Here's a quick & dirty tool I put together for Outlook to be able to update all the phone numbers of contacts to make them E.164 compliant. It relates back to a post a while back around the challenges of formatting numbers 'correctly', particularly important once you get into using click-to-dial technologies such as Office Communication Server.

The tool itself is basic since it's only really expected that people will run it once, to sort out the numbers of old contacts you might have. It will check all the contacts in a given folder and automatically fix the numbers up, but there are a few caveats...

• It's hard coded for UK numbers beginning +44 ... though the code is pretty easy to get to if you know anything about Outlook forms, and you can modify it at will.
  
• It doesn't back up the contacts before modifying, so you might just want to copy your Contacts folder somewhere else before running, if you're of a nervous disposition. I can verify that it hasn't mangled any of my contacts and nobody in Microsoft who's tried it has reported a problem.
  
• It's not exactly straightforward to install - but if you follow the instructions carefully, you'll be OK.
  
• The document in the ZIP file explaining how to install & run it, is in Word 2007 format (docx). If you still haven't either upgraded or installed the compatibility pack to add OpenXML support to your older version of Office, there's a link in the ZIP file to go straight to the download page.

A final word: this is completely unsupported, supplied "as is" etc. If it does mangle all your contacts up, just revert to your backup copy - and if you didn't take a backup then you've only got yourself to blame.

Harsh but fair I think :)

Enjoy.

The logic converts "from" the format on the left to the format on the right... (_ denotes a space)

Examples

The Exchange team gave the green light to build 240.06 of SP1 yesterday!

The download will be available here as soon as they can get the packages deployed to the web. More information on what's in SP1 is on Technet already.

I'm sure everyone knows that email spam is a growing problem and that there's not a great deal we can do to stop it entirely - initiatives like SenderID can help reduce the volume an organisation receives, and by using smart sender and recipient filtering* and connection filtering to drop inbound connections from known spammers or IP addresses that have been dynamically assigned, you can reduce things still further.

* The basic problem here is that by definition, mail arriving from the internet is anonymous. If you've ever looked at an SMTP conversation between two servers, you'll see they're just a bunch of clear-text commands, with the sending server saying "Hello", then "I've got mail from <...>" and "it's going to <...>" and followed by the body of the message. There's nothing to stop anyone sending mail "From:" any address they choose... and anti-spoofing/anti-spam technology has to try to play catch up by filtering out the cases which don't look legitimate, as well as by filtering content which appears dodgy.

At Microsoft, for example, our IT group filters any email which is coming from the outside and claiming to be "From:" any @microsoft.com address. The thinking is, there is no valid case where anything will ever traverse the internet legitimately coming from a Microsoft address, and enter the Microsoft network from outside via SMTP. So - if you're a spammer trying to mail into Microsoft and pretending to be Bill, don't bother. Your email will be "dropped on the floor".

My own problem is that I have a personal email address which has been the same for about 13 years, and I was generally very careful about giving it out (registering on websites etc), but in recent years have relaxed my policy since the junk mail filters in Hotmail/MSN/Windows Live are generally pretty good and I got very little spam.

Now, some *&"%#!^ spammer has started spoofing mail from my address, and as a result I get a vast number of Non-Delivery Reports, Out of Office messages or notifications that my message has been junked since it looks too spammy. We're talking anything up to 1,000 messages a day, which Hotmail manages to categorise as unwanted and sticks in my Junk folder, and maybe 50 or 60 that make it through to the inbox.

I'm sorry if you've ever had spam from my address - believe me, I don't want to sell you Meds, offer you cheap replica watches, or present a solution for lengthening any anatomical components. Really, I'm quite happy working in IT.

I can't think of what to do. I really don't want to close the account since it's a very short & sharp email address, and I use it for lots of legitimate non-work related things. I can't stop someone pretending to be me, so I'm destined to be spending ages cleaning up my mailbox every week until the spammer gets bored and picks on some other address to spoof instead.

Unless anyone else knows different? Let me know if you have any suggestions which might stop the spammer and yet not cripple my own email address...

I was going to title this post, "the Wizard of Id" but decided against it.

It hasn't been a great week for the UK government's HMRC (Revenue & Customs) department, who admitted losing a couple of CDs which had an unencrypted export of the name, address, national insurance number and in some case, bank account details, of some 25m UK citizens, including every child registered for Child Benefit.

The media has gone to town on the department, decrying "how could this possibly happen?" and demanding the head of whoever is responsible. The chairman of HMRC has already resigned, and it wouldn't surprise anyone if other follow.

More info on the story from the BBC.

The public consciousness

There are many questions about the whole sorry affair - such as, why on earth the National Audit Office needed the information in the first place, why HMRC decided to send it on CD rather than using the Government Secure Intranet (GSI) to transfer it, and why it would have been such a big job to filter out bank account information as had been suggested at one point. The Telegraph seems to think it would be at a cost of £5,000 to clean the data up, and take a software engineer a week. I'd be surprised if the content isn't just a giant CSV file or similar; it should be a matter of loading into Excel 2007, deleting the columns to do with bank accounts, then saving again. If HMRC (or anyone else) wants to pay me 5 grand for doing that, I'm at your service.

What is interesting is the raising of the threat of identity theft in the public's mind, from the sudden over-reaction of many to the casual indifference of most, at least until the story broke. Some newspapers have reported of large numbers of customers resetting their bank account PINs, and even wondering if they should move banks...

I personally shred every piece of correspondence which has my name and address in it, unless I need to keep it, and am generally pretty careful about identity. If someone did get hold of my name, address, date of birth, mother's maiden name, bank account details etc, then it's always possible they could mount a serious attempt to compromise my online banking - so the passwords and PINs are always unlinked to anything surrounding them... I wonder how many parents have bank cards with the PIN formed from their child's date of birth?

I remember reading Kim Cameron's Laws of Identity a couple of years ago and being impressed with the clarity, succinctness and yet completeness of what he said. If you've never read Kim's work, go and check out the paper now or just check out the laws as bullet points.

It turns out the UK government breaks every single one of those laws at some level. And the press were saying that the HMRC crisis is a nail in the coffin for national ID cards... at least implementing an ID card system might give the government the opportunity to sort out how it deals with users' data...

Wow. George Ou from ZDNet wrote yesterday about NASA's new supercomputer, the most powerful single node computer in the world. It comprises 1024 dual-core Itanium2 CPUs with 4Tb of memory.

The article doesn't say what OS the beast is running, but one of the comments says that they have used a custom kernel based on RedHat (since the standard kernel won't scale to that number of CPUs).

Since Windows is (still) available for the Itanium architecture, I bet it would be possible to run Win2003 or maybe 2008 on this box. It makes more economic sense, though, to have more servers running fewer CPUs and scaling "out" rather than "up"... but if you you could run Windows on this box, Solitaire really would fly :-)