• the majority still use fax machines more than smart phones
• a large percentage expose themselves to security risks by using personal laptops and mobile devices for work and are unaware of the data protection rules they’re potentially breaking by doing so
• most did not know what ‘the cloud’ is, even those that were using it already (e.g via Gmail)

There were several other worrying facts relating to investment in IT equipment (a third do not intend to buy new laptops or tablets for at least a year) and security (two thirds spend under 10% of their IT budget on protecting against attacks).

It’s disappointing that in this digital age many small businesses still do not appreciate the efficiency improvements that can be attained by updating IT infrastructure or the importance of maintaining IT security. At Glo Networks we are proud that none of our customers fall into this group (and those that may have previously have had our help to make the required improvements). Don’t let your business your business be one of those stuck in the IT ‘dark age’!

To this end some anti-virus providers offer their own tools for removing, but recently we found we were having difficulties in removing a deployment of E-Trust anti-virus from our customers machines, the customer was locked out of the admin consoles, and we couldn’t see any suitable tools. So rather than walk up to each machine and manually remove, we did what us IT geeks love best and created a script to fit our needs:

@echo off
REM Stopping Services
net stop "eTrust Antivirus Realtime Service"
net stop "eTrust ITM Job Service"
net stop "eTrust ITM RPC Service"
net stop "iTechnology iGateway 4.2"
REM ITM Server
msiexec.exe /qn /X{4A2635AD-91E0-4758-BD1E-CA57C9294F1F}
REM ITM Agent
msiexec.exe /qn /X{85F88F9C-6EB2-426B-88AB-28DA4A3526B9}
REM iTechnology iGateway
msiexec.exe /qn /X{847501DF-07C0-4691-B04A-893929F108AE}

Bear in mind that this works for our customers specific version of E-Trust, and for different versions the Product Codes (those bits in parenthesis after “msiexec /qn /X”) may differ.

We ran this on all computers in the Active Directory using PSExec, DSQuery.

cmd.exe /v:on /c "for /F "delims=, tokens=1" %i in ('dsquery computer -limit 0') do set name=%i & set name=!name:~4! & psexec -u Administrator -p AdministratorPassword \\!name! \\server\share\path\to\script.bat"

Be aware that the result set for DSQuery is by default limited to 1000 rows. In the example above we’ve explicitly set it to 0, which is unlimited, and generally speaking a bad idea. We’ve included the limit argument just incase you try and use this verbatim and get confused.

This won’t be executed in parallel, so the more machines you have the longer it will take.

DSQuery is part of the RSAT (Remote Server Administration Tools), installed by default on Domain Controllers, and optionally on other machines. PSExec is available from Sysinternals.

We would recommend creating a one time special administrator account, or you could pass in the administrator password via an environment variable, or read in from a file. Not providing the account may result in funny results depending on the target.

We also found one at least one or two machines there was a problem with UAC, however there did not seem to be a pattern, and we didn’t take the time to investigate the cause.

Oh, and just one more thing. Alternatively you could assign the removal script as a start up script.

Since that post there’s been an update for the software, and this update has brought something a bit fishy to our attention.

First let’s discuss what this update has changed. Directly from the product page on the App Store:

What’s New in Version 2.1

Some SSD’s use hidden compression when writing data to make their benchmarked speeds appear faster. Disk Speed Test will now measure the true speed of these SSD’s so you know if they are suitable for high quality uncompressed video capture.

The people that produce the software say the new update takes account for the ‘hidden compression’ used by SSD manufacturers, and measures the  ‘true speed’. So what difference does it actually make?  Here are some results we came up with:

Before Update	After Update

As you can see there’s a HUGE drop in the speeds the software reports! The SSD in question, a Corsair Force 3 240Gb SSD, is sold with the following specs listed:

Read Performance (max)             550 MB/s

Write Performance (max)            520 MB/s

The two logical conclusions that can come from this are:

SSD Manufacturers are artificially inflating the Read/Write speeds in order to put better looking specs on their SSDs

OR

The software, post update, is reporting things wrong or in an unorthodox manner.

There’s a few bells ringing here, this reminds us of the old hard drive capacity description discrepancy argument that went on for some time or possibly of the IPS broadband ‘up to’ speed claims issue.  Could we be seeing a similar overstatement from SSD manufacturers regards typical speeds?

If you don’t fancy reading through the all the posts on there then allow us here at Glo Networks to summarise a few of the features we’ve found interesting just for you.

Improved file management: File copy jobs (copy, move, rename and delete) make up a large percentage of Windows 7 command use. As such Windows 8 looks to improve these functions. There’s a new centralised copy interface (no longer one dialogue per copy job, all will appear in the same) which has new monitoring and control tools, including the ability to pause individual jobs and a real-time throughput graph.

Improved “File Name Collision”: This is the situation that arises when copying a file to a location which already contains a file with the same name. The new conflict resolution dialogue displays the files from the source on the left and the files in the destination on the right. There’s a thumbnail image for each file, as well as information (modified date, size etc.) to help you make the decision on which file to keep.

ISO and VHD Access: ISO’s (virtual DVDs) and VHD’s (virtual hard disks) are now mountable natively in Windows 8. Simply double click the file and it will appear under Computer as either a DVD drive or hard disk, allowing easy access to the contents.

Hyper-V: Formally the domain of Windows Server editions, Hyper-V will be enabled in Windows 8. Hyper-V is a machine virtualization technology that will let you run more than one operating system at the same time on the same computer. One new Hyper-V feature developed specially for Windows 8 is the ability to use a wireless connection for your virtual machines to connect to the network.

Metro: This one’s a biggy. Windows 8 will have two user interfaces (UIs) available. Firstly the Windows Desktop UI that we know and love from previous versions of Windows makes a comeback, with improvements and new features aplenty. But available alongside this, or even instead of this should you prefer, is the new ‘Metro’, app based, touch friendly, UI. If you’ve seen the UI on the Zune devices, or the new Windows Phone (both interfaces are also called Metro) then you’ll already have an idea of the look and feel of this new UI. The idea is to bring together the power user capabilities of the PC and the more casual, app centric focus of tablets into a single device, with no compromise of the capabilities of either.

This is just a small selection of what has been discussed on the Building Windows 8 blog, there’s much more information on there and it also offers a way to give your feedback (via the comments section and the forum).

We’re excited to see what other new features and improvements will be present in the new OS, and will certainly be taking part in the open beta when the time comes. Keep an eye out for our thoughts and opinions in the future!

There’s a Corsair Force 3 240Gb SSD in the machine that was running in the 400MB/s range before the I’d loaded the machine with my Apps / Data and config etc. It’s running a 2Ghz i7 in a macBook Pro from early 2011 so should be able to cope!  So I took some rough benchmarks using Disk Speed Test from the App Store.

With FileVault	Without FileVault

That’s roughly a 70% speed decrease ! Shall not be using FileVault anymore.

Disclaimer : something else might have been causing this speed funny but it certainly doesn’t look like it !

As the newest edition of Apples popular OSX family of operating systems Lion has great pedigree. Previous OSX versions (Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard etc.) have been very well received. But when you look at the interface changes and new features in Lion another source of inspiration is also apparent; Apples iPhone and iPad operating system iOS.

OSX Lion is available from today, from the Mac App Store, for £20.99. Unlike other OSX releases there is no hard copy available; it’s a download only purchase.

We’ve not yet had a chance to play with Lion but rest assured, once we’ve got our teeth into it we’ll report our thoughts on the new OS here on the blog.

Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it’s not solely your computer anymore.
Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it’s not your computer anymore.
Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it’s not your computer anymore.
Law #4: If you allow a bad guy to run active content in your website, it’s not your website any more.
Law #5: Weak passwords trump strong security.
Law #6: A computer is only as secure as the administrator is trustworthy.
Law #7: Encrypted data is only as secure as its decryption key.
Law #8: An out-of-date antimalware scanner is only marginally better than no scanner at all.
Law #9: Absolute anonymity isn’t practically achievable, online or offline.
Law #10: Technology is not a panacea.

While the entire article is interesting and raises several very good points today we’d like to focus on Law #5 – Weak passwords trump strong security.

Passwords can be and frequently are a pain in the neck but they are a necessary evil. Currently they are simply the best way to verify the person accessing the computer/program is who they say they are.

That isn’t to suggest that they are the only way. Several other methods have been tried; facial recognition, finger print scanners and RSA Keys are just a few such methods. They all have their strengths and weaknesses but for the most part where they fail when compared to passwords is ease and convenience of use.

The problem with this is ease and convenience are the downfall of secure passwords. A short, simple and easy to remember password won’t stand up against an attempt to crack it for long. For a password to be secure it needs to complex and not easy to guess, and as such the securest passwords are generally randomly generated strings of letters, numbers and symbols, the longer the string the better.

But the average person will struggle to recall a 64 character string of characters that means nothing to them, so instead they trade off better security in favour of convenience. A quick read through lists of the most popular passwords reveals that many people will chose overly simple or easy to guess passwords such as ‘123456’ or simply ‘password’.

Somehow a compromise must be made.  Passwords should be as long and as complicated as possible, while still being memorable. One suggestion we at Glo Networks can offer is, rather than just a word, why not use a phrase for your password? Switch some letters for numbers/symbols and make sure it’s a phrase that will stick with you whilst not being obvious.

Here’s a quick example of how you could change a phrase to a decent passphrase:

‘spend a penny’ becomes ‘Spend4penEE’

Using this method it becomes much easier to create a longer password that you will quickly remember every time!

Because of this here at Glo Networks we receive a large amount of screen shots saved inside Microsoft Word files. While this isn’t exactly a problem it does make the files slightly larger than necessary and also increases the time it takes for us to open them (as we don’t always have Word loaded). This is where the Windows Snipping Tool can be very useful

The Snipping tool was introduced in Windows Vista and is also present in Windows 7 (though not the Home Basic edition) and Windows Server 2008 R2. Its function is to take screen shots, and it offers some handy tools to do so. You can chose to take Free-form, Rectangular, Window, or Full-screen screen shots, or Snips as it calls them, and then you can immediately either Save the Snip to file as a PNG, JPG, GIF or MHT file, or insert the file to into a new email (either as an embedded image or a attachment). It also includes a pen tool to make simple annotations to the snip and a highlighter.

The Snipping Tool is incredibly simple to use and perfect for its purpose. Spend a little time checking it out and you’ll get to grips with it in no time at all, or you can check out instructions on its use here

If you’ve still got Vista devices deployed on your network we highly recommend that they are patched to SP2.

As always, if your devices are managed by a Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) server, you can enforce SP2 from there. If your WSUS server is running on Windows 2003 be aware that you may need to install another KB article in order for it to be picked up correctly. Full details over on Technet.

A lot of digging around and finding everyone offering fixes was just doing the usual Windows file associations I found this.

Was rather concerned about running an exe from an unknown site but after some exhaustive scans I took the plunge. Fixed the problem first time on my Windows 7 x64 box. Big thank you to winhelponline.com, would love to know what it does though .