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**** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes **** NewsBytes ****
Finance IT guides
Two guides on finance and accounting software are being produced by NCVO from 21st November:
Find them on the NCVO financial management microsite
Red Hat, old hat
To the disappointment of many Linux fans, Red Hat will be ending maintenance and support for the majority of their Linux distributions from 31st December 2003 with the latest, RHL9, following suit on 30th April 2004. Instead Red Hat are throwing their hat into the enterprise ring with a commercial, paid-for version called Enterprise and and a free version called Fedora, essentially a developer-orientated and community-supported distribution where mature developments are tested and ploughed back into the next commercial release. More at The Register.
MS anti-spam advice
A recent increase in spam sent to posters in newsgroups has prompted Microsoft to issue advice about combating email junk. Two guidelines suggested are the use of a secondary address reserved for posting (something we have advocated for several years) and/or the use of a specially modified email address. Newsgroups are known as potential 'address harvesting' grounds by junk mail senders. Find out more about Microsoft's advice here.
No RIP-off
Of around 470 complaints registered and investigated by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, none of the cases brought by people who claimed they had been unfairly investigated under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) was upheld, according to the Home Office. Its claim of proof that RIPA is not being abused is disputed by opponents. The controversial Act permits access to people's otherwise private information, like Internet and mobile phone interactions by certain government authorities.
Competition winners
Plenty of correct answers to last last month's easy competition (the answer was 32MB) with some replies coming within minutes of the November issue leaving our mailserver! So the three winners on the ball were Gordon Pownall of The Assisted Living Foundation, James McCormack of Cruse Bereavement Care and Mark Allan of Emergency Exit Arts. Personal storage memory sticks are on their way to those lucky three. Look out for more occasional comps in future.
Slim & suave - screen star Howie
Stretching the tape measure to a mere 83mm thick "The Howie" is a computer for the style-conscious. With a wireless keyboard and finger-operated touchscreen, no unsightly projections blemish its smooth and slender appearance. Until that is, you pop a DVD from out of the side of the screen. At least the drive is built in though. Nice looks, weird name - from www.redten.com
Home 64bit Linux
SuSE Linux version 9.0 had been launched in 3 flavours to suit all pockets: Personal (€49.95), Professional (€89.95) or 64bit Professional (€119.95). The operating system supports NTFS partitions, thus co-habiting with existing Windows 2000 and XP installations and its architecture is optimised for AMD's Athlon 64 chip. Along with the autodetection of a larger number of hardware devices on installation, SuSE 9.0 also offers support for standard office functions with OpenOffice, Codeweaver Crossover Office for MS application access and PDA synchronisation.
Almost a videophone
The first and only British smart phone to market is the Sendo X,
a new tri-band GSM, GPRS device packing in all the Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and other Personal Information Management (PIM) apps we've come to expect. Characterising both this and the Nokia 6600 however are not just the PIM features and the Symbian 7 operating system, but the spec ramp up from a plain old stills camera to one that records and plays movie clips and with zoom, a trend sweeping the new breed of high tech handhelds. The Sendo also boasts flash and red-eye reduction.
Both PDA phones feature multimode web browsing, messaging, email, Bluetooth and infrared, with the Nokia adding support for Virtual Private Networks to its connectivity.
**** end of NewsBytes ****
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1. Security: no firewall, no comment
Weapons of Mass Disruption: self-defence for uninitiated broadband surfers | ||||||
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More help at hand. All the back issues just a click away
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A recent visit to a new customer revealed a PC entirely dedicated to serving up adverts and probably knocking out large company servers with denial of service (DoS) attacks. A fairly alarming experience for that particular home-based teleworker once they realised what was going on! SymptomsThe Windows 2000 PC sat there with the disc grinding away continuously, processor usage at 100%, memory usage at 90% and the broadband ADSL line going like the clappers, obviously communicating furiously with who-knows-what.
Like a well-educated surfer, the user had indeed been fetching occasional Windows critical updates manually, to protect their operating system from attackers abusing the flaws that are regularly discovered in Windows. But that's not enough. The youth is out there ...With a simple ADSL modem and no firewall the machine was as good as being connected directly to an attacker's home network, leaving a marauder free to install programs, viruses and worse. In the case of denial of service attacks, intruders recruit an army of slave computers - including yours if they can - to run programs that bombard large corporate servers with vast numbers of useless queries in the hope of bringing them and the business to a grinding halt.
All the unsuspecting home worker noticed was that their machine gradually became slower .... and more lethargic ...... as if ageing prematurely. Who me?Even without the knowledge of the required security measures, this owner - like many new broadband adopters - assumed that nobody out there would be interested in their machine, far less come gunning for it with automated port scanners and then give it lots of its own dirty work to do.
To guarantee they always run and self-replicate, some viruses like W32/Nofer try to infect executable files and copy themselves into the Windows folder using the filenames svchost.exe and kernel.dll. In addition the machine was also infested with ad-serving software like Gator and Interstitial Ad Delivery by n-CASE. So-called 'ad-ware' is not always inherently malicious, but it does gobble up precious PC performance that you need for your own work. Cleaning up the messAfter separating the PC from its malicious partners by simply disconnecting the ADSL modem, a low-level check with F-Prot removed the 13 virus variants.
A firewall was installed in the form of the latest version of the ZoneAlarm (from zonelabs.com). Even the free download version is excellent and starts by default with all traffic barred, both in and out of the PC.
Only then was it safe to hook up to the Big Bad Internet again and immediately fetch Norton's anti-virus updates so that future scanning of local drives would ensure disinfection as before.
Next, to patch all the Windows flaws that had been overlooked, the bulk of updates were downloaded and installed in a single hit with Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 (SP4), a compendium of all previous fixes which is gaining a reputation as a stable release. Finally, the annoying and potentially disruptive ad software was scrubbed from the disc too. Anti-virus applications will rarely achieve this since ads not strictly infectious, so two free cleaners that do the job admirably are
www.xblock.com/download-freeware.shtml (Use Automatic Install about half way down the page) The second - SpyBot, is slightly less straightforward, but has a rollback recovery if anything goes wrong, useful where the registry is being modified. Anything you removed can be put back with just a click. Download it here at download.com. First timers should be able to install and run both of these without any bother. SummaryAll standalone machines need:
Or alternatively .... How to make it happenCo-Operative Systems offer assistance via Facilities Management programmes - including a risk assessment (gathering basic information) for home users who volunteer and delivering fixes.Contact us here to determine your best security strategy. Related Articles
-IB-
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As you start to run applications, ZoneAlarm prompts you to allow each new access that demands a connection in or out of the computer - it's like instructing your own security guard at the front gate.
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2. Interpreting 64-bit processor technology
How wide is your bus, baby? | |||||||
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Who needs a 64-bit computer?
Already running in high-end servers, 64-bit chips have been around since 2002 and even longer in research labs and academic institutions, but their eventual migration to desktop and mobile PCs has been talked about for just as long. What does this mean for your desktop?Processor speeds (1, 2, 3GHz and so on) have increased at a regular rate over the decades, taking the 'wait' out of starting up applications like those in Office and accelerating browsers so that they render web pages faster.To take up a motorway analogy, this is like lifting the top speed allowed and sending more people from A to B. Accordingly, plenty of timing and safety measures have to be built in to avoid crashes! However a massive jump in the information processing rate can be achieved if the width of the processor bus is doubled. To continue the analogy, that's akin to doubling the number of lanes or doubling their width; with the same speeds and safety measures in place you could have buses and coaches twice as wide!
More than double your money's-worthYou can see that servers having undergone memory upgrades may already encounter the 4GB memory addressing limit of current 32-bit technology and it won't be long before high-end desktops bump into the same barrier.A chip off the new block
The two main runners in the processor stakes, as always, are Intel® with its Itanium® 2 and AMD with the Athlon™ 64.
So, does anything run on 64-bit processor yet?
So while your everyday use of a spreadsheet won't call for a powerful new processor, graphics applications and anything that must render millions and millions of colours just to paint the screen in front of you increasingly generates the demand for number-crunching. Also you'll be able to run more power-hungry programs side-by-side, which is what true multi-tasking is all about.
Although the first fully 32-bit operating system (OS) from Microsoft, namely Windows XP, didn't arrive until some 15 years after Intel created their 32-bit 80386 processor (1985), it's fortunate that users aren't going suffer a similar delay on the new version. It's here now - Windows XP 64-Bit Edition Version 2003. Hewlett Packard is currently selling Itanium 2-based workstations with Windows XP 64-Bit Edition installed. Will current 32-bit programs still work?The good news is that 64-bit is backwards-compatible with 32-bit, so that older programs and applications should continue to run on the new hardware, assuming you can't afford to throw all your software out and start again.Contacts
-IB-
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Real workstations do already exist, like 
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3. Wi-Fi Update - flavours of 802.11
Wireless to stay, wireless to go, wireless to come. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Wireless to stay - security souped upThe traditional encryption method that came with 802.11 wireless products was called WEP or wired equivalent privacy. Despite being tagged with an acronym that suggested its protection was as good as a cabled Local Area Network (LAN), that was far from the truth and neither was WEP easy to set up.Enter WEP's successor WPA - Wi-Fi Protected Access (absolutely nothing to do with the co-incidentally-named Windows Product Activation!) - which aims to defeats all security attacks. WPA achieves this by preventing the spurious setting up of rogue Access Points (APs), whether by people internal or external to the organisation, and also - that old favourite - making it easy to use! A major factor in lax Wireless LAN (WLAN) security was simply that administrators didn't implement it! The new certification programme introduced by the Wi-Fi Alliance is intended to speed up the implementation of Wi-Fi Protected Access, being based on the 802.11i Wi-Fi standard (more on this below) and is likely to be ratified late in 2003. To make implementation effective, the idea is to create a simple 'On or Off' interface to switch wireless security in and out. The outlawing of 'rogues' is tackled by WPA's "mutual authentication", to prevent new WLAN users joining an illegal Access Point and exposing security credentials, and sets up a central server to authenticate those users first. A final layer of armour is that WPA employs dynamic encryption keys, instead of the static and easily-cracked keys of WEP. Wireless to go - Mixing wireless speed standardsYou would thought the fact that 802.11a came before 802.11b would mean 'b' is faster than 'a', but alas, no - as you can see from the panel they are neither similar not logically labelled. And 802.11b's advantage of lower cost resulted in a faster initial take-up of 11b devices, even though they communicate at around a fifth of 11a's 54Mbps rate.
g forces
However the next incarnation, 802.11g - a standard ratified during 2003 - kind of brought 11a and 11b together under one roof. Access Points like Buffalo's WBR-G54 and Apple's Airport Extreme are backwards compatible with the 11b standard too.
There are some arguments in the industry about whether your should run separate APs for the 11a and 11b clients, because the 11b backwards compatibility is so demanding it can cause all connected clients to drop back to the lower 11Mbps speed, even 11a users. However there is no consistent to this, with some manufacturers saying they can connect all clients at their maximum possible speed.
Wireless to come - what's nextThe Wi-Fi Alliance has continued to roll out its certification programme of standards bringing together over 180 companies and certified more than 700 wireless products. With the list of equipment delivered by manufacturers leaning towards the small business and home user market, the Alliance is keen to address big business concerns over security with the introduction of more secure 802.11 standards.The next stage in the security model is 802.11i, due to be ratified in late 2003, incorporates WPA secure features, discussed above. It's possible that some 802.11g devices will only require a software upgrade to reach 802.11i, but others will need additional hardware to cope with WPA's more complex data encryption. 802.11h includes features over and above 802.11a enabling it to comply with European regulations that require 5GHz band products to have transmission power control (TPC) and dynamic frequency selection (DFS). TPC reduces power wastage by limiting the transmitted power to the minimum needed to reach the most distant client. DFS selects the radio channel at the AP to minimise interference with other systems in the same band. These restrictions have resulted in more take up of 11a in the US than in the EU but 11h is another standard not expecting Europe-wide approval until end 2003. 802.11n is designed to produce an actual user throughput of 100Mbps (Gigabit wireless) but some are talking about the potential speed being much higher. Finally, 802.1x is a more universal standard covering both wireless and wired connections and brings with it Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP), calling for a central authentication server to authenticate each network user. Improving wireless security nowCurrent practical solutions to providing more network security for WLANs are actually fairly simple:
Contacts
-IB- Acknowledgements: Bryan Betts, Simon Aughton |
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The software on CD includes applications for a phonebook, SMS send and receive and a connection wizard.
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4. Online banking: bringing the 'con' to confidence
With most banks having entered into the online banking arena, fraudsters have weighed in on a newly-discovered (for them) area of digital crime. | ||
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Web site warnings about banking frauds are becoming prevalent and Internet customers are increasingly becoming the targets of fraudsters. Claiming to be from a particular bank, the con artists ask customers to confirm their email address by entering their personal online banking security details. It should quickly become obvious that banks don't ask customers to provide personal security information:
Anyone, including banks, asking for personally identifiable information (PII) like an email address will generally request this information through another channel first, for instance, by phone. Somewhat inevitably, some banks are reigning in the freedom of their Internet transactions - like reducing the maximum one payment from £10,0000 down to £1,000 - if only temporarily. What to doReceived a request like this?
Do not respond to the email. After all, you wouldn't give away your credit card or password over unencrypted email, now would you? If you have received and responded to such an email message, contact your bank's helpdesk immediately. Related Articles
-IB-
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5. Word to the Wise: Clean up your web documents
And the Word was ... Textism. | ||
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Publishing a lot of Word documents as web pages? The answer to your prayers may have arrived in the form of Textism's cleanwordhtml, a tool that accepts Word 2002 documents that have been saved as web pages and removes all the bloated web code they have become notorious for.
Textism is an online Word web document cleaner. You get a 3-panel page showing how it displays and the HTML code before and after. It's this last panel that you paste into your web page. It's this easy ....
How much?As as online, on-the-fly convertor, it's free, but should you find it useful, the author encourages fans to make an online donation via the standard PayPal button on the site. How much is up to you.AlternativesFind a copy of good ol' Word 97 - it generates web pages with far less bloat.Contacts-IB-
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6. Turn on your web logs
Find out more about who has been visiting your web site. | ||
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Strangers in the siteOnce you have got to grips with maintaining your organisation's web site, your next thoughts turn to:"Who is visiting? What do they look for? Do they get what they need?"Inviting and exciting your passing strangers will encourage them to repeat the experience, but only if you can determine their behaviour in the first place.
As an example, Demon provides basic summary logs by default about sites hosted on their web servers. Logs were just a glance away ...Demon call them "access logs". To find the technical support phone number for your particular Demon service go to ...www.demon.net/aboutus/contact/ ... and ask them to "turn on full access logs" for your web site.
You own logs appear in a Logs\ directory, which is back up a level and then down a level from the Docs\ directory where your site resides. The exact location of the access logs will of course vary depending on which provider or hoster you have decided to 'embrace'. Something in your smile - Analysing the behaviourThere is a little more about turning those streams of data into useful reports with stats and graphs Demon's FAQ here, but, for the less technically-minded, InfoBulletin December 2002 contains a review of a range of easy-to-use visitor counters and web traffic analysers, including an excellent free pair of web log processors.
If you need help setting any of these up, do contact us.
It turned out so right, -IB-
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Many web hosters or Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will be able to log this information for you on the server where your site resides and, what's more, will provide it free! It's just a matter of downloading the data, or web logs as ISPs refer to them.
In our own example, it took about 30 seconds to 'go live' - before the phone call was finished in fact.
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7. Boot discs online
A kick start for your computer. | ||||
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Boot discs online. Uh?
RatingAlthough definitely at the more techy end, these indispensable resources are great for making the recovery and emergency discs that most of us bypass when creating an installation.-IB-
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8. Clicks of the Trade - Fast navigation to folders
--- Quick tips for happier clicks! --- | |||
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-IB-
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9. Christmas top buys
A range of small objects of desire. Some even fit in your Christmas stocking. | ||
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What do we think should be the top IT buying tips for Christmas? A quick staff survey came up with these budget-friendly suggestions .....
... from £1000
... from £250
Both from £200 and falling.
... from £60
... from £25
... from £17.99
... from US$5
Never crashes, user-friendly, easy to share and you can't beat it for notes on site, inspiration on the train, notes at meetings, portability, scrawls and scribbles. As used by famous and infamous CEOs in HP and BA as well as our own PM. We like appropriate technology! ... from all good stationers -IB- Tips came from Zorina Baksh, Phil Anthony, Tony Weeks, Paul Craig |
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