Email Questions Email question from Janet. I love technology, but am having trouble keeping up with all the developments. What is your advice? Learn the standards. Understand the standards. Current and future. TCP/IP was developed summer 1973 Movement is toward higher levels of abstraction. We have moved from hardware to software to information. Google Checkout Competes with Paypal Expect Flash Drives in Laptops Pirated Chinese Software – Installation Report Silly Worm Targets Flash Drives Facebook Announces New Business Strategy Text Messaging In the News Sending a text message to and from your computer using a gateway Text Message Lingo Difficult to Detect Keylogger On the Loose
Email question from Janet. I love technology, but am having trouble keeping up with all the developments. What is your advice?
Learn the standards. Understand the standards. Current and future.
Look at the horizon for long term trends. Baseline standards don’t change that fast
TCP/IP was developed summer 1973
Baseline architecture did not build in security, making the security issues we face now inevitable.
IP V6 is the next generation. It has been in the coming for 10 years.
ATM invented 1983, deployed widely 1993
Convergence of voice, data, video on the packet switched backbone made VoIP inevitable. As soon as packet switching beat circuit switching technology.
Directory Services standard was developed in mid-80s. Banyan Vines used it, Novel Directory Services, Window Active Directory.
80386 supported 32-bit operating system was released in 1985. Windows 95 did not come out until 1995 (a full ten years later)
Trend is moving up through successive layers of abstraction
Movement is toward higher levels of abstraction. We have moved from hardware to software to information.
Sun Tzu quotation: The winning general see the battlefield more clearly than the enemy, responds quicker than the enemy, and does it in a way the enemy cannot understand.
Modern mantra: Get the right information to the right people at the right time.
Now the issues are information. Symantec web is the old name for it.
XML is a key way to track information fields.
Google Checkout Competes with Paypal
Very easy to use
Only need Federal Tax ID and back account routing numbers
Cut and paste HTML for simply buy it now.
Easy integration with shopping carts
Not processing fees to vendors until January 2008
Expect Flash Drives in Laptops
The switch, however, will cost you a few hundred dollars more at today’s prices.
SanDisk recently released a 32GB drive for commercial notebooks that stores information on flash memory chips rather than the magnetic platters that make up a traditional hard drive.
The drive is available only to manufacturers, and the company declined to give out pricing or identify any notebook makers that will adopt it,
Notebooks sporting the drive could come out in the first half of 2007.
Unlike traditional hard drives, flash memory drives do not contain moving parts.
As a result, flash devices are less prone to breaking down–flash cards can survive drops from great heights–and consume less energy.
SanDisk’s flash drive can increase battery life by about 10 percent.
Pirated Chinese Software – Installation Report
Windows XP Professional (in a box ) English Version
Installed successfully and validated by Microsoft Genuine
Valid Key – No Activation required.
Volume Edition designed for corporations
Windows Vista Enterprise (in a box) Chinese Version
Installed successfully, but all in Chinese.
Must have been a basic Vista installation because it all fit on a CD, typically the English version of Vista is on a DVD.
Did not ask for product key during installation.
Required activation after install, which did not work.
Will work for 30 days until you are required to activate.
Windows Vista DVD (No Box) English Version
CD key on CD was incorrect.
Took the product key off the Chinese version Vista, and was able to use that product key in the English version during initial install.
After entered key, gave us a choice of which version of Vista to install
Able to successfully install the operating system (We chose Ultimate).
Required activation, but once we tried to activate it asked us to enter a different product key, so therefore it would not allow us to activate Vista.
Once again we can use it for 30 days till we must activate it. Ok for testing purposes.
Office 2007 (in a box) Chinese Version
Right after we opened it noticed some scratches on the CD.
Everything is in Chinese, so it was difficult to understand.
Tried installation and it would get halfway before asking for some file we would navigate to that file, but it did not accept it.
Also, noticed that some the folders/files were written in Chinese, so when it did go look for that file it might have not recognized the files because the folders/files had different characters in them so the paths were not exactly the same.
Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 Suite
Installed perfectly
Key generator which worked perfectly, creating a different key each time.
This was the best pirated software we found.
Silly Worm Targets Flash Drives
According to researchers at security firm Sophos, a new family of worms is targeting removable storage devices, including USB memory sticks and floppy disks.
The worms, formally named W32/SillyFD-AA, create a hidden file to ensure a copy of the worm is run the next time the media is connected to a Windows PC.
It also changes the title of Internet Explorer windows to append the phrase "Hacked by 1BYTE."
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, warned computer users to tread carefully when attaching an unknown device to a PC.
As the SillyFD-AA threat is demonstrating, careless use of the increasingly popular memory sticks and other removable media might offer more than harmless file transfers.
With a significant rise in financially motivated malware, the Silly worm could be an obvious backdoor into a company for criminals bent on targeting a specific business with their malicious code.
Facebook Announces New Business Strategy
No longer will Facebook consider itself merely another social network.
Instead it is becoming a technology platform on which anyone can build applications for social computing.
Outsiders can now develop Internet services on Facebook’s infrastructure.
Facebook today gives all members access to six mostly modest applications: Photos, Notes, Groups, Events, Posted Items and the Marketplace.
Recently 65 partner companies unveiled more than 85 additional applications that members can install immediately.
This programs include an application from iLike that allows you to find friends who share your musical tastes.
The Washington Post created a "political compass" that allows you to exactly calculate your place on the political spectrum and compare your views to those of your friends or other Facebook members.
And Red Bull launched Red Bull Roshambull, a Facebook version of the old schoolyard game rock, paper, scissors, which members can install on their profile page.
Anyone will have access to Facebook’s so-called "markup language," which is intended to be usable even by those with rudimentary programming skills.
So kids in dorm rooms will be able to create simple applications to coordinate TV-watching or trips to the cafeteria with their friends.
The company will impose no limitations on what kinds of applications others can create, except that they be legal.
The company will continue to primarily obtain its revenue from advertising, at least at first. It is betting that the increased usage resulting from the platform strategy will dramatically increase its ad inventory as well as help it grow membership even faster.
This is the same approach Amazon.com has used to become a sales platform technology
Text Messaging In the News
SMS stands for Short Messaging Service
The Short Message Service (SMS) was originally defined as part of the GSM series of standards in 1985 as a means of sending "short" (160 characters or less) messages, most often text messages, to and from GSM mobiles
Since then, support for the service has expanded to include alternative mobile standards such as CDMA networks and AMPS, and land line networks.
Teens rack up big text messaging bills. Parent pay, teen keep on texting.
If you don’t have a plan, each text message is 10 cents.
If you have a plan and exceed your limit, each text message over the limit is 10 cents
Some teens have racked up hundreds of dollars of text messages
Get a plan!
I pay $5 a month for 250 text messages and 250 pictures. Unlimited plans are usually are only $10 per month.
Washington State has outlawed texting while driving. Motorists may now be charged with Driving While Texting (DWT). Law will start January 2008. $101 ticket.
NCAA bans texting during recruiting season.
Schools have tried to ban cell phones and texting during tests.
Sending a text message to and from your computer using a gateway
E-mail gateways for popular carriers
T-mobile: number@tmomail.net
Verizon: number@vtext.com
AT&T: number@mmode.com
Sprint (PCS): number@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Sprint (Nextel): number@page.nextel.com
You can also send email from your cell phone
Just put in the email address as the number
Text Message Lingo
Text message dictionary (http://techdictionary.com/chat.html)
This is easier. Site will translate English to text lingo: http://www.lingo2word.com/
Difficult to Detect Keylogger On the Loose
A new variant of the Russian Trojan Gozi is circulating on the Web, this time armed with a keylogging function and the ability to scramble itself so it is difficult to detect by anti-virus software.
The Trojan is believed to have been spreading since April 17.
Like the original, which was discovered earlier in 2007, the new version of Gozi steals data from encrypted SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) streams.
The latest variant was uncovered May 7 by Don Jackson, a security researcher at SecureWorks in Atlanta.
Jackson also found one data cache from the Gozi variant that contained 2,000 new victims and several thousand account records, including bank and credit card account numbers, Social Security numbers, and other personal information.
SecureWorks researchers suspect that other servers with stolen Gozi data exist.
If you were infected before mid-May, then it will act like a rootkit and hide itself on your PC and will make itself undetectable by most anti-virus software.
Home users reboot their computers in Safe Mode and run an anti-virus scan
Currently, about 15 of the major anti-virus vendors have signatures to detect the new Gozi variant.
You need to run in the safe mode because the newest installment of Gozi has a compression component that it uses to uncompress the blocks of code that it needs to run.
When it no longer needs those blocks of code, it recompresses them.
It almost impossible to see everything the variant is doing in memory and that much harder for anti-virus scans to detect.