TaoSecurity Blog

Recently I railed against PowerPoint . In this post I'd like to congratulate Black Hat and some of their Briefings speakers for submitting white papers, not just PowerPoint presentations. This evening while cleaning out a tmp directory I noticed a copy of a white paper by IBM's Tom Cross from Black Hat DC 2010 titled Exploiting Lawful Intercept to Wiretap the Internet . The paper describes Tom's analysis of Cisco's implementation of CALEA for law enforcement-directed wiretaps. The paper is 18 pages, but the last 3 are basically citations. It's a great piece of work which I wish I had read earlier. For me, this paper emphasized how much of a failure it is to try to deliver complicated information in PowerPoint form. I got more out of taking 20 minutes to read Tom's 15 pages of material than I could have trying to make sense out of his 41 slides. Tom is a good writer whose paper delivers solid arguments. Rather than just praise the paper and slam the Powe...

Blog readers probably know I am not a big fan of PowerPoint presentations. I sympathize with many points in the recent article We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint , which resurrects the December 2009 story by Richard Engel titled So what is the actual surge strategy? I think it is important to focus, however, on the core problem with PowerPoint presentations: bullets. Bullets are related to the main PowerPoint problem, which is having the medium drive the message rather than having the message drive the medium . When you create a PowerPoint presentation that relies on bullets to deliver a message, you essentially cripple the intellect of anyone attending the presentation. I thought about this yesterday while listening to Johnny Cash. Let's imagine Johnny wanted to explain the devotion someone feels for his significant other. If his default thinking involved creating a PowerPoint presentation every time he wanted to communicate, the bullets might look something like t...

Last year I attended The Best Single Day Class Ever , taught by Prof. Tufte. He changed my outlook on PowerPoint for ever. Today in FCW magazine I found a pointer to 8 PowerPoint Train Wrecks , like the slide Bill Gates is presenting at left. While following some of the linked presentations, I came across this line from the shmula blog : While at Amazon, we were all told by Divine Fiat that ALL presentations — regardless of kind, cannot ever be on Powerpoint. Period. Bezos prefers prose and actual thoughts slapped in a report — an actual paper report with paragraphs, charts, sentences, an executive summary, introduction of problem, research approach and findings (body of paper), conclusions and recommendations — not choppy, half-thoughts on a gazillion slides. Thank goodness. I am not crazy after all. That same blog post makes other good points, and links to an imagined Barack Obama "Yes We Can" PowerPoint deck . Hilarious. Richard Bejtlich is teaching new classes in ...

I had the great fortune to attend Edward Tufte 's one day class Presenting Data and Information . I only knew Tufte from advertisements in the Economist. For example, the image at left was frequently used as an ad in the print magazine. I had not read any of his books although I knew of his criticism of PowerPoint, specifically with respect to the Challenger disaster. This was the best one day class I have ever taken. It profoundly altered the way I think about presenting information and making arguments. If any part of your professional life involves delivering presentations, you must attend this class. It's a complete bargain for the price. I would like to see every professional at my company take this course. Following Tufte's advice would provide the single biggest productivity improvement and corresponding "return on investment" we are likely to see in my tenure. There is no way for me to summarize Tufte's course. You should attend yourself...