Worthwhile Reading
MultiBoot USB: Simplifies Taking Your IT Toolbox With You
Another guest posting over at Freewaregenius today. I really enjoyed writing this article because the tool I found just seems like it will be pretty helpful in my day-to-day work. The tool is called MultiBoot USB and it makes the creation of a bootable USB drive with multiple Linux distributions on it a breeze. For me, this means I can carry GParted, Clonezilla, DBaN, Offline NT Password Editor, and a linux distribution on a single USB key.
Find out more about MultiBoot USB from the Freewaregenius article: MultiBoot USB: Simplifies Taking Your IT Toolbox With You
Recycle Your Gadgets for Free or for Cash with Gazelle
There’s a guest post with my name on it over at Freewaregenius. Today’s article is about Gazelle.com, a site that assists recycling your used gadgets. If they’re really old, Gazelle will ship you a box to return the gadget to them for proper disposal. If it has value, they’ll send you a quoted amount of money. It might be a whole lot easier than trying to find a buyer on eBay or Craigslist.
Check out all the details with today’s Freewaregenius article: Recycle Your Gadgets for Free or for Cash with Gazelle.
Google and Verizon Push Policy For Open Internet
In the past few days, a lot of fear mongering was abounding from the New York Times to Internet hotspots stemming from discussions Google and Verizon were having together and how it might be the first death knell for net neutrality. On Thursday, Verizon posted a short reply on their Policy Blog to the New York Times story stating the speculation was incorrect. Today, both Verizon and Google have come forward through their respective blogs, Verizon’s Policy Blog and Google’s Public Policy Blog, to explain their Open Internet Policy proposal.
Ensuring Consent and Revocation When Your Info is Their Business
Ignorance is bliss and a world you’ll never again be able to enter once you have the blinders removed to your privacy and personal information being left behind and sold whenever it can be. This goes beyond the social networks where you volunteer that personal information and also includes instances where
- the alumni association of the University you attend starts sending credit card offers your way as a sophomore (see more Educational Security Incidents)
- when you buy a house and suddenly start getting home insurance offers and every other offer under the sun because your loan agency sold your info
- when your employer has partnerships with an exercise facility and they pass your personal information along without your consent
It isn’t happening in today’s environment but it could take only one big incident where personal information is lost, identity theft is the result, and credit/lives are ruined before we end up in a society where people ask “Can you tell me about your database security before I submit this?” or “Are my records kept in a safe, a locked filing cabinet, or a locked office even?”. Physical security and IT security go hand-in-hand when protecting personal data that might be on an internal database and/or on paper forms. The HR department should be just as secure and cautious as the business/accounting office. Even if they’re not dealing with money straight up, personal information is worth quite a bit to some and keeping yours safe should be of utmost importance to you. So now that we’ve identified the need that exists, enter EnCoRe to address the problem.
How to Suck at Information Security
I received this as a hand out yesterday and thought it worth sharing. How to Suck at Information Security is an article written tongue-in-cheek that highlights some of the worst ways IT Security dives in head-first while doing more harm than good. Although it’s a year and a half old, it’s still worthwhile reading.
The cheat sheet is written by Lenny Zeltser and appears on his own website as well as the SANS Internet Storm Center. You can find a 1 page PDF or .doc format on Lenny’s page. I’ve embedded the PDF here for easy reading.
Microsoft Research’s Sleep Proxy
Saving energy through IT in an enterprise environment almost always comes at the expense of trading off something else. It could be security by not keeping machines on for patching, it could be accessibility by not keeping machines on for remote access, it could be inconvenience by having to wait for your computer to boot up and complete all of its start up tasks, or it could be any number of other things. That’s why the Sleep Proxy system that Microsoft Research has been testing through its Greening Corporate Networks with Sleep Proxy project is so interesting. They’ve taken the approach to make the process meet all of these needs and be as seamless as possible.
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