The
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
Sacha Baron Cohen could not have come up with something any the more insane with his Borat character than the discovery of just how much it costs to get a 6Mbps cable Internet connection in Kazakhstan. Mind you another Cohen creation, Ali G, would probably applaud the bling bling association of paying
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It
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Microsoft on
Microsoft has always been obsessed with licensing, for many a good reason, but the latest twist on the concept of subscription is hard to fathom. If you are a new or renewing subscriber to Microsoft Action Pack you will, from November 30th, be required to sit and exam and score at least 70% in order to get your hands on the goods. What
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The P2P Police
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
Sometimes you just have to laugh, although I am guessing this cop is not doing an impression of the laughing policeman right now. The cause of this mirth is actually quite a serious matter, of course: the distribution of confidential police data via P2P software.
According to Graham Cluley at Sophos a Japanese policeman working at the Metropolitan Police Department in Tokyo, had installed the Winny file-sharing software on his work PC.
The Law (Part One) - don’t allow P2P software to be installed on your network.
What he didn’t realise was that while, one has to assume, he was happily downloading dodgy software, movies and music, the software was happily making some 6600 police documents relating to 12,000 people available to anyone who wanted to download them.
The Law (Part Two) - don’t think that sensible users are sensible enough to make IT security decisions, they are not.
This particular sensible policeman managed, with a little help from the P2P software, reveal the secret locations of automatic licence plate readers, names and addresses of members of the Yamaguchi-gumi Yakuza gang, and numerous statements from victims of crime. “It’s no surprise that the Japanese police force has taken a hard line against this officer for disobeying advice about not running P2P file-sharing software on his PC - the authorities have been trying to enforce a ban following a number of similar embarrassing incidents in the past,” Graham Cluley told me.
The Law (Part Three) - don’t rely upon advice and education, users need to be tamed through application control.
Interestingly, a survey by Sophos last year showed that 86.5 percent of system admins wanted the opportunity to block P2P applications, and 79 percent went as far as to say that blocking is essential.
The Law (Part Four) - listen to your sysadmin, director type people, they tend to know what they are talking about.
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Why the IT Crowd is no longer funny
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
According to research commissioned by Microsoft and which landed in my mailbox this afternoon, it would seem that the vision of IT within the business as represented by the hugely funny IT Crowd sitcom is not that far from the truth. Indeed, the report suggests that the bigger the company the less of a strategic asset IT becomes, or at least the perception of that asset becomes. Only 47% of businesses have IT representation at board level with this number falling to 44% in businesses with more than 1000 employees. Now that really is not funny at all.
The sad thing is that it won’t just be the IT department which is wearing a frown if something does not happen to change this culture of technological and corporate disharmony. After all, 83% of IT Directors are happy to acknowledge that application performance problems will directly impact upon the performance of the business as a whole, and 76% that delays in bringing new applications into the business causes equally serious bottom line difficulties.
The meagre 37% of large enterprise citing that a better alignment, and less discord, between business and IT is a key priority for current IT strategy would seem to provide cold comfort when you consider that pretty much everyone agrees this just isn’t happening in the real world.
Matthew Dunstan, application platform group manager at Microsoft UK, reckons that “the bridges that exist between business and IT form a critical framework for the strategic success of a company.
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Search for CAPTCHA, find angry users of Google
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Google on
Now I have never encountered a CAPTCHA entry box while searching at Google myself, but apparently a number of people have. My mailbox has had a number of queries from concerned readers of various publications I contribute to, including IT Pro, asking just what the heck is going on.
Good question, so I thought I would do a bit of digging and find out.
Most people who have contacted me are concerned with one of two things:
1.
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Google and Microsoft go head to head, again.
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Google, Microsoft on
Google has just confirmed its third largest purchase behind DoubleClick and YouTube, and it points towards a consolidation of its efforts to tackle Microsoft head-on in the business applications market. The
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You have no privacy, get over it or get out.
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 was meant to be legislation to help fight organised crime, not to mention terrorism, by at least in part giving the police and other law enforcement types the right to decrypt your files. When I say in part, I refer to RIPA Part III, which sounds like a bad movie and actually plays like one as well.
New revisions to RIPA Part III are set to come into effect on the 1st October following Parliamentary approval. These changes to the code of practise were designed to fight off the well deserved criticism the original powers presented by way of the invasion of our privacy both personally and corporately. Indeed, some in the financial services sector have had very real fears concerning potential conflicts with data privacy and compliance laws not to mention the security of that sensitive financial data in the hands of PC Plod and Secret Squirrel.
While this new revision has, indeed, restricted the authority of law enforcement to access encrypted material there are still huge questions remaining as to if it has gone far enough to prevent those aforementioned financial folk from upping and moving head office, lock, stock and both data barrels to countries with less disregard for their operating practise. Even the additional security measures for handling key materials and the decrypted data, including the creation of the National Technical Assistance Centre for supporting companies looking to create bespoke decryption facilities remain shrouded in the cloak of spin.
Or how about those revisions concerning restrictions on access to encryption keys without good cause? Always a cracker, excuse the pun, that one
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Grown-ups invade Facebook
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Facebook on
It was interesting to see a press release today from comScore, the digital world metrics people, which showed that Facebook traffic had grown 89% in the course of a year to an astonishing 26.6 million unique visitors in just one month (May) and just in the US alone. That compares with an average monthly traffic volume of around 14 million prior to September 2006.
Perhaps not so surprising though when you factor in the small matter of Facebook having a total change of heart and opening up membership to grown-ups from any walk of life as from September 2006. I suspect it has taken a while for people who are not students, including grown up students who have stayed on within the world of academia and so maintained the relevant email domains to be eligible for membership before, to actually start realising that they can now participate.
Interestingly, the comScore figures also reveal that this new grown-up audience is viewing more pages and hanging around longer. Using the same May to May comparison, whereas 6.5 billion pages were viewed and the average minutes spent per visitor were 138 back in 2006, this year those numbers have climbed to 15.8 billion and 186 respectively. That
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Useless Security Statistics
By Davey Winder in Editorial
Posted in Security on
Here is a thought for all those within the IT security business that compile these detailed monthly statistics: is there any real world point? This might come as a surprise to anyone who knows me, after all much of my professional life is spent within the IT security sphere and keeping a virtual finger on the trends pulse is vital in order to hone ones understanding of the threat landscape. Actually, no it is not. At least not to the level of granularity that I need to know which worm has done the most damage last month, or the percentage point change in the activity of a particular Trojan from one month to the next.
There might be a little more point to them if the statistics actually agreed with one another, but every single set differs to the extent that not only are they in different ballparks but I suspect that they are playing different games entirely.
Here
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