28.12.06

Did you get your child a new computer over the holidays? Read on

With the threats worldwide to our children from internet predators every little step we take to protect them counts.

What can you do you ask?

Education - This the most important factor in dealing with these issues, a simple don't talk to strangers will not cut it in todays world as children as a whole love to interact with others online. And may easily fall prey to internet whacko's.

The folks over at MSBLOG have a great post on this very subject here so sit down with your children and watch and discuss this topic to better protect our youth.

I also highly recommend the Report Desktop Abuse Client a well desinged program to help your children immediately report offenders/sites that target them.

Kid safe Search engine

Many of us try to shield our children from offensive websites using software and hardware to filter out the "bad" why not have a search engine designed for kids?

the people over at Zoo.com thought the same way and launched a kid safe search engine back in Q4 of 2006, kudos folks!

http://www.Zoo.com/

22.12.06

Corporate vs Home AV software - why is it lighter?

I see this question asked many times around the Internet in different places or some derivative there of.

First off what people need to understand is that companies rarely update their computer systems as fast as you would at home. A large company roll-out takes at least a year from start to finish, not to mention that is a large chunk of change to spend. If you are missing the resources to complete either of these tasks, your upgrade may happen pieces at a time or not until the resources are allocated.

Another reason is application compatibility, this goes hand in hand with the above statement. If you don't have the resources to test manage the new systems what good would they do your company?

What does this have to do with AV software you ask?
The above examples leads to "legacy" systems being ever present in a corporate environment, since legacy systems are much less powerful than what you would use on a normal day at home the AV industry has taken note and tries to keep the resource usage down.

Speaking of resource usage, this is kept down in most corporate antivirus' by "dialing down" the protection at the end user level.
You may think that is a little crazy but what needs to be kept in mind is that in a corporation there is much more supporting hardware in the network to alleviate threats at the entry points rather than at the end user level. Thus negating the need for "useless bloat" in the program.

The last major reason in my opinion is user intervention, in a corporate environment work stations are managed by the respective IT departments and require little, or more often no user intervention. In complete contrast home users are expected to be able to manage their own systems and more than often they fail miserably in this respect. Just have a look at the root cause of botnet effectiveness. Antivirus vendors realized this early on and are trying to automate and more clearly explain the needs and actions of their software solutions, thus increasing "heaviness" of the utilities.

So in conclusion to the main question of "Why are corporate antivirus solutions lighter than home versions" there is not an almighty above all reason, but in general it is due to user intervention, needs, and money.

I hope this post shed some light on the situation, and please note this is not a definitive answer but rather a general observation.

HTH

Exploit surfaces for Windows Vista/XP/2003

Well seems this exploit provides an escalation of privileges to an ALREADY authenticated user.

eWeek article below:
Vista Exploit Surfaces on Russian Hacker Site


I can't yet tell how this is going to effect the adoption of Microsofts self proclaimed "Most secure operating system yet"

Since it is not publically available yet the threat seems low, but if businesses weren't leery enough of adoption yet then this might help seal it. But who knows, definately not me!!

Later

14.12.06

Latest adventure with software

Well this one is going to be quick, but here goes. I was trying to open a large.rar file with IzArc and it froze so I took a step back fired up taskmgr and killed the service. Well needless to say it was not that easy, take a look at the screencap below.

I can't remember when the last time I had to do a manual shutdown and reboot of Windows XP. This just goes to show that more than likely it is the software built for Windows vice Windows itself that is the culprit.

How do I know you ask? Well 7zip, Winrar, Winzip, and Pkzip all worked fine.


8.12.06

Nice find for the holiday season

I was surfing LifeHacker this week and came across the posting from digitalFAQ.com about the DVD+/- media ie. life expectancy and quality of DVD-r's and thought it would be great information to put out in more channels as the holiday season is filled with new technology gifts.

You can read the repot online via the DigitalFAQ link above or download it in pdf here.

ciao!

6.12.06

First AVERT notice for Vista is here

Tonight I received the first AVERT notice for the new Microsoft Windows Vista operating system, all I have to say is "here we go..."

For those that don't know AVERT stands for "AntiVirus Emergency Response Team" and is run by McAfee.

You can read the whole article here, but I doubt you want to it is boring unless you are a geek, hey wait a second.....

3.12.06

Nostalgia

Today I have been working on my recovery disk and ran into a program that needs to create a boot floppy, it has been over 5 years since I had a computer with a floppy in it and god only knows how long since i actually used one. So I brought out the USB floppy and started to create the disk. In the middle of the process something struck me as odd, and I was damned if I could figure it out. During the VM's boot sequence I hit me like a ton of bricks, it was the sound of the floppy humming away. Almost soothing, like running into a person from your past that stirs up fond memories. Just you and those 25 floppies to "trial" Windows95 from your friend whos new computer came with the companion cd.

Ok so some may think that is taking it a little far but I suggest you give it a shot, makes me want to install Windows 3.11 from floppies again just to play Doom.....

Ahh the memories...

I must be tired.

1.12.06

Lack of activity

I would like to humbly apologize for the lack of activity here lately. I am actively searching for a job and that takes up most of my time. Hopefully once the phone interviews and face to faces are done I will be able to put up some more informative posts.

And yes I know that practically no one reads my blog, so mainly this is a message to myself.

Later...