Software Scan

The President's Column

Welcome to another edition of Software Scan from Software Analysis and Forensic Engineering Corporation. In this month's Scanning IP section I discuss the findings of a recent report by Forrester Consulting (commissioned By Microsoft And RSA) about the value of corporate secrets. In this month's Scanning The News section I tell you about an interesting deposition in the trademark case of North Face v. South Butt (yes you read that right). In the Scanning Tools section I discuss CodeMeasure™, the latest software tool from SAFE.

Send me your comments and critiques. I'm always interested in hearing from you.

Bob Zeidman
President, SAFE Corporation

Scanning IP

The Value of Corporate Secrets

Forrester Consulting just put out a report that I found interesting. According to Forrester, chief information security officers (CISOs) face increasing demands from their business units, regulators, and business partners to safeguard their information assets. Security programs protect two types of data: secrets that confer long-term competitive advantage and custodial data assets that they are compelled to protect. Secrets include product plans, earnings forecasts, and trade secrets; custodial data includes customer, medical, and payment card information that becomes "toxic" when spilled or stolen. Forrester found that enterprises are overly focused on compliance and not focused enough on protecting their secrets. Forrester's key findings are the following:

• Secrets comprise two-thirds of the value of firms' information portfolios.
• Compliance, not security, drives security budgets.
• Firms focus on preventing accidents, but theft is where the money is.
• The more valuable a firm's information, the more incidents it will have.
• CISOs do not know how effective their security controls actually are.

Download the report to report to get the details.

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Get Smart

SAFE offers training at our facility or yours or on the Web. Contact us to make arrangements:

MCLE credit in software IP

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Your New Office

Remember that you can now have your own secure office at the SAFE facility for storing proprietary software, running CodeSuite, analyzing the results, and getting onsite support. We're located at

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(408) 517-1167

Scanning The News

North Face v. South Butt

Jimmy Winkelmann, a freshman biomedical engineering student at the University of Missouri, decided to create his very own line of sportswear and called his company The South Butt (motto: Never Stop Relaxing). The North Face, a San Leandro, California-based outdoor products company, was not amused and smacked Winkelmann with a cease-and-desist order that Winkelmann read and promptly ignored. Then came the trademark infringement lawsuit. South Butt's reply, filed in court, is pretty funny. Among other things it defines the company name as "being the soft undercarriage of the non-mountain climbing human anatomy, commonly known and referred to in non-salacious form as, among others, rump, bootie, bottom, buttocks, posterior, rear, saddle thumper and butt." In a similar vein it describes "Little Jimmy" himself as "a handsome cross between Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Newman of 'What me Worry' fame, and Skippy the Punk from the Midwest" If anyone knows who Skippy the Punk from the Midwest is, please let me know.

The North Face didn't get the joke. Their lawyers scheduled a deposition of Winkelmann's father, James Winkelmann Sr. That didn't go too well. It turns out that Winkelmann Sr. was once a partner at the St. Louis brokerage firm of HFI Securities where partner Don Weir Jr. pleaded guilty a year ago to charges he stole more than $10 million from clients (Winkelmann was never implicated in any wrongdoing).

I suggest you download the reply and the deposition when you want to have a good laugh at the expense of the legal system. The reply is pretty sarcastic and it's not clear to me who it's supposed to appeal to (except readers like us, but not necessarily the judge). The deposition reads like a Marx Brothers skit and is every bit as funny. Litigation has never been so much fun.

Scanning Tools

CodeMeasure

SAFE has just introduced its latest product called CodeMeasure that can measure the growth of software. Unlike our other products, this one is intended for software developers (look for a litigation version coming soon to CodeSuite). The tool is based on the technique that Zeidman Consulting developed for the case Symantec v. IRS that we call the Changing Lines of Code (CLOC) method of measuring software changes. It worked pretty well in the Symantec case to help calculate software transfer pricing, and saved Symantec over $500 million in taxes.

We have a whole new website about the product, designed for software developers, at CodeMeasure.com. Check it out and let me know what you think of the product and the website.