a bomb threat.”

Jacob: Sure.

Paul: Hmm. We want to do something about it. We want to catch this guy. So, if the IMEI number is registered to that serial number, and we could find out that it was bought at 9:45 at Wal-Mart on the 15th, we could look at the camera footage and see that, “Gee, it was a guy that was six feet tall with black hair and glasses.” And oh, my gosh, when we find this guy in the lineup, it looks just like him. It looks just like me.

The other thing that happens when you use a cellphone is they know where you are. They know from both GPS and also from cell tower use, so which cell tower you’re near. So, if you go and buy one of these prepay phones, and you use it from your house, they are going to know that somebody is using this phone from that house.

So, okay. So, we go out and we buy the phone. And we go somewhere, I guess, near our house. You know, within 10 miles or something.

Jacob: You just stand in your neighbor’s front yard.

Paul: Yeah. You go and stand in your neighbor’s front yard, and we go to Google, and we want to register for an account.

Okay. So, let’s… We go to the local McDonald’s. We have this phone. We are using their Wi-Fi, which is free. We don’t have a proxy server. We don’t have anything yet. We just have a computer.

So, now, we need to do some things to secure our computer. We need to go and change, which is, what is called the MAC address. The Media, Access Control Address. And that is the serial number of the network card in your machine. It’s relatively easy to change.

You can override it in the software, so if you figure that out, you go with your laptop and you change the MAC address. You also download a browser that allows no tracking whatsoever. You might even run an OS that allows no tracking whatsoever.

You go to Google.com, and you want to sign up for a new address.

Browsers to Use for Anonymity

Jacob: Right. Now, would TOR or something like that be one of those browsers that does not allow for…

Paul: It would. Google doesn’t like tor. And if you use Chrome, Chrome is engineered to give Google as much information as possible. So, don’t use Chrome.

Jacob: Right.

Paul: You could use private mode in Internet Explorer, private mode in Opera, or private mode in Firefox. And they’re relatively good. If you want to be extremely careful, use something called Tails, which is an operating system and browser environment that allows you to boot on an ISO.

There have been rumors that the FBI tracks everybody who downloads Tails. I find that difficult to believe, but okay. Let’s say they do.

So, I go to my McDonald’s. I change my MAC address so that my machine can’t be tracked. And I go to a browser that doesn’t share the fonts I have and all the different things that could be used to fingerprint me.

And I have my trusty little phone there. I go to Google, and I… I… You could try and use a proxy server if you happen to have one, but again, we’ve just been born. We don’t exist.

If you use a proxy server, Google will say, “I’m sorry. You can’t access us that through this proxy server.”

So, anyway. So, I have my phone sitting there. I go to Google and I sign up, and I say, “I want a new email address.” Anonymous@google.com, let’s say.

It says, “Well, in order to validate you, you have to give us a phone number.” Well, where do I get a phone number? Well, I have a phone number.

Jacob: You just bought one, right?

Paul: I just bought one. And so now, I have gotten around the chief way in which they validate that you’re real.

Jacob: Right.

Paul  Now, we need to assume that Google has a fingerprint of me from that browser, from whatever it could get. And a browser that’s clean is as much as a fingerprint as a browser that has all the different fonts and all those things in it.

So, we go to the next step. We say, “Gee, I want an account at wherever it might be- Amazon or whatever. And I can do this by buying gift cards. So, I can go out and buy gift cards with cash, and now I am relatively anonymous on the web.

Now, I need to be very careful because I don’t want to log in with that Google acct at my home or with a different browser.

Jacob: Which means you probably need to turn the computer off in a sufficiently dead way, where it’s not going to like occasionally ping.

Paul: Yeah. That’s not as much as the concern. The concern is doing something humanly stupid, where you just forget you’re not connected, but you’re connected, and you use that browser and it opens, and it goes back to your Google page and automatically logs you in, like it does. Because if you drive around with your phone, I mean, with your computer, and you use it, use it in New York City, fly to London, and open your browser up, you’re still logged in to Google.

Jacob: Right.

Paul: But they know you’re in London and in New York. You were in New York, and now you’re in London. So, the fact of the matter is you have a legitimate, you’re a legitimate brand new user on the internet. You’ve validated yourself through this phone. Now what could the authorities get on you?

Well, there was a phone that was used at this McDonald’s, because they know that both from the cell phone tracking, from the GPS location, potentially in the cell phone. They know that from the McDonald’s Wi-Fi logs. They can look at your MAC address and see, “Okay. Is was a MAC address.” They could go back, and if they knew it was a Dell MAC address, they could say who owns, who did you sell that MAC address to, that computer with that network card that had that MAC address to?

But since we’ve changed it now, they can’t go to Dell and… You know, they could go to Dell and they say, “We never issued that MAC address.” Again, this would be a lot of work. But, you know, detectives would have to do it.

Jacob: Well, just the idea of having to go through all of the work of getting this stuff set up and then like, for example, buying stuff on Amazon anonymously, having to go get the gift cards. I mean, it just sounds like you’re committing.

Paul: Yeah. It’s definitely work. Now, the problem with buying something on Amazon is you need to have it delivered.

Jacob: Right.

Paul: So, unless it’s a digital good, you need I have it delivered somewhere.

Jacob: Now if it were a digital good, would they be able to track like, oh, there’s a code. You downloaded this Beatles album, and now you’ve got it playing on this computer.

Paul: Early in the iTunes days, there was rumors, I don’t know if it was true but when they switched from proprietary to mp3, when you could download mp3 that you could effectively give to somebody else, that your name was in the meta data. I don’t know if that was ever the case. And I don’t know that about Amazon, actually. That’s a great question to really look at that and see if it is.

Now, the name isn’t going to be sitting there, Paul Parisi. It’s going to be some big hash on the name. But you could go in and potentially strip those out. But if I were doing it, I would make it so you couldn’t strip it out and it would be part of the data in the file.

So, I don’t know. That’s a great question. It’s plausible.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: To your point. So, you could buy something, and you put it on a server. And so you buy it as new person, and then you go and put it up on a server as yourself. You know, as your real self. If Amazon could track that and say, “Well, you just stole that. You just bought it, and now you’re giving it away. Where did you, your real Jacob, get that from?

Well, I downloaded it illegally somewhere else? Or a bought it as my anonymous self? So, that could be a problem in that sort of payload, using a payload to track who you are.

It is difficult with these prepaid phones. That is the biggest loophole for becoming anonymous. Or it’s the biggest opportunity for becoming anonymous.

There are also, you know, there are phone apps that will, that will, as a service, allow you to make a phone call through this app, that they promise is anonymous.

Jacob: Sure.

Paul: Well, that’s okay. But you’re trusting them. And they must have some logs or something. Maybe they don’t, you know, but there’s all these different services out there that do that. And they make it very easy to do it. So, it could be that it is anonymous, or it might not be. So, some of the proxy servers, for example, this is a great example.

You buy a proxy server service. If it’s an American company, they have to keep logs of who used the proxy service. So, I know that Jacob bought it, and I know that he used it at 9:45PM, and he went to this weapons website, and he bought, you know, five nuclear missiles. And that’s illegal. Well, all the US does, government does, is go to that and say, “Let me see the logs,” and we can now correlate that and see that it was Jacob.

So, if I used overseas proxy services, companies that are overseas, they have different log keeping. And there are several companies that don’t keep any logs.

So, the issue is, is even… American companies can do that. They can say, “We don’t keep logs.” So, if you don’t have them, there’s nothing to produce.

What is a Right?

Jacob: Right. This seems to kind of touch on the issue of, you know, is the internet inherent… Does it have to be inherently anonymous? Or is an inherent right that then has to be protected by free speech or something like that? Because if we’re a country will legislate that sort of thing, I strikes me as getting to that sort of dynamic.

Paul: You know, I don’t know, personally, what is a right? You know, what…? We have personal agency in our actions. And there are certain things that our society has deemed to be inappropriate. Going into a building and yelling, “Fire” whether you’re anonymous or not is wrong. Most people will say that it’s wrong. I mean, you should be aware that there, there is this whole postmodern philosophy that permeates our culture, and the example I give will be absurd. But we are moving quickly towards this level of absurdity, that if you want to say, “There is a fire,” you should be able to say, “There is a fire.” You don’t even need to believe it. You just, you should be have that right to express yourself.

And the postmodern philosophy says that whatever you think is whatever you think, and it’s good. And we can do this, or we can do this. And whatever circumstance, we define what is right in that circumstance. That is the fundamental sort of tenet of postmodern philosophy. And most of what you see in society is based on that. And America right now is at a crossroads where you can’t tell anybody that something is wrong, down to the point of some, you know, early childhood education things, where it’s okay for a kid to believe two plus two is five.

Jacob: Right.

Paul: I know that sounds absurd, but there are people that want to, you know, it’s better to encourage and empower the child, rather than say, “No, there are rules and facts.” So… Having said that, you know, your question is, is should it be anonymous, or should it be, should we have control over what we say and do.

And really, what you’re asking isn’t should we have control over what we say and what we do and what the government observes, because we already have control over that. We don’t need to do the wrong thing or the right thing. And we need to be responsible. See… And that’s really the gist here is who is responsible. And the ration, rationale of thinking that well, the government shouldn’t be able to watch me doing things that are irresponsible and hold me accountable to them.

Well, okay. But if you are being a responsible individual in a society, you should take that on yourself. And I think that’s really the crux of the issue. So, you know, we’re talking about, you know, I’ve given you a way to do things that you shouldn’t do.

Jacob: Yeah.

Paul: But you should be a conscious active participant in society, and it shouldn’t be a problem. You shouldn’t do those things, because it’s not best for you. It’s not best for you to go into a school and say there’s a fire.

Jacob: Right.

Paul: But you know, “I want free speech.” Well, that doesn’t extend to that, because it’s not reasonable.

Jacob: So, is anonymity on the internet, is that an act of free speech then?

Paul: I don’t think so. You know, you could be a dissident in, in a country that is being, that is suppressing your, your views on society. So, you want to say that this country, this government is wrong. Think of North Korea. Somebody wants to say something. Well, anonymity would help that person.

Now, they’re in a highly controlled state, so for us to come over from the outside, to say, “Oh, you need to allow anonymity,” well, the government in Korea, North Korea is going to say, “That’s crazy. Why would we do that? We don’t want the results of that.”

So, you know, you have some semblances in America of anonymity. You know, you can go to a chat board and sign in and say something. If you say something that’s illegal and inflammatory, you, you probably will find that you don’t have the anonymity that you thought you did. If you use this technique I’ve told you about, yeah, you could do that, you know.

So, you know, I think the thing really focuses on personal responsibility. I mean, free speech is a privilege, I think, not a right, because you have to use some judgement when you exercise free speech. Now, you know, in America, we have people on all sides of different political persuasions, and sociological persuasions, and they can say things that are deeply offensive to another persuasion. And that is protected. But it isn’t protected to go into a room and say there is a fire.

Jacob: Right.

Paul: So, there is a reasonableness there. And there is almost a pride in America in that ability of somebody to say something offensive. And I think we need to protect that, because at some point, somebody is going to say something that’s offensive to you. And if you had the ability to punitively punish them, that would not be a free and open society.

Jacob: Sure.

Paul: So, you’re saying, how does that translate to the internet and how does the internet do that. And I don’t think… I mean, again, there’s a semblance of anonymity because of the technology. You know, if you, 200 years ago, if you wrote a note and posted it to a wall or a door and nobody could identify your handwriting, maybe you pieced it together out of magazines, they couldn’t figure out who you were. It was just not possible.

Now, they might go and dig through the trash and find out that you cut all the letters out of the magazine in your trash, they might be able to say, you know… But it wasn’t simple. It’s not simple now, but it wasn’t, I couldn’t comprehend that it was simple then.

So, I don’t know if that answers your question.

Jacob: No. I mean, I guess in some ways as we’re talking about this, I am beginning to think about how, you know, it’s funny. I, you know, I love my wife dearly, but if she sits next to me, I get, while I might be, you know, looking at Facebook or something like that, I, I feel like, “Why are you watching over my shoulder?” Like there’s kind of like a you’re watching over my shoulder. This is slightly annoying. There is a sense in which some of those aspects of being able to fingerprint and the anonymity rubs us the wrong way. But I’m not… I guess I’m just curious, is there something to be concerned about with, you know, the way in which we are fingerprinted and should we be more cautious about those things. Or is it just kind of a part of, you know, this is just the way the world is, and get used to it.

Paul: Well, I think it is the world, the way the world is. So, tough. If you want the use the services, you ultimately control what you do. That’s really the personal responsibility. You can reduce your fingerprint to nothing.

Jacob: Right.

Paul: Don’t use Facebook. Don’t do this. But you make a value judgement every time you use it. The value outweighs the, the personal information I’m giving away. And you know, so, I don’t know what people are worried about. You know, because, you know, let’s, you know, if I were interested in basketball, and the government outlawed basketball and was going to send jack-booted thugs to go around and kill everybody that was interested in basketball. And the people were behind it, that’s a pretty absurd statement. I mean, you know, you could talk about, you know, polarizing ideas, such as pro-life or pro-choice. So, one of those becomes, you know, completely unacceptable and they send out thugs to kill the people that believe it. That’s a little absurd, you know, for a… But it isn’t absurd given our history of the 20th century of what’s happened, you know, in Nazi Germany, you know. Just by being a certain race, you could be killed, you know.

So, the technology allows the government to identify those people, you know, and is it ever going to happen again? Gosh, I hope not. But it has happened. It’s, it’s weird because we could be theorizing about this. But what happened is, is it actually… You know, if you were sympathizer to a, a Jew in, in Nazi Germany, you could be killed.

Jacob: Right.

Paul: Wow. So, you know, let’s extrapolate that our silly thing, if I liked basketball, and they put basketball on my Verizon cable, and everybody who watches it gets a visit by the jack-booted thugs, that’s absurd. But it happened.

Jacob: Yeah, yeah.

Paul: You know, the more polarizing thing, really, actually a more absurd thing, you know. I mean, you know, you could say, “I like, you know, b-science fiction movies,” you know. And, you know, they’re really bad. Well, this obviously you have no judgement and don’t deserve to live. You know, that would be more reasonable than what’s actually happened.

So I don’t know. Again, we all have the option to opt out. You know, so you can just choose to not participate. That is the ultimate in privacy, the ultimate in anonymity. You know, use cash for all your transactions. But, you know, I don’t think you’re going to go home tonight and say I’m giving up all my technology.


Also published on Medium.

Virtualization

On Episode 4 of The Edge of Innovation, we talk about virtualization as a dynamic for business and business leaders, and the technical history and future of virtualization.

Transcript

Sections

Introduction to Virtualization
Integrity and Workflow
Technical Aspects
Historical Examples

Intro

Paul: This is the Edge of Innovation, Hacking the Future of Business. I’m your host, Paul Parisi.

Jacob: And I’m Jacob Young.

Paul: On the Edge of Innovation, we talk about the intersection of technology and business, what’s going on in technology, and what’s possible for business.

Introduction

Jacob:  Today we’re going to talk about virtual. Virtual as a dynamic for business, virtual for business leaders, virtual for every dynamic of how to lead a company. But I guess, the first question, Paul, is what exactly is virtual?

Paul:  That’s a good question, especially since we’re going to talk about it. Well, I think there’s a lot of abstract. There’s virtual reality. We’ve heard of that term forever, and the technology is starting to catch up. We have the new headsets that will allow us to view virtual images in a sort of immersive virtual experience. We’ll be able to sit in a room and look around as we move our head, and the image will move with us.

We’re not talking about that kind of virtualization. We’re talking about, really, two today. One is the virtual office and the virtual worker and virtualization in the technology sense.

So, first we’ll talk about virtual employees, if you will. If we go back 20 or 30 years and told our parents that I work for a high-tech company that’s in San Francisco, and I live in Boston. They’re like, “Oh, you are part of their sales office or is it a different…?”

“No, I work out of my home.”

“What? You work out of your home?” I mean, there was the occasional sales person who worked out of their home, had a phone, and maybe worked out of their car, really.

But nowadays, this whole idea of virtual is really something that we have to come to terms with as business owners. And if you’re a little bit on the older demographic, it’s hard to image hiring somebody that you don’t see every day.

And how does that work? Well, technology really both enables that, but makes it possible. We used to work on physical things €” making cars, digging ditches, stacking rocks, building a house. What?

Jacob: Stacking rocks.

Paul: Stacking rocks.

Jacob: Yeah sorry.

Paul: What’s wrong with that?

Jacob: I just think it’s funny to bring that up.

Paul: I always think, one of the things technology cannot replace is a guy building a stone wall. New England is full of stone walls, and it’s really a testimony to all of the labor that was done. If you really take a keen eye when you’re driving around New England, there’s so many of them. And they’re hard to build. They’re back breaking.

But now, we push around bits, which doesn’t require any strength. You move a mouse, and you move a bit. So, we’re in this sort of ethereal world where we create things that have no substance. They’re, at best, an idea or a concept or a number on a screen or a color on a screen or a pixel.

So, I’m not talking about that virtualization, but the idea that we can have employees that work in different parts of the world. Right now, I work with people that work in different towns. It might be 10 miles away from me, or 30 miles away, or half the world away. I have people that I’m working with actively in the Philippines, and we’re in Boston and in India and in Europe, all sorts of things, Australia…

And so now, physicality doesn’t really play into it. So, that’s really the true virtual thing. There’s a lot of issues with that. One is, how do you know they’re actually working? How do you know they’re not sitting there watching TV?

In the past, you used to go to work, sit at a desk or stand at a production line or whatever it was, and do a task over and over, and you would be judged on the output. Now, if you were smart enough and could figure out a way to automate that, they would say, “Great. We’ll give you a different job now that you have to do manually.”

Integrity and Workflow

So, we really now, though, are measuring people on their output. So, as we look at the virtualized person, we measure them based on what they produce for the organization. There’s also a personal ethics issue here. I might be really good at solving the Rubik€™s Cube. Let’s say that was my job. And you virtually assign me, say, “I want to you spend eight hours today solving the Rubik€™s Cube.” And I do that in five minutes.

And I say, “I solved it.” Or I wait seven hours and 55 more minutes and say, “I just solved that.” Well, that’s personal ethics.

Somebody’s paying you at your level of expertise to commit eight hours to a task, two tasks, whatever it is. And once you go and achieve that task, you go back to them and say, “I need more to do.”

So, in the virtual world, we have to deal with that. In the physical world, we would observe that and say, “What are you doing sitting around? We have other work here to do.” And you would direct them to do that.

In the virtual world, you have to have systems, systems that help remind them and say, “Here’s your tickets for today, the things you need to accomplish today.” And feedback mechanisms, because they may be able to do tickets one, two, and three really fast, and they do it in a hour. You basically have systems now where you say, “I’m going to estimate that that’s going to take me an hour.” And maybe at half an hour, they reassess that and say, “I’m still on the hour.” But at a half hour, they realize, “Well, this is a lot more complicated than I thought. It’s going to take me 10 hours.”

And then that really brings to light the fabric of what we’re doing and what we’re trying to accomplish, and the level of investment that we’re going to make for, hopefully, the return.

So, once the person is out from under your thumb, you need to be much more proactive about managing them. Now, that could be that you IM them every five minutes and say, “What are you doing now? What are you doing now?” Well, that’s not going to work, so you have to build a rapport and a trust.

And really, what’s happening is it’s bringing a lot of jobs up to the white collar level, where you have to have an implicit trust of the person. They have to prove that they’re worthy of that trust by producing things in a timely fashion. Now, there is the option of having somebody say, “I want you to do this job. I want you to paint this thing.” Well, paint isn’t a very good example. “I want you to write this article, and I’m going to pay you for two hours to do that, whether it takes you 10 hours or it takes you one hour.”

Well, that’s not an employee. That’s outsourcing. And that’s fine too. And some people like to work that way. But when you have a virtual employee, you need to have that management, that proactive management of them on a day-in-day-out basis. “What are you doing?” “How are you doing?” “Are you hitting any roadblocks?”

And you also need to instill in them, even more so, to get them to ask those questions back to you. So, I like to say I want to have circuit breakers in place, that when people are doing things, if they spend more than half an hour trying to solve the problem… So, let’s say you had to type in 100 pages. You’re not going to be able to do that in half an hour. It’s going to take you whatever your rate is, whether you type a page an hour or whatever it is, it’s going to take you a certain X amount of time.

But if you’re sitting there saying, “I want you to type in this 100 page document,” and you’re trying to figure out what word processor to use for more than a half an hour, we obviously have a problem. It wasn’t either well defined enough or you don’t know something or what it is. So, I want to put those circuit breakers in place with people to say if you’re spinning your wheels for more than half an hour, you need to escalate and ask.

So managing virtual employees can be a challenge, but I think it’s the new normal, very much so. And it is very interesting to observe more mature people €” basically older people €” dealing with this virtualization. How do you know they’re working for you? And it’s really, the proof is in the pudding. It’s basically based on whether their output is there.

Jacob: Right. And in terms of virtualization, virtual office, what are the technical components that build that sort of infrastructure within a company?

Technical Aspects

Paul: Well, there’s two major areas. One is sort of virtual infrastructure, and then we’re also going to touch on something called virtualization in computer technology and what that means and why it’s important.

First of all, the virtual office. What does it need to have? Well, people have to have an internet connection. They have to have a way to communicate, both via instant messaging, or some sort of text-based messaging so that they can transfer thoughts in writing and they can be memorialized. You could use email for that. Email is great, but it’s not interruptive, so it doesn’t interrupt somebody. It’s not like walking into a room and saying, “Hey, I have a question for you. What do you think of this?”

Text, instant messaging, SMS are very helpful in that. There’s also virtualized phone systems. So, when I picked up a phone in the old days, I could hit an extension and talk to somebody across the building. So, I want to be able to emulate that in my small business. What’s really happening right now is people are used to using their cell phones. So, people just make cell to cell calls. And because cells phones, typically the plan you get is unlimited calls, no employee complains about that.

Another scenario here is somebody calls into your company, and you need to have a PBX, a private branch exchange, a phone switch. Well, they have virtual phone switches now. So, you buy a phone switch in the cloud. Somebody calls into that and presses a button, gets a dial by name directory, types in the extension, and then they get transferred to that person, and their cell phone rings, and they pick it up and say, “Hey. Hello.”

And you could even do that with a sales or customer service team. You could say, “Here’s your cell phone. You’re going to get a call or a voice over IP phone.” Somebody calls in, goes to customer support, and it ring to next available customer support person. Again, all virtualized. That person goes offline, it automatically goes to the guy who’s in London or different time zones. So, that’s one aspect of virtualization.

As I mentioned, there’s other tools coming out, like Slack, where it allows you to have an ongoing conversation about a topic, sort of in a channel, and you basically type in… When we’re working collaboratively on the project, you would say, “We chose the color of the logo. It’s going to be red.” And you put that in there as opposed to burying it in an email that has no context. There’s no threaded context, necessarily, in an email.

So, in a Slack environment, which is sort of like a discussion group, you type in, “We’ve chosen the color red.” And somebody says, “Wait a minute. I thought we agreed it was blue.” And you can have that discussion there. And those tools are very useful. You can even post articles and links to there.

So, now we’re going to slip into… We talked about business and virtualization, like a virtual PBX, virtual storage. You have online storage things, such as Dropbox and Box and OneDrive and Google Drive. Now things are stored in this ubiquitous cloud. It’s up there. And that means you can get to it from anywhere. So, that’s the virtualization of it.

So, the advantage of that is just a few short years ago, 10 years ago, we’d have a server that was in a building. If you had an office in Boston and Chicago, you might have a complicated system of replicating data between the two. And that would get very slow, because the lines were very slow. What you would end up doing is you’d save an email or save a document and email it to somebody. They’d edit it and send it back.

Now we tend to work on the actual copy of the document stored in the cloud, a safe place where we can all work on it and collaborate on it. Even to the point now where we have Google Drive and Microsoft Office 365 where we can be working on the same document at the same time and seeing the other person type in the changes, which is really quite cool. It’s taken us a while to get there.

Historical Examples

Now we’re going to talk about this whole idea of virtual machines. A long time ago, probably in 1986 or 1987, there was a company called… I think it was Insignia Software. And they came out with a piece of software called SoftPC for the Mac. What is was is it was a piece of software that emulated a PC. And you could install Windows or DOS or whatever on a Mac.

At that time, most of the business applications were on PCs, and they didn’t have versions that were on the Mac. So, this software was very intriguing. It’s like, wait a minute. I can have one physical piece of hardware on my desk, and I can run the Mac OS, and I can run a copy of Windows, and I can run Excel. Well, actually Excel was originally a Mac program, but whatever PC program you needed, maybe your accounting software.

That was virtualization. So, what they did is they wrote a piece of software that was very fast, very slick, and very cool that tricked Windows operating system, or DOS, into thinking it was running on an Intel processor.

What was amazing about that is they were using Motorola processors. So, they had to translate when somebody said draw to the screen when using the Intel command to draw to the screen, they had to, in software, translate to say, no, do it through the Motorola processor.

So, that was the first experience. It was…wow. This is really cool. Fast forward a few years, a company came out, Connectix. They actually came up with the first webcam. That was their claim to fame. They came out with Virtual PC, which was another thing on the Mac that allowed you to run a virtual PC.

So, it was really cool that you could do these things. It was mostly a toy, though.

Then some smart guys got together that were working at Microsoft and left and started a company called VMware. VMware was, basically they saw this idea of virtualization in the PC world as being something that they could do more with, where you could buy a big piece of hardware €” very expensive high-end machine, server and run multiple, virtual servers on that high-end machine. And they made a business out of that. From nothing, they went into that business.

Since then, there have been several virtualization technologies that have come out. There’s one by Microsoft called Hyper-V. There’s a couple of others, one that Oracle bought up. There’s some open source ones as well.

What they do is allow you to install an operating system in a virtual environment. So, what does that mean?

If I go down to the store and buy a computer from Best Buy, if I buy a Mac, I can install Mac OS on it. If you’re clever, you can install Windows on it, because now they run Intel chips. And that’s fine. If you’re like me and you customize it a lot, then you install Office, and you install this, and you install this screensaver and this other program, and all sorts of programs on it, and you get it just the way you want. And you go out and drop it.

Well, if I had a backup, I could go get a new one and restore that backup. In the virtual environment, I can take and install it all, have everything just the way I want it, and then I could make a clone of it. Because it’s just a file on a hard drive. Does that make sense? It’s just a file on a hard drive with all that configuration and information in it. So, I can duplicate that, and maybe I could give it to you. And now all of a sudden, you have my environment the way it is, or maybe my corporate standard desktop. I install Word; I install Office; and I install all the different tools that I want. So, that’s sort of cool. That’s really nice.

And for a long time, I personally have been using virtualization on my desktop. So, when I had to do testing, and I had to test in an old version of Windows, or I had a special browser, I would create a virtual machine, install it all, and then install the old version of Chrome on that and use it.

Well, then I got the bright idea, why don’t I just install the machine, put nothing on it, and then clone that, then install Google on that or the old Internet Explorer to test with. So, that was great. That’s how developers use that virtualization technology all the time to do that.

Then it became, “Wait a minute. What can we do to make this part of… Could we run a desktop on it?” It becomes the idea of can I set up a virtual machine that somebody, whatever they are, can connect to and do their work on? Well, of course, they’re going to need an internet connection. If they don’t have an internet connection, they can’t get to the machine.

But what does it afford me? Well, I can create one image and clone it for 100 people. And I can then give them the credentials and they can remotely connect, and they have everything configured. I can lock it down so they can’t change anything. I can even lock it down where they can’t take any data off the machine. So, security is a thing there.

So, what you have is a lot of companies come with VDI, or Virtual Desktop Initiatives. VMware supports that, but they’re a little bit now. They’ve been around for a long time. Now, they’re a little bit less innovative, because they make software that is installed on hardware, software that allows you to virtualize things.

If I want to do that… I’m a corporate IT manager, and I say, “I want to virtualize all my desktops,” I’ve got to go to Hewlett Packard or IBM and say, “I need a beefy server, a lot of hard drive space, a lot of memory, and a big internet connection.” And I need to go to VMware and pay their licensing fee. And then I have to install a hundred copies of Windows. Or one copy and clone it.

So, in the natural world, where the next person eats the next person, like the fish in the ocean, everything eats…the whole food chain. People like Amazon have come out with cloud-based virtualization. So, you can go to Amazon €” there are Amazon web services €” and say, “I want a virtual machine.” Within minutes, you can have a virtual machine that they have cloned from one of their images. It can either have Office or not. And it can have just no Office if you want it, and have that up and running. You could hand that to a person and say, “Here’s where it is.” You then connect that to your corporate cloud storage, and they’re up and running in minutes. I didn’t have to go to the store. And didn’t have to pay anything. I pay for it month-to-month. And I have zero risk, because now if that machine gets lost…how does it get lost, because it’s in the cloud.

So, I buy them an inexpensive laptop with a decent screen. They connect to the internet, and they use that remotely. So, that’s what virtualization is and really how you can apply it.

The problem is it’s a little expensive. A virtual machine, a virtual desktop, at Amazon is about $75/month. Calculate that out. That’s 750 plus 150, that’s $900/yr. So, if I go to Best Buy and buy a machine, I still have to buy a machine, but I could buy a cheaper one. So, I’m going to spend $400 as opposed to $700, but I still have to spend $400. And that will last three years. So, it’s $130/yr. So, now my $900 goes to $1000 a year to supply this person with that.

Now, the $75 comes with a license for Office, which is otherwise $100/yr. So, if I go out and buy a $700 machine, add the license for Office for three years, that’s $1000. And the Amazon solution is $1000/yr. I just spend $1000 on a physical machine. Now, if the person drops the machine, I’ve got to have somebody service it. I’ve got to have an IT guy, potentially, come it and install everything for me. So, let’s say that’s $500.

So, the doing it yourself, buying a machine that’s $1500, which we’ll say lasts three years. Doing it the Amazon way is $3000, so it’s still twice as much.

Now, I’m sure they have rhetoric on why it’s better, and it is backed up and all that, but those are some of the things that you can do. You could also buy a very high-performance machine that performs on demand as you need it to. So, that’s another option that you could do. If you need a fast, fast machine, you could do it on that cloud, virtual machine and do that.

Virtual machines are good for just about everything. One of the things they’re not very good at is audio and video editing. You’re going to need a have a high-performance machine locally to you. And that’s where you need to go out and spend the money on a machine.

So, that’s sort of virtualization. It should be something that we should consider. It’s great for employees that you may have that are virtual, because they need access maybe to some files that you don’t want to ship them all the files. So, we have one client that has about 30,000 images that they need to work with in a web environment. And it’s huge. It’s like a terabyte of information. So, if I start a new person, am I going to send them a terabyte hard drive? And now I’ve lost control of those? No, we provide a virtual machine where they browse in. They can get to that virtual machine. They have all the assets they need. And I didn’t lose any control of those videos or pictures.

Jacob: So, if a company is looking to go virtual, it seems like – and I think you alluded to this earlier – there are going to be dynamics of going virtual that are going to grate against our expectations of life within the office. So, you can’t just go knock on somebody’s door and just say, “I have a question about this.” There’s going to be some give-and-take in terms of what are you giving up by going virtual? Can you walk us through ideas of how to set expectations for that? Or what are understood sacrifices in going virtual for an office?

Paul: I think that what you’re addressing is culture and how do you maintain culture. I’ll give you just a little insight. This is 2016… 10 or 12 years ago, maybe even 15, I started working virtually with people. And I said to them, being their manager, I was development team, I said, “I don’t care where you work or when you work. But when I need to get hold of you, I need to get hold of you.” And we did instant messaging. “So, I expect that when you’re supposed to be working, if I IM you, you either set your status as away or at lunch or whatever and give me an expectation of when I’m going to be able to get back in touch with you, or you’re available. Or I’m going to get frustrated.”

So, that worked really well back then, really well. That was sort of cutting edge. Now that it’s become more familiar, I have found that it’s much more fluffy, in other words, much more nebulous. Is the person available and they’re not, and they have so many things. They have SMS coming in. They have IMs coming in. They’re not as hyper-sensitive to my SMS coming in or my IM coming in.

Jacob: Yeah. They’ve got Twitter, Facebook, text messages, Skype…all that competing for the same attention you’re trying to grab.

Paul: Exactly. So, that’s a huge challenge. I have a good friend who manages a team that’s international, and they find that… They actually have periodic €” like, every six months €” physical get-togethers, where they actually fly people in from all over the world and get together and work for a week together.

Jacob: I’ve heard of that more frequently with friends of mine that work, maybe in the Philippines, and they live in New England. And they’re setting up a situation where they’re flying out to the Philippines once or twice a year.

Paul: Exactly. I have one project that we’re working with an organization in India. We were just talking with some of the people, and they’re planning to send their engineer here for a week or two this summer because they want to get to know us and who we are and how we think and what our processes are. And that would have just not been the case 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago.

So, it’s very important to do that. It’s very important to have ways of disseminating information and updates that we might take for granted because we’re in an office. Things like Slack, where there’s this natural recording of it all, transcript, help with that immensely. As you embrace that, you need to embrace that knowledge sharing across time boundaries.

Jacob: In terms it looking forward for virtual, what exactly are the entrepreneurial frontiers or interesting opportunities for entrepreneurs within the virtual office realm?

Paul: Well, I think it allows you to do more. And you could even say do more with less, because there are lots of really good people that can offshore things, and you can get people to do things that you may not be able to find somebody to do here. Or the people might not be willing to, or they might be able to do it cheaper.

Jacob: So, it allows you to have a more lean startup in some ways?

Paul: You could. Absolutely. There’s lots of opportunities for that. But you do need to fundamentally change how you manage the people, because you just can’t leave them alone or they’re not going to hit your mark. So, you do need to check in with them, and that is a fundamental change that is very hard. Any type of change is hard, especially if you have to change. So, I would predicate all the virtualization happening… The success of virtualization is that you change.

I have a good friend who has started a bunch of companies and been wildly successful, but he really needs to be in the room with the people in order to feel like they’re doing the right job and be effective in his style. That’s not the way the world works anymore. It might in certain circumstances, but you’ll have an easier go of it if you virtualize.

With great power comes great responsibility with these new opportunities. Even virtualizing an employee has new challenges, and it’s really incumbent on you, business owner, to beat those challenges. It’s not the person you’re working with that has to beat those challenges. You need to set your expectations, give them clear mechanisms for reporting and for accountability.

Jacob: The Edge of Innovation is brought to you in partnership with SaviorLabs. SaviorLabs exists to help businesses mature and strategize for the future. Learn more about SaviorLabs at saviorlabs.com.

© 2025 Paul Parisi

Theme by Anders NorénUp ↑