Under the bed

A woman, cranky because her husband was late coming home again, decided to leave a note saying, “I’ve had enough and left you so don’t bother coming after me.”, and hid under the bed to see his reaction.

After a short while the husband comes home and she could hear him in the kitchen before he comes into the bedroom. She could see him walking towards the dresser and pick up the note. After a few minutes he wrote something on it before picking up the phone and calling someone, “She’s finally gone … yeah I know, about bloody time. I’m coming to pick you up so put on the sexy French shit. I love you”.

He hung up, grabbed his keys and left.

She heard the car drive off as she came out from under the bed, seething with rage and with tears in her eyes she grabbed the note to see what he wrote;, “I can see your feet. Stop being ridiculous. We’re outta bread. Put the coffee on … back in 5”.

Are you paying attention ?

Imagine if you email out a document to your team and ask them to read it. How do you know if they have even looked at the file. One way to get an indication is by embedding a token in the document. When the file is opened, you get a notification. And what happens if someone not in your team opens this file. That could be a problem. Perhaps documents (data) are leaking out of your organization.

This is the idea behind Canary Tokens. Very smart micro level traps. Think of them as granular trip wires. There are so many creative uses for these simple and effective triggers. You tokenize a file and if someone opens it, you receive a notification, with perhaps the source IP address.

Have a look at this old article the brilliant Haroon Meer shared with me. This is an example of a token in the analogue world. Compelling story this … smart stuff.

There’s a brilliant reason why Van Halen asked for a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown candies removed before every show

https://www.thisisinsider.com/van-halen-brown-m-ms-contract-2016-9