Archive for the ‘blog’ Category

Most Companies require them and a lot of home users do not but for those who do, just how good is your password?

 

I often advise people on passwords and how to make them more secure and if you like spaceballs you will know about one of the simplest easy to crack passwords going around

 

but here a re few more that are common and should not be used

• password
• 1234
• 12345
• 123456
• 1234567
• 12345678
• qwerty
• abc123
• letmein
• monkey
• myspace1
• password1
• blink182
• (your first name)
• god
• sex
• money
• love
• 696969
• admin
• password

But sometimes it is not even necessary to hack the password, I have seen people give out their password to work colleges and friends.

 

In one case someone had managed to get a co-workers password they then went on to use this account for looking up adult material while in work.  The only reason that he got caught was he used this account while his co-worker was on a different shift, so after security and the IT department looked into it and then tracked the usage they were able to catch the person in the act.  That person was instantly sacked, but things could have been different if they had only used that account when that person was working.

It used to be the case that good 6 character password would be sufficient and that someone could try 100 passwords per second (see table below, thanks to baekdal

 

 

But now there is a new threat.

 

Graphics cards

 

As the graphics processing unit (GPU) have become so powerful and fast in order to handle the the rendering for today’s games this has also lead to them being used for other things.

According to the Georgia Institute of Technology passwords with fewer than 12 characters can be decoded using brute force and to put the power of these graphics cards in to perspective:

The top graphics processors, today,  offer about two teraflops of parallel processing power. Put this into comparison comparison, the world’s fastest supercomputer, in the year 2000, a cluster of linked machines costing $110 million, operated at slightly more than 7 teraflops

A teraflop is “a trillion calculations per second” and like every other computer technology, they are just going to get faster meaning they will crack your passwords faster.  A brute force attack means they will try every combination of number, letters & symbol combinations until they find the right one.

 

Christian Brindley, Regional Technical Manager EMEA at VeriSign Authentication, said,

Lots of people think that they have a solid password – over 12 characters long, including a combination of letters, numbers and cases to increase their strength.

However, in today’s world passwords are simply not enough to protect sensitive information on their own. In fact, VeriSign research of UK online adults showed that 39% of us disagree that ‘user name plus password’ is a strong enough security measure.

If that was not bad enough Elcomsoft have software that is meant to audit your wireless security by hacking it and if you have not already guessed it, it uses your graphics card’s GPU to do it.  No doubt some criminals will find a way of adapting this to try and hack their way into someone else’s network.

 

My Advise

For home users I would suggest a 8 character password and for businesses at least 12.  They should include uppercase letters, lowercase letters, numbers and special characters like £, $ or &.

 

It is better a strong password that take a bit longer to log in than have it hacked and have sensitive details lost.

 

If you would like any more information then please contact us and we will happily give you some advise.

If you are fed up with the same controller as everyone else and want it to be different or want to stop your kids arguing about who’s controller is who’s then try our modifications.  Below is a simple ring of light modification, while the LEDs I installed were blue you can get them in the following colours Blue, Red, Orange, Pink, Yellow and white.

Do you use Microsoft office a lot and are fed up taking your hands off the keyboard to perform a task, if so then take a look at these shortcuts as they may save you time.

 

 

Email solutions have become more flexible, scalable and economical. From online to offline, unified to stand-alone, there are plenty of options to choose from that can enhance your business, saving you time and money. Here are just a few of the benefits that could come from reviewing your email situation with us:

 

• Anywhere access to email, voicemail and instant messaging
• Push email for mobile clients
• Larger storage capacity – 25GB as standard, more if you want
• Flexibility to react quickly to infrastructure demands
• Easily add new services like instant messaging, video conferencing and document sharing when required
• Online mailboxes as well as on-premise
• Advanced anti-spam and anti-phishing filters
• 99.9% scheduled uptime and carries a financially backed service level agreement.
• Shared calendar, shared tasks, and contacts
• Global network of geo-redundant data centres provides around-the-clock access to your business-critical collaboration services
• All from only £3.36 per user, 5 user minimum

To take advantage of the latest email solutions tell us what you want and we will help you find the right solution for your business needs.

A lot of people should have had the Microsoft browser ballot by now but was it as much of a choice as you think?

There were twelve browsers on offer but in reality they were only four.  Why four, well they all use one of four rendering engines Trident, Webkit, Gecko or Presto.  This means that any browsers using the same rendering engine should handle how it shows a website the same.

• Tridentis in the following browsers
  • Internet Explorer
  • Avant
  • Maxthon
  • Slim
  • Green Browser
  • Sleipnir
• Webkit is used in the following browsers
  • Chrome
  • Safari
• Gecko is in the following browsers
  • Firefox
  • Flock
  • K-meleon
  • Sleipner
• Presto is used in the following browser
  • Opera

Why do browsers use the same rendering engine? Why reinvent the wheel, it is easier and cheaper for them to use one that is already built after all browsers are usually free so it helps reduce the amount of money spent on programming new ones.

Now that bit is over how do you decide what browser you want to use?  Is it what I am used to, what someone recommended?  Below we are going to look at some of the more technical reasons and let you have an informed choice.  I will only

I will show results from sunspider, ACID3 and Browser support.  These are industry standards that show how good the browsers are at displaying the the website. click on the images for a larger view

ACID3

Safari 4	Opera 10	Google Chrome 2.0 & 3.0beta	Firefox 3.5

Internet explorer 8

As you can see Internet explorer is way below the rest and if you think than the new Internet explorer 9 will do any better

It sill falls short compared to the rest.

Sunspider

Sunspider tests the speed the browsers handle javascript, which helps make a web page more dynamic, and like all speed tests the faster the better.

• Safari 4: 603ms
• Google Chrome 3.0 Beta: 636ms
• Google Chrome 2.0: 720ms
• Firefox 3.5: 1278ms
• Opera 10 Beta: 2975ms
• Opera 9.64: 3931ms
• Internet Explorer 8: 5441ms

Again as for internet explorer 9 it is better but it still lags behind

E9 PDC 2009 Demo 834.00ms

IE9 Mix 2010 Platform Preview 1.9.7745.6019 598.80ms

Browser support

This will show what your browser will support with HTML5 the new way of streaming video as youtube has started to offer this.

Safari 4

Firefor 3.5

Google Chrome

Opera 10

Internet Explorer 8

Internet explorer 9 does support HTML5 and CSS3 but I do not have a comparison chart for it.

If you are wanting more browser comparisons then have a look at sixvisions website

We will allow you draw your own conclusions as to which browser you want to use as it’s not all down to technical statistics but also down to individual preferences and what you are used to using.

Sunspider and Acid3 results from cybernetnews

Browser comparison from deepbluesky

If you want do download any of these browsers click on the links below

Safari 4, Firefox, chrome, opera

We have all heard about the dangers of allowing your child online without supervision but what stops can you put in place to help prevent these horror stories.   Here are a few tip on how to do this.

1. Make sure you make a separate account in windows that is either a standard user or limited user, this stops them changing any setting you make or even installing any programs you don’t know about.  To see how to do this click on the appropriate link.  XP, Vista and Windows 7
2. Never give then the password to the administrator account, again this would enable them to undo your settings.
3. Tell them never to give out any details, like address, phone number, email address, online usernames and passwords
4. If they have a laptop or computer in their rooms and you also have one downstairs then heavily restrict the one in their rooms and make then use the one you can see them use for social sites like facebook, myspace, bebo and twitter.
5. Talk to them about their online activity encase someone is bullying them online, let them know they can talk to you if they want to.
6. Use parental control.  Windows vista and 7 came with useful controls that let you limit what hours someone could log in as well, blocking certain websites and programs.  The other option you have is to get an activity report so you know what they have been getting up to.  Vista controls, Windows 7 controls.  You can see windows 7 parental controls in action here remember to set limits for games as well.  As for XP it does not have any built in but later I will look at a program that will help you.
7. Set restrictions on windows media player.  If you want to prevent R rated movies being played on the family computer then you can block films above a certain age rating being played. To do this go to ‘Tools’ then ‘Options’ then select the ‘DVD’ tab. Select the ‘Change’ button under DVD playback restrictions. Select the highest rating you want to be played and select OK
8. Set restrictions on Internet Explorer, this will block any content you think is too old for them
9. Don’t use your ISP’s DNS server, DNS explained (quite techie), one is OpenDNS.  OpenDNS has a free service that can block harmful website that have phishing or botnet sites. Other include DNSadvantage, openNIC, Scrubit and Google
10. If you have XP and don’t have the parental controls you can get software that will help, while they can not stop someone logging in when you don’t want them to you can however stop them accessing the internet.  One of the biggest and best know is Net Nanny, Bitdefender has it as part of it’s total security, which also has antivirus and firewall included.  For a list of other software click here This may seem like a lot of hard work but in most cases once it is set up you don’t need to go over it again unless circumstances change.  By following these tip, even if it only a few, then hopefully your child will have a good experience on the computer and the internet.Here are some extra links you might find handySuper nanny on video games
    Click Clever Click Safe: The first UK Child Internet Safety Strategy

I was taking to a local business who needed files while on the road but didn’t want the hassle of moving files from his laptop to his desktop all the time just to keep them up to date and this got me thinking of solutions. Here are a few I have tried, I know there are more out there and if you use any or know of any then please add them.

First one I am going to talk about is Gladinet cloud desktop.

This allows you add a virtual hard drive to your computer where you can drag and drop your file like a normal drive but all your files are then moved into the cloud. This means you can access your files from different computers anywhere. Gladinet supports connections to many popular online storage systems including, Google docs, Picassa, Amazon S3, FTP and skydrive from Microsoft.

I have set up Gladinet with my skydrive account and this gives me a virtual drive of 25Gb. I have used this to backup my photo’s of my family. As I was moving a lot of files I got the option to schedule my upload to a time that would not affect me, so I got it to start at midnight. If you have used skydrive you will know it is a pain as you cannot drag and drop folders onto it. At the moment there are 2 versions of Gladinet, the first is free but is limited to 1000 tasks/sub-tasks, the second one costs $60 and this limit is removed. They are working on a third level that has more integration.

The only disadvantage is that you need a internet connection to access your files. while this might work well with some people, it could be a problem for others.

My other suggestion is Dropbox solves this problem as it has an offline cached mode. As I only use Windows most of my suggestions are biased towards this but Dropbox is a universal program. You can get it for Windows, Linux, Macs and even a free app for your Iphone. This makes it easy to move files or share files between different formats and if this was not enough then you can also access your files using a browser.

Dropbox creates a folder in your My Documents folder, in windows, and it acts like a normal folder but it does take it’s time to upload your files. Unlike Gladinet it does not offer a scheduled upload but instead does it straight away. Like I said Dropbox has an offline mode so as long as it has synced after you added files then you can use and save to your files on your other computer, when it does get a connection it does not upload all your files only the data that has changed so once you have it up it is quicker and uses less internet bandwidth. Unlike Gladinet who uses other online storage Dropbox uses theirs, as a result you only get 2Gb free but you can upgrade your storage to 50Gb or 100Gb at a cost but see website for details. Again this can be used as a method of backing up files that you need or want to share.

Please read their terms and conditions before you use them.

If you know anymore then please add them

How often do you use a free WIFI service from a coffee company or restaurant and do you think it is secure?  I was asked this question recently.
The truth is not very safe at all.  If someone wanted to and you were not protecting yourself then they could quite easily by using programs available on the internet.  To see this in action goto the BBC watchdog website and see for yourself.

The solution is to use a VPN.

You have a few options here

1. Buy VPN access, you can buy this which has a lot of security and one company I looked at had servers in Livingstone
2. Configure your server for VPN access and this will give you access to all your resources on your network
3. Configure your Windows operating system to act like a VPN server but this will only allow you access to this computer only

If you use public WIFI a lot and want the best performance then the best option is to buy your VPN access, while this will not give you access to your resources on your computer or network it is the easiest to do and again has the best performance.
If you want to have your own VPN access but do not have it yet then I will show, you links on how setup your own PC or laptop to act like a VPN server.  However if you want your server setup as a VPN server then I would get this done by your IT support provider (or me) as you can force better security which I would recommend.  While I advise you use VPN for better security I cannot guarantee you will be 100% safe.
Please remember that after you have setup Windows to act like a VPN server you will need to configure your router and firewall to allow these connections otherwise it will not work.  Due the large amount of routers and different firewalls available, I cannot go into detail on how to set these up but if your router does not support PPTN or VPN then you will need to create a port forward for port 1723.

VPN incoming connections

Windows XP VPN setup (not my page as I don’t have XP)

Windows Vista incoming VPN setup

Windows 7 incoming VPN setup
Depending on your firewall, you will need to allow access for port 1723.
Now that you have setup your connections, you need a way of finding your computer on the internet.  If you have bought a broadband package with a static IP address then you can use this but if not then you have a few options.  Download and setup a program called NO-IP, which is free for personal use and instructions can be found on their website or if your router supports it you can setup DDNS again instructions are on their website.

Now all you need to do is setup the VPN outgoing connection

XP out going VPN connection was shown above

Vista outgoing VPN connections follow these steps

1. Go to Start -> Connect To
2. Click the Set up a new connection or network Option.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the list and select Connect to a workplace, then click Next.
4. Select the Use my Internet Connection option.
5. Type in your VPN internet address.
6. Enter a User name and password that has been granted access to the host computer.
7. You can use the Connect To option in the Start menu.

Windows 7 outgoing VPN connections follow these steps

1. First, go to Control Panel and open Network and Sharing Center.
2. Click on Set up a new connection or network.
3. Select Connect to a workplace then click on Next.
4. Select Use my internet connection (VPN).
5. Type the IP address or computer name where you wish to connect and your connection name under the Destination name field.
6. Enter a User name and password that has been granted access to the host computer.
7. For connecting your VPN connection, you can either right-click on the Network icon in the system tray and select Network and Sharing Center or go to Control Panel and open Network and Sharing Center, and click on Connect to a network.
8. Now connect VPN Connection windows will appears.

iPhone and iPod touch: Setting up VPN

Configure VPN<

Choose Settings > General > Network > VPN and then choose Add VPN Configuration. Ask your network administrator which settings to use. In most cases, if you have set up a similar VPN on your computer, you can use the same VPN settings for your device.
Turn VPN on or off

Once you’ve created a VPN configuration, the option to turn VPN on or off appears in the main Settings screen. When you are connected using VPN, the VPN icon appears in the status bar.

If you search the internet you can find a lot of free programs but you are you left asking the following questions. Are they any good, are they safe, are they stable? these are only a few questions I have asked myself when looking for software but here are a few good ones that my help you either in business or at home.  This is just the first part and I will compose more free programs and websites another time.

It is worth stating that while some products allow you to use their free service for commercial use other don’t, so please read the small print first as I will not be help responsible.

I will start with office products:

open office based on Sun Microsystems star office this can do most things MS office can including save your files to PDF. Open office is also available for most popular operating systems so you can have a consistent user experience no matter what operating system you are using.

OxygenOffice Professional This is based on open office but with bundled extras like several templates and sample documents are included, as well as over 90 fonts and additional tools like OOoWikipedia.

google docs If you want to share your documents quickly and easily or if you want to have access to all your files anywhere you have an internet connection then this is a good option. Although it does not have as much to offer as open office if all you want is a word processor, spreadsheets and a presentation tool then it is worth a try. The other advantage is if your computer breaks then you will not have lost any files.

Think free I have never used this product but after been given a good review by a friend I might try it. ThinkFree usability extends beyond PCs and is perfect for Internet-connected devices, including thin client and mobile computing platforms.
The award-winning ThinkFree Office is a Microsoft® Office compatible application suite comprised of word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation graphics software – all usable online and offline.
ThinkFree Office can automatically install and upgrade over the Web with features such as Internet-based file sharing and storage, as well as end-to-end security.
Built for cross-platform functionality, ThinkFree Office is compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Unix and Linux systems.

Now for some free music tools. I never use MS media player as it lacks at lot of functionality unless you look for and install codecs but there are tools out there that are better.

Winamp This takes me back to my early internet years with the latest 56K modem (I’m not old enough to remember the slower ones) and this was one of the first programs I downloaded and installed from the internet. What can I say really, it plays music but well, it is also highly customizable with thousands of “skins” to make if feel more personal and it can even sync with your Ipod and itunes.

ItunesThis really does not need much of an introduction so I will leave it there.

Video playback

Video lan I can only suggest one here as video lan can play all I have needed it to. Available for all operating systems I have yet to find a video file it can not play. On top of that it can also play streaming videos and play from tv capture cards. This also has a handy remote in the itunes store so you do not need to have your keyboards and mouse to watch a film.

Online storage

sky drive from Microsoft this offers 25 Gb of online storage that you can make private or share your files with either selected people or everyone. The only downside is you need to manually upload the files or if you are using internet explorer you can drag and drop but it does not accept folders.

Humyo Offers 10Gb free but with the option to add more for a fee. The free version is only accessible through the internet.

Adrive free for personal use but again with price plans the free plan offers 50Gb of storage and again the free version is only available by the internet but it does allow folder uploads.

This has only scratched the surface and if you would like more on a specific topic then please let me know.