Real World Computing

It never ceases to amaze me how out of touch software vendors can be with their software. They spend a lot of time and money promoting what is essentially crap software, and then when something really spectacular comes along, they forget to do any marketing. Ok, this generalisation seems to apply to a lot of things, not just computing, but for now, lets look at a recent example. Symantec MailSecurity for Domino We have been using Symantec MailSecurity for Domino for some time and while it has been working for us, the maintenance on this product is a lot of work. For a start, there was no such thing as an automated update, you had to manually add in blocks for everything you could think of. In my case I did a few things; Firstly, to prevent false positives; Created a whitelist which included the domain names of most of our frequent business partners (obviously something that needs to be updated occasionally) Created a whitelist keyword which meant that the use of a specific word in the

I can't remember a day in the last three years when I wasn't asked at least one security related question. Security has become the biggest problem in the computing world and it's only going to get worse. This blog entry is aimed at the "average" home-PC user, and will hopefully help you to secure your own computer. Why is this relevant to me - I haven't got anything on my PC that I want to keep or hide? Yep, that's the biggest excuse I hear for having no security on your home PC. Let's bust this myth right now. If your computer is unprotected, people can take things off it (like credit card details) but people can also put things onto it - like child pornography. There are numerous cases of trojan programs installing child-porn websites on unprotected computers. People have gone to jail for this... People have died for this. Don't let it happen to you. Have a look at these articles. " The Giant Wooden Horse Did it " - The Register "