Solutions Superguide: 529 Tips for Better Computing

There’s a ton of information in your computer’s user manual, but it’s also hundreds of pages long. To become a real power user, you could read through the entire thing, memorizing the details on each page. Or you could turn to PC Magazine.

For this very special feature, we’ll boil down that manual’s hundreds of pages into hundreds of tips—529, to be precise—carefully organized into nearly three dozen categories. This should take the hard work out of being an expert!

Crafted by our analysts and editors and tested in PC Labs, our tips compendium starts with the fundamentals of computing: the operating system and basic productivity applications such as Word and Excel. Then we touch on multimedia, mobility, and business, with hundreds of tips in each section.

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New Compression Tool Triples Network Storage

Storwize has developed a new range of in-line data compression appliances which it claimed can compress files at up to 500MB/s, doubling or even tripling the effective capacity of a NAS array.

The three new systems are 64-bit, meaning they can use far more memory than the company’s previous models. That increases their performance, as the compression technology is memory-reliant, said Jon Ash, Storwize’s sales VP.

Top of the line is the STN-6800p, which has two dual-core Intel Xeon processors, plus an accelerator card with a 16-core packet processing engine. The device supports both CIFS and NFS and is designed to sit between application servers and NAS arrays, acting as a transparent front-end to the NAS, compressing and decompressing data as it is written and read.

The ability to compress files on primary storage is what sets start-up company Storwize – or Storewiz, as it used to be called – apart from the in-line data de-duplication technology offered by vendors such as Asigra, EMC/Avamar and Symantec, which is aimed at operations such as backup and replication.

The box only compresses in memory, so it has no hard drive and it never stores users’ data. It operates in-line, compressing data as it’s being written.

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24 Digital Spy Tools To Capture, Protect, And Secure Data

Back in the ’60s, when the spy craze first hit, would-be snoops had to satisfy their desire for spy gear with products like 007 cologne and aftershave, when what they really wanted was the bug Bond hid beneath the bumper of a quarry’s car, or the greenscreen mapping device mounted in the dash of his Aston Martin.

We’ve come a long way, spy babies!

Today there’s a mini-industry in spy and spy-like surveillance, monitoring, tracking, and disguising equipment and gear, and any number of retailers specializing in the stuff.

Clearly, a lot of the gear is intended for law enforcement and security personnel. Not for nothing do many of the products and Web pages cited here include warnings about privacy rights and legal restrictions on their use. Pay attention! Some of this gear can get you in a lot of trouble if used improperly or illegally.

But many have serious consumer and business uses, from security monitoring to data-theft prevention, to tracking kids’ driving or Web surfing habits.

Sadly, some of these uses are headline-making: Nanny-cams, for instance, have exposed more than one case of abuse.

But before we get too serious, some of these tools are just plain cool, and some just plain silly. None of them — we can all but guarantee — will turn anyone into the next James Bond.

And, while we’re not advocating that you use any of these tools to watch over your employees (or business rivals, or speeding children or straying spouses) and certainly not to peek into your competition’s secret files, we recommend that you be very familiar, and careful with the laws and regulations regarding their use.

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Hackers Cancel Attack on CNN

A planned cyberattack against CNN’s Web site fizzled out Saturday as the group backing the event called it off.

“Our original plan for 19 April has been canceled because too many people are aware of it and the situation is chaotic,” wrote a group called “Revenge of the Flame,” according to a translation posted on the Dark Visitor Blog. “At an unspecified date in the near future, we will launch the attack.”

Pro-China hackers had called for the attack in protest of the news network’s coverage of Tibet, which they believe has been overly critical of China. Participants had been instructed to flood CNN’s Web site with Internet traffic in hopes of knocking it offline, something known as a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack.

Early Harassment

Some had begun hitting the site ahead of the April 19 attack date.

On Friday CNN reported that it had been attacked Thursday causing the site “to be slow or unavailable to some users in limited areas of Asia.” The net effect of the attack was “imperceptible,” CNN said.

Network monitoring company Arbor Networks observed that www3.cnn.com was hit with a minor 14-MB-per-second attack that lasted about 21 minutes, according to Danny McPherson, the company’s chief research officer.

Source: PC World

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The New E-spionage Threat

The e-mail message addressed to a Booz Allen Hamilton executive was mundane—a shopping list sent over by the Pentagon of weaponry India wanted to buy. But the missive turned out to be a brilliant fake. Lurking beneath the description of aircraft, engines, and radar equipment was an insidious piece of computer code known as “Poison Ivy” designed to suck sensitive data out of the $4 billion consulting firm’s computer network.

The Pentagon hadn’t sent the e-mail at all. Its origin is unknown, but the message traveled through Korea on its way to Booz Allen. Its authors knew enough about the “sender” and “recipient” to craft a message unlikely to arouse suspicion. Had the Booz Allen executive clicked on the attachment, his every keystroke would have been reported back to a mysterious master at the Internet address cybersyndrome.3322.org, which is registered through an obscure company headquartered on the banks of China’s Yangtze River.

The U.S. government, and its sprawl of defense contractors, have been the victims of an unprecedented rash of similar cyber attacks over the last two years, say current and former U.S. government officials. “It’s espionage on a massive scale,” says Paul B. Kurtz, a former high-ranking national security official. Government agencies reported 12,986 cyber security incidents to the U.S. Homeland Security Dept. last fiscal year, triple the number from two years earlier. Incursions on the military’s networks were up 55% last year, says Lieutenant General Charles E. Croom, head of the Pentagon’s Joint Task Force for Global Network Operations. Private targets like Booz Allen are just as vulnerable and pose just as much potential security risk. “They have our information on their networks. They’re building our weapon systems. You wouldn’t want that in enemy hands,” Croom says. Cyber attackers “are not denying, disrupting, or destroying operations—yet. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have the capability.”

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