Podcast on Man in the middle attacks

I was a guest on the Security Break Live show on Blogtalk radio here. Steve Dispensa and I talk about what this kind of attack is and how you can try to prevent it.

PC World: Use OpenDNS To Protect Your Business Network

If you aren’t using OpenDNS to protect your small business network, now is the time to take the few minutes to set it up. It is well worth the investment, it is free, and it will protect you from any number of issues in the future. And you might get better browsing performance as a result that your users will thank you for.

You can read more of the column that posted this week in PC World here.

Five useful social networking tools

In preparation for a keynote speech that I am giving next month, I took some time to look at a variety of social media consolidation and notification services. You might find one or more of them useful for your purposes, even for those of you that still don’t poke, tweet, or know what RSS really stands for.

First is Ping.fm that can post to multiple social networks at once. You sign up, give them your login credentials at Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, WordPress and many others. When you want to update your social networking universe, you send one message to your Ping.fm account via an email, a text message, or a Web form, and it goes out to everyone.  This can be a big time-saver if you post across different networks and don’t mind sending the same information to all these places. I haven’t used it as much because I tend to post different things to LinkedIn vs. Facebook, as an example.

Friendfeed.com works in reverse. It consolidates your entire social network “feeds” together in one place, so that your network can follow your posts across your blogs, your social networks, and other sites. You set everything up using the various RSS feeds that these services create, which is pretty clever when you think about it. The downside to Friendfeed is that your adoring public has to sign up separately for this service, which means Yet Another Social Network Request to fulfill. Still, I have been surprised at how many people are following me in this fashion, and how many of them are the A-list blogger types that you want to engage and be at top of mind in any event. Clearly, this is one service to pay attention to if you are trying to get the word out about your products and services.

Twitter is certainly all the rage these days, and a number of services have taken some of the best notification-style pieces out of it in interesting ways. If you like the way Twitter works but don’t want to share your updates with the public, such as just with your work colleagues or a special task force, then take a look at Presentlyapp.com. You can use the free Web service or pay to install it behind your own firewall for the ultimate private group. They even make use of the same kind of scrolling interface that Twitter has made popular.

Another take on private discussion forums is from Yammer.com. They cost $1 a person a month. Think of this as one of those old-school BBS’s that has been updated for the Gen-T and Web 2.0. I think if you want something quick and dirty and need to have a group discussion to knit your project team together, this is worth a closer look.

Buzzable.com can be used to create groups of Twitter users if you want to send out notifications to all of your partners or customers at once. LinkedIn is finally implementing this feature on their groups, but that is probably too much work to get the initial group assembled, given their still draconian triple opt-in rules.

So these are just five services that I have found that have something going for them. Whether any of these companies will be around next year is hard to tell. And I can guarantee that none of them have received any TARP funds from the US Government. If you have other suggestions, email them or post a comment here.

 

Problems with electronic medical records

One of my favorite bloggers has this post on why she has problems with EMRs and using reminders for tracking what happens when she orders lab work on her patients and either the lab or the patient doesn’t follow up. This seems to be a big issue, because her experience seems typical: there are dozens of systems that each doctor has to access to assemble the entire patient chart, and these systems don’t always talk to each other.

Health club converts bus stop seats into weighing scales

This is one idea where ignorance of the metric system can come in handy. A Dutch health club has put a scale inside a bus shelter, when a passenger sits on the seat, their weight is displayed in rather large numerals on a sign on the shelter where you would normally see an ad. I don’t think this idea will go over big here in the States.

Ten ways to inexpensively augment your current IT security infrastructure

I will be doing this webinar tomorrow at 1 pm ET for TechTarget’s SearchSecurity.com web site, you can start at this URL.

I will present ten different ways that a midmarket IT organization can improve its threat management and network security posture. I will review a critical strategy going forward into an economic recession: making only minimum investments in new tools and finding products that don’t require a great deal of increased manpower to implement and manage. The webcast will focus on midmarket IT strategies that either don’t cost a lot of money, or at least provide fast returns on the investments.

Virtualization for pennies a day

The Amazon EC2 service has been an interesting way to virtualize anything inexpensively, and they now have a Web console to make it even easier to bring up a virtual machine, all for pennies a day. If you just want to test something quickly, you don’t even have to pay for persistent storage. In this video from Chris Fleck, he shows you how to get started and how to run a virtualized Xen App instance in about 15 minutes.

A good description of Wolfram’s Alpha

Can be found here, on Nova Spivack’s blog. Spivack is the CEO of Twine, which is another interesting service that helps people understand the semantic Web. Think of this as searching for things that you don’t yet know how to search for. It sounds very Zen. I don’t know where all this going, but I am paying attention.

PC World: How to choose an online backup provider

Online backup makes a lot of sense: It gives you off-site peace of mind and the security that comes from knowing that someone else is keeping your data safe and sound. The trouble is that, while there are dozens of individual service providers, there are just a few designed for enterprises and small businesses. 

In my column today for PC World, I review some of the providers. I also keep track of them in this table here.

PC World: Protecting your data with whole disk encryption

I want to review another series of tools that can be useful protection as well: doing whole-disk encryption of your hard drives across your enterprise. The idea that even if your laptop falls into the wrong hands, no one besides yourself will be able to read any of the files stored on it. When you boot your PC, you need to enter a password, otherwise the data in each file is scrambled, and no one else can gain access to your files.

You can read more of my column in PC World here.