Globalize Networks blog

A disturbing news story about computer security came out this week. In a high school in Pennsylvania, the students were given laptops with webcams to use outside of school. It was later discovered that the school was turning on the webcams remotely and spying on the students inside of their own homes! Hopefully the school administrators will be appropiately punished and prevented from doing this again. However, there is something simple you can do right now to prevent this kind of spying from ever happening to you. If you borrow a laptop with a webcam from someone, just tape a small piece of paper over the lens. You could just use tape for privacy reasons, but the paper will prevent damage to the lens from the glue on the tape. It’s a simple solution that will give you peace of mind. – Gretchen Bily, 18 East Web Design

Read full article: School gave kids laptops to spy on them at home

So I went to MacWorld 2010 and was surprised at how many cool things there were. Most of our client’s machines run on Windows, but scientists and designers still tend to prefer the Mac experience. I am even working on a project in which we are replacing all the Windows machines with Macs and running the one required Windows application within a Windows VM running XenApp on a Mac OS X server. XenApp serves up Windows applications to any client (even Macs) via a web based Java applet.

The iPad discussion was so popular that the 1500 person capacity primary room filled up and they had to open an overflow room. The discussion covered most of the topics which are being discussed in the gadget blogosphere. Probably the most contentious point is Apple’s control of which apps can be installed. Other platforms allow users to set a well-buried option to enable 3rd party apps. One panel member likened this to Cuisinart forbidding users to cook pop-tarts in their toaster ovens. I actually sympathize more with the stability argument. Also, why shouldn’t Apple get more revenue as a reward for building the most cohesive mobile experience? If people want more choice, HTML5 might be an alternative going forward. Google built a good Voice app for the iPhone using HTML5. This might open the door to many more applications to side-step the apps store.

Here are my favorite products from the show:

These little external batteries will prove handy to keep those cell phones charged without having to swap out the internal battery.	Flexible solar panel charges large battery in just 2 days! Bring on the ThunderDome.
Then again, you can always spend $1000 for a brick that will run you laptop for 30 hours. Great for the survivalist laptop user.
There were some cool touch surfaces, but they were all running VISTA! I was surprised that there weren’t more multi-touch interface products.
The kids loved the multi-touch table for adults!	Touch whiteboard and multi-touch table from SMART Technologies.
Touchscreen Gloves by iTouchGloves.com. Cool multi-touch screen by 22miles.com.	I was fascinated by these nanotech-enabled leather gloves that work with capacitive screens. I understand that the process is integrated into the tanning of the gloves and is very durable. I also like this touch screen which brings us one step closer to Minority Report.

Microsoft issues updates on the second Tuesday of each month.  This month, they issued their largest update ever.  Now, Adobe is following suite and will start issuing quarterly patch updates on the same day that Microsoft releases it’s updates.  This month, Adobe released a big update with 29 fixes.  As I noted in my previous post, un-patched client software is the primary way in which computers with internet access are being hacked.  So stop canceling those Adobe update prompts. 

This report from SANS was an eye-opener for me:
http://www.sans.org/top-cyber-security-risks/

Priority One: Client-side software that remains unpatched.

Waves of targeted email attacks, often called spear phishing, are exploiting client-side vulnerabilities in commonly used programs such as Adobe PDF Reader, QuickTime, Adobe Flash, and Microsoft Office. This is currently the primary initial infection vector used to compromise computers that have Internet access…

Priority Two: Internet-facing web sites that are vulnerable.

Attacks against web applications constitute more than 60% of the total attack attempts observed on the Internet. These vulnerabilities are being exploited widely to convert trusted web sites into malicious websites serving content that contains client-side exploits…

Don’t ever re-use passwords between sites.  Here is an  article about high-profile security sites getting hacked:

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p=2048

Day in and day out, I cannot imagine doing my job without the internet, and specifically Google searches, to find those obscure solutions to all manner of technical problems.  Here are some links to improve your own Google searching experience:

Google Cheat Sheat

Google Expert Tips

Gartner is recommending that enterprises not deeply into a Vista roll-out should wait for Windows 7.  It’s no secret that a majority of companies surveyed are keeping XP rather than deploy Windows Vista to the desktop.  Common complaints include performance, driver, and application compatibility problems, though these latter two have been greatly reduced over time.    It is nice to have a homogeneous desktop environment, but it will probably be less expensive  and problematic to keep XP on older systems and rollout the new OS on new hardware.

Personally I would prefer to stick with XP until the bitter end, but we will begin to see increased support overhead after mainstream support ends.  My main concern is the “Non-security hotfix support” which will require a special agreement with Microsoft. http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy.

It makes sense start putting  together a roadmap to transition

1. full environment software and hardware inventory
2. determine possible hardware problems
   1. Printers, scanners, business-card readers, etc.
3. Determine software problems
   1. Compatibility of standard software
   2. What about non-standard, business critical applications?
4. set up training or at least some simple documentation like cheat-sheets

I’ve been wondering why there aren’t more free internet remote support solutions given that there is very good open source code out there to accomplish this (i.e. VNC).  Using VNC requires knowing the host IP and having TCP 5900 open through whatever firewalls the host is using.  I have come across a couple of free solutions on TechRepublic that might serve this purpose:

crossloop.com

teamviewer.com

I like crossloop – built on VNC and offering a whole support community  sort of thing.  I have only tried it over a shockingly slow connection to africa though and it was pretty painful.

I am starting to get into things like Technorati and Digg and Reddit.

Technorati Profile

For corporate Video Conferencing, we usually have a dedicated “codec” from Tandberg or Polycom.  However, we recently ran across this offering from Sony which works well, has nice modular add-ons, supports the latest protocols, and is more economical:  Sony iPela PCS-G50
(CDW is a good corporate vendor if you want to simplify purchasing – not the best prices, but decent)

NetMeeting is a deprecated Microsoft H.323 client.  Looks like Microsoft wants to push everyone over to Live Meeting.  It’s still included in XP though (START | RUN | Conf), and I guess that you can install it into Vista: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_NetMeeting

We have been using NetMeeting to test H.323 connectivity and to link in remote users.  (Multi-site capabilities in the VC codec usually cost more.)

I have come to conclusion that it doesn’t make sense to keep your codec behind a firewall, I agree with this site: http://www.more.net/technical/video/troubleshooting/videofirewalls.html.  Basically just turn off the web-interface and other IP services and you should be secure.  I have many bumps on my head from H.323 firewall configuration.