Secunia Personal Software Inspector

Secunia Personal Software Inspector (Secunia PSI) is a free (for personal use) security vulnerability scanner for software installed locally on your machine.  PSI will inspect installed software and report back on such things as known vulnerabilies, known updates, end of life applications, etc.  Part of the beauty of this service is that it will help you to download and patch anything which it considers to be a threat, so no messing around trying to find the patches; plus you only need to run it when you want (though it can be configured to run full time if you want).

From the home page:

“The Secunia PSI protects against software vulnerabilities 527,821 users have already installed the Secunia PSI and 45,228,804 user applications are currently monitored.”

I will post comments as I continue to test this, but you can get your copy here

Tech alternatives to waterboarding

Original is here

Technorati tags: alternatives to waterboarding, waterboarding

Flickr Vision

Like Flickr? then this may be of interest . http://flickrvision.com/ . real time mashup of Flickr photos as they are uploaded.  very addictive

Dramatic Lemur

enough said !!!  

Technorati Tags: lemur,dramatic

Global warming Mindmap

I did not do this, simply passing on the good word.  The original can be found here

Excellent Mindmap if I do say so myself.

Technorati Tags: mindmaps,global warming,good message

USB cooler

What to do with all those old CDs and DVDs … use PLENTY of glue now or the thing will spin off and make a mess 

Is HDD disk encryption "really" secure any more

I came across two articles in the last few days which show that disk encryption is perhaps more vulenarable to a successful attack than previously thought.

Article 1

Article 2

Wallpaper heaven

Came across this site which has links to LOTS of really nice (IMHO) wallpapers for your desktop … many different types and surely something for everyone  :-) 

Pillow rocks

These had me fooled for a moment … damn cool pillow rocks

Online couple cheated WITH EACH OTHER !!!

www.metro.co.uk is carrying a story about a married couple who ended up dating each other through an online chat room.  “Sweetie” and “Prince of Joy” spent hours telling each other about their marriage troubles.  Apparently the truth emerged when the two turned up for a date and are now getting divorced after each accusing the other of being unfaithful.

“I was suddenly in love. It was amazing. We seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriage. How right that turned out to be,” Sana, 27, said.
Adnan, 32, said: “I still find it hard to believe that Sweetie, who wrote such wonderful things, is actually the same woman I married and who has not said a nice word to me for years”.

Article

Technorati Tags: internet cheats, online chat

Google, Microsoft and Apple build online storage havens

I have been reading about the latest developments for online storage offered by the big 3 as named in this post header.  Google have all but dismissed hopes of unlimited free online storage with the announcement that they will offer a paid service storage upgrade for its users.  These can be used across both Picasa Web Albums and Gmail (and shortly for Google Docs & Spreadsheets).  For $20 a year, Gmail users can add another 6GB of storage to sit on top of the 2+GB which is offered [for free] through Gmail, plus an additional 1GB offered for Picasa. There are more storage options available, going up as high as 250GB for $500 per year.  More info on this here 

Additionally, Microsoft announced that Windows Live SkyDrive (previously ”Windows Live Folders”) has opened to the public. This free beta service offers up to 500MB of online storage for not just e-mail and web albums (as with Google’s offering) but practically anything else can be stored as well.  Through a new look UI which integrates into Windows users can drag and drop their files, plus browse the public directories of other SkyDrives users.

Finally, not to be outdone in such matters Apple has bumped up their storage offerings through .Mac from 1gb to 10gb.  Subscription remains the same, $99 a year, but the service also comes with a number of other tools such as web hosting, tight desktop integration and Mac training.  More info here

There are alternatives to these providers both free and subscription based but it is interesting to see these companies battle it out on the road to cloud computing (its a long road!) and it will not be surprising to see these services gain functionality and drop in price.

I am currently reviewing these services so will post my findings over the next week or so, but feel free to leave a comment if you have any experience with these.

These are not true “online backup” solutions - I may post about those at a later date.

Scottish exams body and the missing ‘S’

It looks as though the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) , who are responsible for the development, accreditation, assessment and certification of qualifications, other than academic degrees, in Scotland, decided that their Website, where some exam results would be posted, should be a secure HTTPS connection. Excellent, a positive move to help ensure that the security of students’ results would be preserved…. except they apparently made this decision after a number of letters giving a link which excluded the ‘S’ had already been posted to many candidates. So not only were they having to cope with helping some 3000 students remember their own login details but they also had to help with the link challenge as well. There is now a page redirect (can’t say when that went live) but it will be interesting to see who blames who for not reading their own published letters.

The full story is here as are links to other reports of access problems. While this move is to be applauded as a positive use of technology the lessons to be learned seem perhaps rather obvious???

Imagine a computerised election process in Scotland ….. oh, wait … they had that fiasco as well !!!!