Re: The State of the CCIE Training Industry

Darby,

You give me a headache man. It's a qualification not the raison detre. Study
hard and you will pass. That's it.

I hope you are having a nice weekend.
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Darby Weaver
  To: Luan Nguyen
  Cc: Gary Duncanson ; Persio Pucci ; ccielab_at_groupstudy.com
  Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 10:12 PM
  Subject: Re: The State of the CCIE Training Industry

  Well said Luan!

  Sorry my main point was missed.

  Here's what I think and why I think now is the time for the training vendors
and Cisco to take back the CCIE Certification:

  1. The content has changed - about 45-55% of the layout of the exam is
either new or different.

  2. The training materials need to reflect the changes and we know they will.
This is going to be a huge development effort.

  3. The new materials need to be supported only by a given training company's
forum or other mechanism and no other.

  4. We might as well get used to the idea that if something is electronic, it
was meant to be shared - cause it will be shared. LockLizard or other
protection mechanisms not withstanding - and easily so.

  - Hint: If you need a key to open or enable a key - a modest amount of
reverse engineering turns an or to a zor or whatever and voila.... everything
but the key opens pandora's box. You lose.

  - Hint: If a program needs to call home to be validated. Did the program
have to do anythign on the box of the user? Probably... Um... Ooopps... You
lose again. It is a trivial matter to sniff the transaction and either
recreate the transaction or better yet map the call to the loop and create a
test file with the value needed to be returned from the query... eveni if it
is a registry call. Sucks huh? In many cases it is just that easy. And to
think some very smart people paid for this level of protection.

  Remember that these program protect against the weakest among us and the
weakest among us is probably not who bought the product. and if it was they
might have a few hundred thousand very capable friends. One of them will not
be so weak.

  Now I suppose some will argue that this is not an issue - they have their
own books and would know for sure. If it is not an issue than forgive me for
bringing it up. If it is an issue consider what I'm telling you carefully.

  And there are those who will throw stones since they may think I just made
their efforts a little tougher by sort of spelling it all out.

  I'm just saying...

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Received on Fri Jul 17 2009 - 22:39:48 ART