Kroll Ontrack obviously know a thing or two about data disasters, it is a company that spends its entire time working with the consequences of them. So who better than to do a data recovery survey with a twist: if you only had time to save one file which would it be?

Asking a cross-section of business types just what they consider to be the most vital of business data proved to be an interesting exercise. I am guessing that there was some kind of ‘assuming you had no backups’ suggestion implied in all this.

I asked my secretary, also known as ‘the wife’ or if she is in earshot ‘the lovely Yvonne’, what would she save for the good of the business. Rather sensibly, I guess, she said the accounts. “After all” she explained “HMRC are not going to accept ’sorry, they got mislaid by the courier’ as a valid excuse, are they.” She may well have a point.

Personally, I would choose exactly the same as an astonishing 81 percent of those surveyed and save my email. That’s my email message database, not my contacts file or appointments calendar, they can go hang - it is my message base that is vital to my business.

“Our statistics reveal that e-mails are the most important files for business executives,” said Phil Bridge, Managing Director, Kroll Ontrack UK. “Regardless of the size of IT budgets, organisations simply cannot afford to ignore implementing systems to help avoid severe data loss. Employee education, careful planning and rigorous backup testing of e-mail storage is the only way critical information is protected.”

The reasoning, Kroll argues, is simple: “the logistics required to restore a large e-mail system is complex, and due to its critical nature, downtime needs to be minimised.” Indeed, for this very reason many companies are now capping the storage capacity of user mailboxes and inadvertently increasing the risk of users losing their e-mails.

Kroll Ontrack put together some top tips to e-mail bliss for executives.

It would seem that Bill Gates has not only left his Microsoft office and car parking space behind him, but the same might apply to his use of Microsoft software. After all, you might reasonably expect the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to turn to Microsoft Project Server and Microsoft Project to help manage the construction of its new Seattle-based HQ.

However, it appears that a small British outfit called BIW Technologies, employing just 40 people, can do the job better.

It has just announced that it has been chosen by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide its Software-as-a-Service construction project control system during the building of that new HQ.

Planning and consultations for the 500 Fifth Avenue North project commenced in 2005, and the initial phase which involves the construction of the US$50m Seattle Center 5th Ave N Parking Garage is scheduled for completion in mid-July 2008.

BIW technologies says that while another online system was used to deliver the 1,020-space Garage project, the Foundations needed “to manage a range of complex business processes” and so opted to “use the BIW system instead to support design and construction of the key first phases of the campus buildings.”

BIW chief executive Colin Smith says that “This project, won in the face of competition from other global firms, demonstrates that the BIW platform can be readily adapted to support large and complex schemes working to US standards and processes.”

Perhaps what he should have said was ‘will you be using Firefox on a Linux platform next Bill?”

Gartner has been coming out with some seriously big figures over the last week or so. I mean huge, even by Gartner standards. Take, for example, the little gem revealed in the “Market Trends: Worldwide PC Market Scenarios, 2Q08” report that says some 297 million computers will be shipped worldwide this year. That’s up 12.5 percent on the 264 million that were shipped last year if you believe the Gartner numbers.

The rise being predominantly down to the strength of the mobile market, causing a revision of the 10.9 percent growth that was being touted around by its analysts as recently as March.

“Mobile PC shipments exceeded our expectations in the first quarter of 2008,” said George Shiffler, research director at Gartner. “Mobile PCs continue to have strong momentum and the global economic environment is proving to be less punishing than we expected. Even so, it’s a bit premature to say PC shipments won’t be impacted by a weaker global economy, especially if oil and food prices continue to soar.”

Gartner also says that emerging PC markets will remain a key shipment growth segment, forecast to grow 17.1 percent in 2008 compared with 6.3 percent for mature market shipments. The emerging market mobile PC growth will do even better, 39.4 percent versus 19.1 percent in 2008.

“PC shipments should continue to maintain double-digit growth so long as emerging markets remain strong,” Mr. Shiffler said. “Emerging markets appear less imperiled by the economic slowdowns taking place in the United States and other mature markets than we once thought. However, rising oil and food prices are accelerating inflation in many emerging markets and this could begin to squeeze PC demand in those markets, especially if local policymakers respond by curbing GDP growth to cool inflation. Even so, it is unlikely that emerging market PC growth would slow so much that global PC growth would slip into the mid-single digits.”

But even those numbers pale into insignificance when Gartner rolls out the real big guns in its “Forecast: PC Installed Base, Worldwide, 2004-2012” report which claims that there are no less than a billion PCs installed around the world. Jump ahead to 2014 and Gartner suggest the figure will double to 2 billion.

That’s an awful lot of computers. Trouble is there is an awful lot of churn when it comes to computer hardware. Which means that, again if you put your faith in the Gartner research, some 180 million computers will be replaced in 2008 alone.

However the most troublesome number as far as I am concerned is also one of the smallest: 35 million.

That is the number of computers which will head straight for landfill, no recycling, no environmentally friendly stripping of toxins, just straight into the ground. Call me an old hippie (actually I am an ageing punk, truth be told) but that just seems an awful sad state of affairs…

How many cores do you need in a graphics chip? The answer, according to AMD, would appear to be at least 800. That’s how many it has managed to stuff into the ATI Radeon HD 4850. The world’s first teraFLOPS graphics card.

Unlike many of these cutting edge ‘wow’ announcements that reach my ears, the 4850 is actually also available to buy right now. Trouble is, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I guess I could whizz through my open folders using that flashy Vista control/tab system. I could probably fly around in Second Life at new heights, well maybe not.

Like all things, the need for such speed will arrive eventually. And there are those who will argue that getting aboard the teraFLOPS graphics bus now makes for a sensible ride to cushion the bumps ahead. Me, I’ll stick with my slow old graphics chips from a couple of years ago. You know, the ones that somehow manage to allow me to get through a full day working at the screen without once feeling the need to scream “for goodness sake, I wish my graphics card was more powerful than my computer itself.”

Odd that. But I bet I am not alone.

“The ATI Radeon 4800 series represents a 2X performance jump over the ATI Radeon HD 3800 GPU, the biggest generational increase since the game-changing launch of the Radeon 9700 in 2002,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager, Graphics Products Group, AMD. “AMD made a strategic decision to focus on GPU designs that maximized our efficiency and allowed us to provide enthusiasts, performance and mainstream users with the most compelling value proposition at every price point. The ATI Radeon 4800 series sets a new industry standard in key metrics such as performance-per-watt, performance-per-mm2 of chip die size, and performance-per-dollar.”

Great, well done lads, that’s really good to know.

“It is remarkable that we are now able to build high performance gaming PCs with over one teraFLOPS of compute power inside,” said Patrick Cooper, director of Product Planning, Alienware. “With that kind of performance and the addition of visual enhancements made possible by DirectX 10.1 and tessellation, gamers can now achieve cinema-quality realism. It’s an incredible step forward in gaming and Alienware is looking forward to introducing the ATI Radeon HD 4800 series in the near future.”

Right, so it’s a game thing. I see. I have an Xbox Elite for that, does HD gaming really, really well. As does my PS3 funnily enough…

By now everyone and their aunt has heard the news that Bill Gates is stepping down from his role as Dr Evil. Sorry, I mean head honcho at Microsoft of course. Sure, he will still be the single largest shareholder, he will still be Chairman of the board, he will still be trying to give his vast fortune to good causes (thinks: Billsters Billions, great movie opportunity) but one thing he will not be doing is going to Mars.

Nor, for that matter, will Windows.

The currently much talked about Phoenix Lander is not a Windows driven beast. Instead it is powered by a specially designed mobo and CPU which runs VxWorks, an embedded Real Time OS.

Of course, this has much to do with stability as anything else. Now I am not knocking Microsoft here, but NASA take the whole stability thing very seriously indeed. Although you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise given some of their quality control mistakes over the decades. However, they do sacrifice speed and power for stability as is evidenced by the 33 MHz clock speed of the RISC Rad6000 CPU. Although it has not been confirmed, rumour suggests that 128Mb RAM is all that has gone to Mars as well.

Not surprising that an embedded RTOS has accompanied it then. I have enough trouble running Vista comfortably on an AMD Turion 64 clocked at 1.80 GHz with 1GB RAM.

Simon Barrett reveals how NASA manage to get around the 20 minute lag between sending a command from Earth and it being executed on Mars in his fascinating look at the software behind the Phoenix Lander mission. He explains how a whole day of tasks are sent in one batch, written in C. “The NASA programmers and engineers sent approximately 1000 to 1500 instructions to the lander every day.” Because of the importance of the code working, this is a Herculean task, no pun intended. As Barrett concludes “In layman’s terms, if your computer program has 100 steps in it, it will take you 10 days to write and test it. NASA are doing what a regular programmer would take nearly 5 months to achieve in 24 hours!”

Look, like most people I get a lot of spam and a fair amount of it would fall into the phishing scam category I guess. Quite apart from the stuff that has not been sent to one of my email accounts, I also get to see stuff forwarded to me by concerned readers of magazines or websites to which I contribute. A little hint, there is no point sending me copies of your spam so please stop it. The only exclusion being when you have a real news story to throw in my direction, and ‘look at this spam’ is not it.

Anyway, the point of this posting is that it really takes a lot to stand out amongst the phishing crowd these days. Much of it is very sophisticated, using every technique possible to obfuscate the real sender address. Much of it comes in HTML format with the body painstakingly copied from an authentic bank or business communication: branding, logos and house style copied to the last dot. Much of it is very believable, after all that is the whole point of a phishing scam, you have to reel your mark in, make them believe to bite and get caught on your fraudulent hook.

Which is why I just had to ignore my own ‘don’t forward your spam’ advice and share this message from what has to be a candidate for the dumbest phisher in history award.

What you won’t see here is the Japanese script which was left intact at the top of the HTML format email, something of a clue that the letter might not be from Dr Mike Ellis, Group Finance Director of the Halifax bank of Scotland after all. As, indeed, is the free webmail @yahoo.co.jp Japanese return address.

And that is quite before we get to the bit about him happening to find a dormant account in his office, containing £15 million, and for some reason wanting to make a business arrangement with me so that we can share it. Not that ‘Dr Mike’ actually says what he has in mind, nor even that I should contact him about it. I guess he assumes I am smart enough to know a good thing when I see it and compose that eager response.

Do you think I should reply?

mkellis111@yahoo.co.jp

Good day to you,

I am Dr. Mike Ellis, Group Finance Director Halifax Bank of Scotland, I

have urgent and very confidential business proposition for you. I

discovered a dormant account in my office, worth 15,000,000 million

pounds.

- Dr Mike Ellis

IBM has built what could well be the largest ever dual booting Windows and Linux HPC blade system, comprising some 5376 Intel Xeon quad-core processors each of which is running at 2.5GHz and which will be able to reach a sustained 46 teraflops worth of processing power. Running Windows HPC Server 2008 (Beta) the high performance computing system has been built at the Umea University in Stockholm, Sweden and forms part of a resource used by a number of academic research groups.

In itself the system is sufficient enough of a powerhouse to lay claim to being one of the top 50 most powerful computers on the planet, which should be enough for any geek to get excited about. However, I suspect that the bit of the announcement that will get the most coverage will be that this one has been built around Linux and Windows rather than Linux alone. Heck, look at the statistics and it appears that around 85 percent of such HPC systems are running exclusively on Linux and Windows cannot even claim to scoop up the remaining 15 percent but instead sits somewhere around the 2 percent mark at the most (if you use the latest available Top 500 list as your metric anyway.)

This could all change when the latest Top 500 list is released later this week, Microsoft is certainly hoping to start making a bigger impression and has been investing heavily in the HPC market of late. I don’t think that the Linux fanboys have too much to worry about though, as it would take something of a seachange in the HPC world to shift even to the point where half the machines were dual-booting let alone Windows exclusive. I’m not sure I am even convinced by the argument that as people using Linux-powered high performance computers more often than not will be using Windows-powered desktops or laptops at home or outside of the research lab so there is a ready made market for the dual boot option.

We can all relate to, and laugh at, the antics of your average Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH) that rogue system admin who vents his spleen on end users and employers alike. However, sometimes a sysadmin with a grudge is no laughing matter. Such a case would be that of one Jon Paul Oson who has been jailed for five years after deleting data from his former employer’s network in an apparent act of revenge over a poor performance evaluation report.

It seems that the chap was actually pretty good at his job to start with, having been hired to work as a network engineer at a company providing services for 17 regional health clinics in the Southern California area. Within just five months he had got promotion to a technical manager role and all was going well, until the following year when he got that bad performance review and quit. This seems to have been the trigger for his particularly extreme BOFH attack on the former employer during which he first disabled the automatic backup routine for medical records, and then six days later deleted thousands of records containing appointment data and medical charts over the course of an hour.

Although fined $400,000 and sent to jail for a total of 63 months, which might seem harsh for a nerd hitting the delete key, the real human cost of this red mist has to be taken into account. It is all too easy to dismiss such an event as being all about the network: better security should have prevented it so the employer must share the blame. However, let’s remind ourselves about the chain of events here, because this was major league data vandalism with intent. First the guy disables the automatic backup system, then leaves it a week to ensure that there are plenty of files which have not been backed up and only then returns to delete them. These are files which contain the medical records of patients, a fact that as a network engineer and then technical services manager working on the system he must have been all too well aware of.

As far as I am aware nobody died as a direct result of the reckless deletion of data, if they had then I suspect Oson would have been on some kind of murder or manslaughter charge. But that was surely more a matter of luck than judgement.

There was little in the way of luck when it came to how the FBI actually managed to provide the required level of proof that Oson was behind the attack though. Despite his best efforts to conceal his involvement, which included securely wiping the drives of all but one of his home PCs, Oson did not allow for just how clever some detectives can be these days with regard to technology related evidence.

It appears that before the attack itself, ’someone’ had explored the network without permission and had done so from a computer that had drivers installed for an HP 2100 Laserjet printer. A printer which Oson possessed. No great evidence as plenty of people have these, of course. However, the Feds also noted that a second computer used in the intruder incidents was loaded with not only the HP 2100 drivers but also those for a Laserjet 4M. Guess what, Oson used both of these. Still not damning evidence, but when investigators discovered that second PC was called ‘kuku’ which was the same name as Oson’s son, and that a printer had been given the handle of ‘mike2003 HP LaserJet 4M’ and this exact same name was given to one of the printers being used by Oson when the FBI raided his house, it starts to become a little too much to put down to coincidence…

With some industry commentators predicting that the Virtual World population will hit 50 million by 2011 there can be no more attempting to write off these 3D immersive environments as just another gaming fad. Indeed, in my book Being Virtual I have interviewed many people for whom the virtual world is at least as important as the real one, and for some more so. The argument so often posed by ‘the media’ which suggests that real life suffers when folk become addicted to their virtual ones can, in many cases, be countered by the simple fact that for some their real life stops and the roleplay begins when the computer is switched off rather than the other way around. The t-shirt slogan of ‘I am not a nerd, I am level 9 warlord’ is a badge of honour for some.

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McAfee Inc has named Hong Kong as the most dangerous country domain on the web, jumping up 28 places from this time last year. According to the Mapping the Mal Web Revisited report, McAfee says that Tokelau, a tiny island of 1,500 inhabitants in the South Pacific, has lost its crown as king of web danger. Apparently, 19.2 percent of all websites ending in the .hk domain pose a security risk to users. China is close behind in second place, while Finland, Ireland and Japan are the safest places to surf.

The research compared ratings of sites found in each of 265 country and generic domains, ranking them by way of the number of risky Web sites found in each domain using SiteAdvisor technology which contained adware, spyware, viruses, spam, excessive pop-ups, browser exploits or links to other ‘red-rated’ sites.

Other key findings from the report include:

• Your chances of downloading malware from surfing the web has increased by 41.5 percent since last year.
• The Philippines has seen a 270 percent increase in overall riskiness.
• Spain has seen a 91 percent increase in overall risk.

“For administrators of top-level domains this study should act as a wake-up call. Last year’s report spurred Tokelau’s domain manager to re-examine its policies,” said Jeff Green, Senior Vice President of Product Development & Avert Labs. “Not all domain managers are as accommodating so our mission is to educate consumers of the dangers and protect them in every way they enjoy the Web whether through their PC, the Web itself, or mobile phone.”