Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five is all about cyber security.  There are a couple of stories about protecting yourself, and two very important stories about protecting critical infrastructure.

#5: EU Wants Consent for Every Web Cookie

This is a story about the nanny state run amok.  Cookies are little chunks of text that web sites leave on your computer so that they can remember who you are when you return to their site, and store some information about your preferences and habits while on their site.  Limiting their use will lead to a greatly reduced user experience, not mention tremendous expense to all web site providers who will need to rework their architecture.

Link: TechRadar.com

#4:Stop Paying for Windows Security; Microsoft’s Security Tools Are Good Enough

Lifehacker makes the case the the free suite of security tools from Microsoft have reached the point where they are at least as good as the paid versions like Norton Antivirus.  The reality is understanding how to avoid scams and dangerous web sites is at least as important security software.

Link: Lifehacker

#3: Banned Xbox 360s Flooding Craigslist, Ebay

If you’re looking for used bargains this Christmas season, be particularly wary of purchasing used Xbox 360 consoles.  Microsoft recently began “actively banning consoles from Xbox LIVE that have been modified to play pirated games.”  These castrated units are now finding their way to the classified ads.

Link: PC World

#2: Cyber War: Sabotaging the System

60 Minutes broadcast an important story about vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure and the threats posed by hackers and nation states.  While parts of the story are a bit sensationalized (I know, shocking) if not downright misleading.  However, we still need an awakening with regard to cyber security and the crucial role every user plays in keeping our systems safe.

Link: CBS News

#1: Control system cyber events, 60 Minutes, disclosure, and FUD

The previously mentioned 60 Minutes story touched off a firestorm of discussion on a cyber security mailing list I subscribe to.  This article is a response by Joe Weiss, who is one of the world’s foremost experts in cyber security of process control systems and has even testified before Congress.

Link: ControlGlobal

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week saw a couple of major releases; Windows 7 and a new Facebook user interface.  On its surface, the new Facebook “Live” and “News” streams may seem innocuous, if not confusing, to most, it is an obvious reflection of their recent hiring of the FriendFeed founders and indicates their intent to leverage real time search as part of their business model.

#5: How To Build A WiFi Home Surveillance System With Your PC

Our next door neighbor’s home was broken into a couple of weeks ago and suffered significant loss.  I’ve been researching various surveillance options and found this:

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-build-a-wifi-home-surveillance-system-with-your-pc/

#4: Email Being Replaced by Social Networks? Not So Fast Wall St. Journal

As someone who is just slightly obsessive compulsive, I love symmetry and this week’s #4 post provides the perfect follow up to the Wall St Journal article that was last week’s #4, “The End of the Email Era.”  This predictable response from email marketing provider Vertical Response” provides some lucid arguments against the somewhat overstated conclusions in the Wall St Journal article

http://blog.verticalresponse.com/verticalresponse_blog/2009/10/email-being-replaced-by-social-networks-not-so-fast-wall-st-journal.html

#3: New Views for Your Home Page

The new look of Facebook’s home page is no surprise to those of us who have used FriendFeed.  Recently, Facebook acquired the talent behind that social networking site and promptly gave it the “Friendfeed treatment.”  The thing that flabbergasts me is that Facebook did not publicize this change ahead of time, or provide users with a link to this otherwise obscure blog post that explains the how and why of the changes:

http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=162536657130

#2: Lifehacker’s Complete Guide to Windows 7

Those of you who have suffered through Windows Vista with me should run, not walk to upgrade to Windows 7.  I’m still waiting for my free upgrades to ship, but the reviews I’ve read are unanimous in their praise that W7 absolves the worst sins of the horror show that was Vista.

http://lifehacker.com/5386953/lifehackers-complete-guide-to-windows-7

#1: Scan of Internet Uncovers Thousands of Vulnerable Embedded Devices

This article covers a serious networking threat to many home users.  If you use a home wireless router to connect your PCs to the Internet, and you’ve never changed the default administrator account password you are in danger!  This vulnerability has been addressed in recent years by Linksys and other manufacturers by requiring a password change before the device will work, but there are still thousands of devices in use that were taken out of the box, plugged in, and never touched again.  The problem is that these routers are exposed to the Internet and all have the same factory default username and password, which allows hackers to take control of your router and, potentially, gain access to your home network.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/vulnerable-devices/

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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What is RSS?

Well, it stands for “Really Simple Syndication” but given the fact that there is still not widespread adoption and so few people understand it, one could take exception to that moniker. In any case, let’s try to use a newspaper analogy to explain this. Think about reading your local newspaper. For many people, there are certain sections that are of more interest than others. And maybe some sections that are of no interest. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could call up the newspaper and tell them, “I’m only interested in the Local, Business, and Sports sections, so would you please only include those in my newspaper? Also, I’d like the newspaper delivered to me at home, the office, and in my car – depending upon where I am at the time.”

So, that’s it in a nutshell; it allows you to subscribe to “feeds” that contain news and information from sources that are of interest. And depending on your technology platforms, you can read them from anywhere, anytime. You can scan over headlines, deciding which (if any) sound interesting, choose whether or not to read the entire article, and even make notes, mark them as a favorite, or share them with your friends and associates.

For this particular article, I’m going to stay away from the more technical how-to stuff and try to concentrate on the “what” and “why”. I’ve spoken with many colleagues in the past couple of weeks who are either new to the concept or don’t really understand how it can be leveraged by them to help them meet their personal and/or professional goals.

Here’s a snapshot of my Google Reader. It’s only showing publications I haven’t yet marked as “read” (click on the image to see full size).

So you can see that I’ve set up my reader to “tag” feeds with certain keywords (e.g. “FFL”, “LinkedIn”, “News”, “Sports”, etc…) I can browse through the publications based on these categories and when something seems worth reading more, I’ll either click on the article to read it immediately or “star” it so that I can read it later. Because I’m using Google Reader, I can also do all of this on my BlackBerry as well using Google’s Mobile Reader Application.

Why Do I Care?

• Let the information come to you. For me personally, this is the most compelling benefit of RSS. I don’t have to worry about missing out on information that might be important to me by failing to read a particular issue of a newspaper or seeing a press release on a company’s web site.

• It takes all kinds. There are many different types of RSS feeds available for subscription that make it possible to stay informed of many different topics. You can subscribe to news articles, blog posts, forum discussions, Craigslist postings, press releases, etc…

• It’s OK to look. Any RSS reader will display a headline and several summary lines describing the publication, allowing you to quickly and easily scan through for items of interest.

• Save, tag, share, and/or comment. RSS readers generally provide capabilities to perform tasks to organize, document, and share your subscriptions. If you see an interesting article but don’t have time you can save it to read for later. You can assign “tags” that categorize articles and even share them with others in your social and/or professional circle.

If you want to start utilizing RSS, the first decision to make is selecting a RSS Reader. Read this Lifehacker article to get some recommendations. You can also see how many different ways there are to make use of your RSS feeds.

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