Recently in Public IM Category

"It's compliance Jim, but not as we know it"

By
Sarah Carter
 on August 31, 2010 12:34 PM | | Comments (0)
From Robin Smith, Technical Manager, EMEA, FaceTime Communications

I recently read an article posted on The Register, based out of the UK, about the great advances the current version of Microsoft's Unified Communications platform (OCS) has made, when compared with previous incarnations. I'm in full agreement and look forward to the next release, currently called CS14, details can be found here. Given that a large number of our customers have either industry or legal compliance requirements they must comply with, I did feel one of the final comments needed a little more qualification than space in the article allowed for:

"...if compliance is a concern, you have IM archiving"

The moment I read that, I was catapulted back to the late 1980s and ever since haven't been able to get the incredibly annoying "Star Trekkin" by "The Firm" out of my head. Click here or search YouTube for "The Firm - Star Trekking" if you have no idea what I'm talking about - your ears won't thank you. Why? Well, compliance is in the eye of the person with a fine and possible jail sentence hanging over their head and as Spock's line in the song goes:

 "it's life Jim, but not as we know it."

There are in fact a few different ways you can store OCS IMs both natively with Microsoft products and using third-party solutions. But, as those who write on bits of paper or print things out so they don't forget or lose them and then can't find the bit of paper when they actually need it can attest to, just because you've archived something doesn't mean:

  • you can ever find it again, even though you know it's in that pile somewhere
  • it will be complete, maybe the dog ate half of it
  • that it will come back looking the same, maybe you spilled coffee on it or you printed out several pages and they've been mixed up so the order is wrong
  • that someone else can look through the pile and find the piece of paper
  • different things of difference genres or sizes will fit or stay in the pile properly
To achieve all of the above, you need special controls around how you capture, store, search and recover data.

You need to be able to show that what has been recovered is the same as what was originally stored and that it is a true representation of the original data. You should also make sure that in the case of a multi-party chat where someone wasn't part of the whole conversation that the view of their data is different to that of the other participants'. Let alone the ease of use issues around eDiscovery; making it possible for someone (often non-technical) to search the archive and recover what they need without having to become an expert in SQL scripting. So if we can achieve that, are we compliant? Maybe, maybe not.

What about usage policy? Can my Traders and Research teams talk to each other? Do I want Billy in the call centre using my OCS system to ask all the eligible young ladies in the department out on dates?

What about content security? If I'm allowing file transfers, shouldn't they be stored along with the IM conversation transcripts? Shouldn't you be virus checking file transfers, making sure that staff aren't using inappropriate language over IM, especially with business partners through my OCS edge server.

My point is that for some people compliance isn't just about storing what happened, it's about making sure certain things can't happen in the first place and being able to retrieve it in a fashion that meets regulatory requirements.

"There's Klingons on the starboard bow"

The list goes on...and we haven't even thought about what else is happening on the corporate network. What about Skype, Yahoo, GoogleTalk , Windows Live Messenger and Blackberry PIN / SMS to name but a few?

Of course the OCS Archive server wasn't designed to be an enterprise platform covering so many different flavours of IM - but it is rare to see just one flavour of Instant Messaging on a corporate network. From a management perspective alone it makes sense to have a consistent policy around all authorised channels and block everything else.

...and finally, there's the whole issue surrounding Social Networking. "We block it", I hear you say. Well, that's all well and good, but last time someone told me that I searched Twitter and found no less than 5 accounts tweeting on behalf of the company. I then searched Facebook and found a network, groups and employees.

Couple this with the huge pressure many companies are under to enable sites like Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter for legitimate business purposes along with the reach it gives sales and marketing for the company's brand and you can see why there's such a lot of noise in the corporate space surrounding Social Networking.

Ask FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority) or the UK's FSA (Financial Services Authority), both have issued specific guidelines regarding social networking posts, saying that they need to be treated as forms of electronic messaging. This means that they effectively need to be subject to the same controls mentioned above.

So. Yes, you can indeed store your OCS IM conversations in the OCS Archive server. Does it give you IM compliance? Not as we know it, Captain.

Robin J Smith is FaceTime's Technical Manager for EMEA, an occasional Star Trek viewer and is currently looking for suggestions on how to get the above song out of his head. You can follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Vantage: It's officially the best.

By
Sarah Carter
 on May 10, 2010 8:49 AM | | Comments (0)

2010 marks my tenth year with FaceTime - and I've seen some changes in those 10 years - no more so than in the Financial Services sector, where Vantage, the product that I manage excels.  Having a third party organization verify that is exceedingly gratifying - and that's what happened recently.  At the SC Magazine Europe Awards in London, Vantage was unveiled as the Best Security Solution for Financial Services.

 

Perhaps it's the pedigree - Vantage is based on the equally award winning IMAuditor, perhaps it's the new features that we rolled out recently (from support for Microsoft OCS CAC, to Group Chat support and Skype).  Maybe it's the product manager....

 

Ultimately, I think its that we absolutely understand the requirements of financial institutions, their reliance on real time communications, rigorous regulatory requirements and we do this alongside our understanding of the real time collaborative internet. 

 

Features such as real-time logging and policy for Microsoft Group Chat, data leak prevention for file transfers, zero day worm protection, inline legal disclaimers and a full 360 degree audit capability make Vantage uniquely positioned in heavily regulated industries such as Financial Services.

 

Who am I kidding, of course it's all due to the product management....

 

Brian Babin is Director of Product Management for FaceTime's Vantage and Insight products and celebrates his tenth year with the company in 2010

Farewell old friend. Its time for the next generation.

By
Sarah Carter
 on March 29, 2010 3:05 AM | | Comments (0)

The drive to extend collaboration outside of our own network boundaries has never been so strong.  Whether our drivers are to save cost, a geographically challenged work force, a diverse supply chain network or reduce time to market - we're all looking to collaborate and communicate with individuals who don't necessarily adhere to the same security, management and compliance controls that you have on your network.

 

And we're using a variety of tools, I hesitate to admit to how many different applications I use to communicate, not just internally here at FaceTime, but with suppliers around the world, our channel and strategic partners, prospects and customers.  It's probably a good exercise actually to think about that right now.

 

My real time communications tools:

 

 

Wow.  There's a wonder I ever get any work done with that little lot eh?

 

But I'm not unique.  It's representative of the world in which we work now - that enterprise deployed Unified Communications platforms, like OCS and Sametime are co-existing alongside those Web 2.0 tools that I installed myself - because - well because that's how I communicate with different folks around the world.

 

The need to secure and manage the whole picture has never been stronger either. The same risks apply in our 2.0 world as always did in a 1.0 world - so whether your bugbear is inbound threats, outbound data leakage and managing your errant employees - all these areas require consideration.  I guess the only problem is that in a 2.0 real time world - the issue becomes apparent, well, in real time.

 

Compliance too affects real time communications.  Regulatory bodies, from the SEC, FINRA, HIPAA to the Financial Services Authority have all issued guidelines and rules on use and retention of real time communications - they are, after all, simple electronic communications, and subject to the same regulation - AND LEGISLATION - that your email is.

 

If you want to take a look at just how much growth there has been in the usage of real time communications tools and how prepared the average organization is to deal with security, management and compliance issues- take a look at the results of FaceTime's fifth annual survey - and compare it to what's going on in your organization.

 

Today, we launched Vantage, the successor to IMAuditor. 

 

IMAuditor - farewell old friend, but our world has moved well beyond pure IM and just auditing - Vantage heralds the new standard for security, management and compliance for real time and Unified Communications - giving you a vantage point, a view, visibility and control over all facets of real time and unified communications and the individual tools and capabilities in those platforms. Vantage also gives you a significant advantage - from managing OCS CAC, to controlling federation, non registered employees, logging Sametime announcements - and across the widest range of UC platforms and public IM networks which now includes Skype.

 

Why not take a look for yourself? - and bring your security, management and compliance for unified communications up to the new standard.


Sarah Carter, who can also be reached on old fashioned email:  scarter@facetime.com



Yesterday's solution doesn't address today's issues

By
Sarah Carter
 on December 2, 2009 4:54 AM | | Comments (0)

Today's guest blogger is Eric Young.  Eric is FaceTime's Sr, Director of Field Services, and works with FaceTime customers to implement leading edge security and compliance solutions for Unified Communications and Web 2.0.  Eric's worldwide role gives him an insight into the global requirements of organizations implementing real time communications technologies to enable their businesses and works closely with our product team to ensure that FaceTime solutions remain at the forefront of the industry.

 

Yesterday's solution doesn't address today's issues.

 

I was onsite with a customer recently completing our fifth competitive replacement within the Fortune 400 in the past 6 months.  As the customer was detailing all of the requirements the previous solution did not satisfy, it made me wonder, how are other customers of these competitors feeling they are operating in a compliant fashion? 

 

If you, as a compliance officer or legal counsel, cannot make sense of a group chat conversation, cannot actually view the content of a blocked message, or can't see what folks are trying to post to a social networking site; how can you possibly defend your organization from SEC fines or from a lawsuit in a court of law? 

 

Security technologies evolve quickly, especially in the area of real-time communications - but the adoption of tools like Unified Communications, Instant Messaging and social media has grown exponentially - in many cases even without the knowledge of either IT or compliance.

 

Regulation and compliance changes too, with the times.  Most recently I've seen FINRA starting to address the issue of social media and issuing guidelines to member organizations and individuals on how usage should be treated. 

 

We all understand there is a big difference between "logging" and "being compliant" but knowing there are still some banks and other highly regulated companies using these legacy solutions that were designed for technology of a few years back, it begs the questions:  What are the minimum requirements for security and compliance for Unified Communications, Instant Messaging and Social Media?


And, what are you doing about dealing with emerging technology?

 

 

 

Social Networking? or Social NOTworking?

By
Sarah Carter
 on July 1, 2009 8:06 AM | | Comments (0)

It's not so long ago that I'd wonder what I did without my instant messaging client just to get through my working day. Not, you understand because I needed my latest fix of emoticon laden gossip with far flung friends, rather so that I could use Windows Live, Microsoft OCS, Lotus Sametime, Skype (yes I'm a serial IM'er) to get answers I needed from people who were online, rather than abandoning my question in a voicemail black hole.

 

My must have applications of choice now?  Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for starters.   And it appears I'm not the only one to join the social revolution.  FaceTime's June survey on social networking had over 87% of 1199 respondents using social networks, with 39% using a social network every day.  

 

Now most of the folks I social network with are work related.  And my communications are during the working day.  And they respond in kind.  (So.. there's a Sherlock Holmes style deduction going on here) It's elementary, my dear Watson, that they must therefore be using social networks in the workplace.

 

And our survey agrees with that.  With a whopping 85% of respondents believing that their users are utilizing social networks from the corporate network.  We'd been somewhat surprised earlier this week, when Chris Boyd, our Director of Research uncovered a keylogger on the kids popular social networking site Neopets.  (Neopets (originally NeoPets) is a virtual pet website, based around the virtual pets that inhabit the virtual world of Neopia.)  

 

Chris found hackers targeting 12 year olds - and probably their more affluent parents.

 

Interestingly, sites such as Neopets are accessed in corporate environments too - FaceTime collects live traffic data from commercially deployed Unified Security Gateway appliances at more than 80 mid to large enterprises worldwide that have opted into this program, representing the daily Web-based activities of more than 100,000 corporate workers.

 

During the past week, these corporate workers have accessed 99 different virtual worlds from their work computers, and at least half of those are targeted at children. Perhaps, as Chris suggests, the kids are asking their parents to check on their Neopets at work or see if the latest friend request on Myspace has been approved?

 

I guess it's at this point in time that the corporate security folks start shaking their heads, and blocking access to social networks, updating those URL filters, tightening up the rules on the firewall.  You know the drill. 

 

Hold up.  Whoa.  Stop. 

31% of our survey respondents reported that Social Networking is critical to business - but must be secure and compliant, citing business benefits from better employee communications to improved marketing communications, more efficient recruiting and faster decision times through collaboration as the key benefits that social networking delivers.

 

But that's not all.  40% of our survey respondents derived their information about their employee social networking usage from URL filter logs.  The Web 2.0 applications and real time communications tools that make up the social networks and the internet that we use today are highly evasive, specifically designed to get around Web filtering, firewalls and other traditional security solutions using a variety of techniques like port crawling, tunneling and onion routing.  So the reality is probably that there is a lot more of this traffic that folks are just plain NOT SEEING, let alone managing.

 

I'll leave you with the thought that our web 2.0 world is no longer about blocking (even if your traditional URL filter could..) it's as we at FaceTime say (and our survey respondents agree with resoundingly)  - our new social order needs enabling, just make sure that it's done securely and compliantly.

 

White House says yes to email, no to IM. Change doesn't have to be this hard.

By
Frank Cabri
 on January 20, 2009 1:50 PM | | Comments (0)

It looks as if the decision has been made, President Barack Obama will be allowed to keep his Blackberry. Politico's Ben Smith reports incoming white house staffers were told last Friday that, indeed, the President would remain connected - but for them the news was not so bright. There will be no IM in the White House, and that's a change that the white house staffers are not ready for.

 

This is an interesting policy, since Web 2.0 and real time communications have played such a significant role in the Obama campaign.

 

According to Smith:

 

"They just told us flat out we couldn't IM in the White House," groused one senior staffer Friday.

"It sucks. It's really going to slow us down," complained another, saying that lawyers had warned that, along with instant messaging, White House software will restrict users to a range of sites roughly "like your average grade school." 

 

At the heart this debate is The Presidential Records Act, which requires White House documents to be made publicly available five years after a president leaves office. The White House will obviously be archiving its emails to comply. But why stop there? After all, in many ways IM is really just instant email. For more than seven years now, corporations have embraced the benefits of IM and solved the compliance issues around storing and retrieving its content.

   

In defense of the White House IT staff, even though IM seems like instant email to its users, its very different from a management standpoint. Instead of one email network under IT's control, there are dozens of different IM networks in play where conversations occur in real time and involve any number of parties.  It's like solving a Rubics Cube as opposed to a flat picture puzzle - it can be done, but it's a bit more complicated.

 

For example, a multi-party IM conversation can include numerous participants joining at different times, creating a requirement to make clear the context surrounding each participant's understanding of the conversation. Who entered at what point, what did they hear and what did they say?

 

Or in terms that became familiar during the Watergate scandal, which was the catalyst for the adoption of the Presidential Records Retention Act, "Who knew what, and when?"

 

The technology exists to solve these problems, so my guess is that's not all that's behind the decision. IM conversations are by their nature casual, more like hallway conversations. So the fear is that if IM is archived, one day those walls will talk and the result may be embarrassing. Remember Mark Foley?

 

But Corporate America has dealt with this issue as well, and the White House could do the same. Employee education goes along way, along with proactive technology solutions like setting policies and real-time notifications to appear during their instant message conversations to let them know they are being monitored. If you tell the White House staffers they're being monitored, I'm guessing they will use IM appropriately - no more or no less than they would with email. How often do you go over the speed limit when a Highway Patrol car is in the next lane?

 

Change. If anyone can do it, this administration can.

Are these the Halcyon Days, or are they gone forever?

By
Sarah Carter
 on December 2, 2008 7:03 AM | | Comments (0)

[Halcyon:  Oxford English Dictionary: Definition  adj & n calm peaceful]

 

Sarah Carter definition:  sepia tinted memories of days where you only remember the good bits...often a rose tinted remembrance...

 

I don't believe I'm surprised anymore by what happens in our increasingly connected world.  Perhaps I'm a natural cynic.  Having been in the IT security industry for more years than I'll ever admit to, I'm naturally suspicious.  When Steve Gold, one of our well known journalists in the UK, Skype'd me an unsolicited article synopsis text file that he wanted to interview FaceTime about recently, I wouldn't accept the file until he'd answered a specific question I asked him in the Skype IM.  As I explained to Steve, "Sure, we Skype each other regularly, but just because I know you doesn't mean I trust you.  And I certainly don't trust your IT or some of the nefarious characters (I include myself in this list) you associate with and who send you files and information to investigate."

 

I remember, you see, the days of the "I love you virus", the days before we purchased anti-spam and email anti-virus without question. When I'd click on a link that someone in my trusted network would send me, or I'd open a .zip file and the only way that I could stop the resulted virus being propagated out to my entire contacts list, was to reach under my desk and pull out the network cable and then sit and wait red faced for helpdesk to come and rescue me. 

 

It surprises me that people aren't more suspicious, that there is a natural trust between users of real-time communications.

 

At FaceTime (in our labs and through working with customers) we see threats propagating over real time channels every day - protecting you from them, is after all our business.  We've seen Trojans come in over a public IM network, propagate out to all your buddies and then hop over to an enterprise IM network.

 

So, is it just a matter of time then before we see malware and Trojans and worms written specifically for unified messaging and communications platforms, written to take advantage of the inherent trust shared between users?  And are we currently in an equivalent halcyon period that I remember before ILoveYou and email?  Or am I worrying about nothing?

 

Time, I guess will tell.  But next time, I ask you for verification that you are who you say you are when you're sending me a file over IM, or when you're sending me your holiday pics over Skype...well, it's not that I don't trust you.  I just think the halcyon days are long gone. Am I the only one?

 

Can the Water Cooler Chat

By
Sarah Carter
 on November 11, 2008 2:58 PM | | Comments (0)

I read a report from Reuters about British Think Tank, Demos, saying that bosses shouldn't stop their staff from visiting social networking sites because it could actually benefit their business.  Music to my ears I thought.  I'm obviously pretty pleased with the conclusions that they came to, not least because it absolutely marries up with the results of FaceTime's fourth annual survey  of Internet Trends  (more on this in a moment), but it marries up with how I work.

 

The Demos report concluded that

 

"The value of networking within an economic downturn is perhaps more important than ever and I believe it could mean the difference between a business collapsing or capitalizing on the tricky conditions."

 

Paraphrasing the report, it means that employees should be allowed to use MySpace, or Facebook, because there is very little difference between social networking and professional networking.

 

The FaceTime survey also looked at the changing way in which IT professionals and employees use the Internet. This year, 81% of survey respondents said they use social networks at work for personal reasons. But what's interesting is a nearly equal number - 79% - said they use these sites for business reasons. And 51% are accessing them several times a day. 

 

  chart_SocialNetworksUsedAtWork.jpgI'm definitely one of those 51% of the 79%. You'll find me regularly on LinkedIn and Facebook, both for social and legitimate business reasons.  I actually think that my local supermarket owes me some coupons or at least a pat on the back.... I recently posted a tip on Facebook about beating the credit crunch with a special deal they had on some wine, and I know for certain that my buddies bought at least 5 cases.  So Tesco, if you're listening....you know where I live.

 

However, there's one point in the report that I don't agree with.

 

"Bans on Facebook or YouTube are in any case almost impossible to enforce; firms may as well try to put a time limit on the numbers of minutes allowed each day for gossiping." 

 

You see this is one of the great things that FaceTime - and our flagship product, the Unified Security Gateway (or USG) does. 

 

Ban the access if you want, USG lets you do that.  Or, enabling you to truly realize the value of networking, it gives you granular control over who can do what. Whether its downloading one of the more than 20,000 thousand applications on Facebook, or setting who can use AIM or Yahoo! Messenger or GoogleTalk or myriad other real time chat and communications tools. 

 

So while we can't stop the gossip around the real water cooler, we can stop them getting to the virtual one!

Lessons from Yahoogate

By
Frank Cabri
 on September 24, 2008 12:53 PM | | Comments (0)

They say you can find anything on Google. Turns out it's especially useful when one is searching for personal data to crack a Yahoo! Web mail password.  

 

In the remote case you missed it: Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo! Webmail was hacked last week, and the contents were posted on Wikileaks.  Wired reported that the hacker easily broke into Palin's Webmail, hoping to find incriminating evidence that could derail her campaign.

 

We see this happen a lot. While IT installs email and IM archiving software, the workforce moves their personal and sometimes ill-advised communications to what I would call rogue channels. These channels include Webmail, public IM, Skype, and even Facebook. Employees think that management doesn't monitor or control these tools and it becomes an appealing place for improper or even illegal activity to occur.

 

Michael Osterman explained this well when he wrote about the lessons IT should learn from the Sarah Palin Webmail hack.

 

More examples of infamous rogue channel use in recent times include Senator Mark Foley, whose IM conversations with a intern cost him his job. Jerome Kerviel, the French banker who alledgedly cost his company $7B, and Scott Sidell, the former CEO who funneled client lists to himself through Webmail.

 

What are your employees doing thru Webmail, personal IM networks and social networking sites?

 

When I ask IT professionals the above question the majority respond (very confidently) that nothing rogue or unsanctioned is happening on their networks. Common responses include, "We block it with our firewall" or "we have a policy against it."  Then we deploy an evaluation unit and provide a report of actual employee initiated traffic and it becomes clear: hope is not a strategy. 

 

As customers move to adopt Unified Communications platforms from Microsoft, IBM and others, I believe the same issue will exist - employees will use personal systems and corporate sanctioned systems interchangeably.  IT will have the hard task of managing policies and controls consistently across this heterogeneous environment. 

It's 10 pm, do you know where your ESI is?

By
Jim Obrien
 on September 15, 2008 4:13 PM | | Comments (0)

... or even what it is?

 

Back in the old days, TV networks would run public service spots before the nightly news saying: "It's 10 pm, do you know where your children are?" The fact that the spots ran for twenty years in cities like New York points out that it is easy to lose track of stuff, even important stuff.  Which brings me to ESI--Electronically Stored Information.  Not that it is as important as your kids, but in the discovery phase of a big lawsuit, it might seem that way.  And, like kids, ESI can be surprisingly easy to lose track of.

 

ESI is the catch-all term for the digitally stored files of litigants in a federal case.  During the pre-trial discovery phase of a lawsuit, all ESI is subject to discovery, meaning it all has to be checked for relevant information that the other side has requested to help it prove its case.  Only the relevant files need to be actually given to the opposing party, but all ESI has to be checked to make sure all the relevant files have been located and handed over.  It sounds simple enough, but it is hard if you are not prepared in advance and a lot can go wrong. 

 

When the e-discovery rules changed in late 2006, there was a lot of commotion about it, and a lot was written about the need for companies to have their ESI organized and well maintained in order to be able to respond to the tight discovery timelines set by the new rules. I don't think that message has really sunk in though.  And now that the rules are no longer "new," and the commotion has died down, it is easy for companies to lose track of whether they have really prepared to meet the current e-discovery challenges.  Yes, the e-discovery market is growing nicely, but more spending is not assurance that the companies really understand all the risks or even the problems they are trying to solve. 

 

As the resident lawyer at FaceTime, I am occasionally asked to talk about e-discovery issues with customers, or on a panel. Sometimes I can tell that a person I'm speaking with just doesn't want to have to deal with instant messaging in e-discovery, even when IM is used for business purposes in their company. To them, the most obvious way not to deal with it is to make it go away, or more precisely, to take the position that IM logs are not business records and therefore will not be saved. 

 

No saved IM records, no IM ESI, problem solved. 

 

There are undoubtedly circumstances where this is a sound policy, but what I've seen is that such a position is most often taken without enough attention to the reality of how easily IM logs are stored in hard-to-find places, and how difficult it is to effectively enforce a "no IM records" policy when employees use IM for business purposes and may need to refer to those logs the way they refer back to e-mail.  The company falls into the trap of mistaking its ESI policy, what the company wants its ESI to be, with the reality of what its ESI actually is -- i.e., what is actually saved, either inadvertently or surreptitiously against policy. 

 

The resulting danger is that the ESI is there, but the company doesn't know it exists until too late. My recommendation is usually that if IM is used for business, then it will generate business records that should be maintained and be treated on par with e-mail records for e-discovery purposes.

 

If the IM-savvy, and sometimes IM-dependent, companies that FaceTime deals with are still coming to terms with IM logs in regard to e-discovery, then I have to believe that companies in general have not moved much beyond e-mail archiving, if they have a proactive e-discovery solution at all.  To me, that's like being happy that one of your kids is watching TV with you at 10 pm. and forgetting about the one you haven't seen since yesterday.

« Product Announcements | Main Index | Archives | RSA Conference »

About this Archive

This page is a archive of recent entries in the Public IM category.

Product Announcements is the previous category.

RSA Conference is the next category.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

Twitter Updates

follow us on Twitter

Search

Blog Roll

Collaborative Thinking

Ed Brill

Eileen Brown's Weblog

Enterprise 2.0 Blog

FastForward

Irwin Lazar

No Jitter

Schneier

Single Point of Contact

SKT

Team Think

Technology Live

Techland

The Facebook Blog

The Impact of Information Technology (IT) on Businesses and their Leaders

The Osterman Research Blog

The User View

Security Fix

Zero Day

Comment/Trackback Policy

This site supports an open comment policy. Rude, wasteful, off-topic, privacy-intruding or libelous comments will be deleted. Comments will remain open unless abused.