You can also check Skype setup, including voice quality by calling test service user echo123. Just call it, speak some words and after 10 seconds hear your message played back to you.
I can only second that. It is a big problem with Windows files when somebody starts actually use national characters in file names, for example, Russian or Latvian. It works great untill on local machine untill they should be shared. Then other users quickly discover that they cannot access those files because because they have different Windows version, or sometimes even different locale. The same happens when someone upgrades to different version of Windows. And more over, many backup software may not backup such files at all. In many organizations this has lead to policies to use only ASCII chars for filenames (often violated by clueless users).
However, Linux doesn't have problems with such filenames. mount command has some switches which allow to access these files although the actual unicode characters will be converted to hex numbers.
I tought my grandmother to use a computer. She, like other old people, has some difficulty using it but opening e-mails is not a big deal. She just clicks on a message and reads it. She even learned to send messages herself and was very proud of this.
But this time she got in trouble. I don't know how - maybe antivirus software was disabled or something else but MyDoom infected her computer. Yes, it was Windows. I actually don't have much time to install software for my family members and just bought a second hand computer with Windows and everything and gave it to her to use. Now I think I will take some time to wipe it out and install Linux instead.
It is a psychology of inept users to click on things. It cannot be changed, at least not easily. There will always be some grandma or some office clerk who will click and execute attachment regardless how many warnings will be there. That is the biggest security problem with Windows systems - the files are always executable by default. It is different in Linux. To run the script it requires to set executable attribute first. Who needs to execute attached file anyway?
The security which does not take into account user psychology is worthless. I predict that there will be more viruses like MyDoom in the future as there were in the past. The whole Windows architecture is broken with regard to user interaction and it cannot be easily fixed.
Did you know that only 40 people on site died in Chernobyl?
But what about many thousands who participated in cleaning up the mess and later got very sick and/or died in the result? Did you also know that there is a special disability status "Chernobil veteran" in Latvia and probably other surrounding post-USSR countries and they get free health care? They even didn't work at the very site. Health problems started to appear many years later. Thousands and thousands of children in many areas of Ukraine and Byelorussia are still dying for leukemia because they were exposed to winds flowing from the site.
Did you know that Russia did very little to clean up the waste that was expelled and as a result killed about 200 more people through inaction?
Soviets were never efficient but this is too much BS. You can imagine the difficulties. First they were throwing graphite from chopters above. There were men with lead armor sent just to throw one shovel of graphite and afterwards they were sent away from the site never to work again here because their amount of radiation received exceeded all levels. Their work was for 7 seconds and we don't know if they survived some years later.
Recently I did some freelance translation work for Microsoft. Actually some brochures highlighting the benefits of using licenced software versus pirated sw. The files I was sent were in rtf format and I did the job successfully using Open Office 1.1 in Linux.
If the documents from Microsoft (although I don't really know if they were from Microsoft because my direct client was not Microsoft) can be used on Open Office then why not in the Israel government, provided that the language support is there. My experience is that government clerks are not the brightest users anyway and they tend to use a limited range of features they have been tought. With some planning Open Office can be more than adequate for all real tasks in the government. --
I have never used antivirus program for the last 4 or 5 years and my computer has never be infected with a virus. Actually it is a mistery for me why people execute apparently infected file on their computers and then blame others for their stupidity.
I remember the times when viruses spread around with floppies. It got written into boot sector and loaded into memory when floppy was inserted into drive. Then antivirus programms were necessary. Nowadays, however, it is not a technical issue to write a virus but purely human engineering. Those virus writters have better understanding of average human psychology than I have and they know that average Joe will download untrusted file, or will run the attachment, regardless how suspicious it may look.
Why care about virus writers? They will always be arrond like those who draw grafiti on walls which is a nuisance but not something that any sane man would seriously believe to. Better educate people how to use their computers and whom to trust online.
The problems with NAT in many cases are overestimated. I was working for one mom & pom ISP which provided over 100 business clients in Riga, Latvia with internet, mainly over wireless links to areas where DSL or cable were not available. I was responsible to implement all this system, and what I did was put a Linux router on the roof on one high building installed antennas and started to figure out how do the routing considering that we were connected to two different uplink ISP but they asked some fee for every block of 16 IPs.
Besides, we were too small to install BGP4 or anything, so we just bought only 16 addresses and used NAT for all clients. Plus one ip for SMTP, POP3, DNS and web servers we were hostings for the clients. We routed the "real" ip address only to a few geeky clients who asked for them. They were only 5 or 6 cases. Majority of clients saw no problem with NAT. They simply used internet for web browsing, e-mail, banking and chatting.
NAT helped to keep our network more or less secure. The clients don't know anything about security. Hey, while creating POP3 account for them I even had to tell them: "No sir, you cannot have an e-mail account without a password." They windows boxes are never patched but we never had Code Red or other worms.
Of course, NAT breaks many things and sometimes I wished we had not used it. When we started to connect residential clients it turned out that they were much more demanding regarding bandwith, realiability etc. including routable ip addresses than businesses, although they were ready to pay much less. However, from the business point of view I cannot see much profit from using IPv6 instead of IPv4 combined with NAT.
IE might be just pulling the page from its cache which is stored by url, independently of IP changes. But DNS cache on Windows2000 and XP can be cleared with command "ipconfig/flushdns"
In Latvia there are only two competing mobile phone operators; one of them blocks IMEI that are reported as stolen and another does not. The first operator uses this fact to bad-mouth the competitor: "Look at these bastards! They allow stolen phones on their network." And the second operator counteracts, saying, "On your network there are as much stolen phones as on our. Every kid knows that IMEI can be changed. However, the equipment to block by IMEI is costly and, by not buying it, we and our customers save money as our rates are lower." This is a little bit funny to see all this tit-for-tat.
However, I don't really think that checking IMEI codes have much use. Correct me if there are any statistics, but I don't think that many stolen phones has been retrieved using this protection. Ultimately it only fosters those shady businesses (illegal or not) who perform IMEI deprogramming.
Yes, it makes harder for thieves to sell stolen phones but the question is does it curb theft considerably to pay back all the equipment? In my view it is the same protection as computer network security which relies on MAC addresses.
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You can also check Skype setup, including voice quality by calling test service user echo123. Just call it, speak some words and after 10 seconds hear your message played back to you.
--
I can only second that. It is a big problem with Windows files when somebody starts actually use national characters in file names, for example, Russian or Latvian. It works great untill on local machine untill they should be shared. Then other users quickly discover that they cannot access those files because because they have different Windows version, or sometimes even different locale. The same happens when someone upgrades to different version of Windows. And more over, many backup software may not backup such files at all. In many organizations this has lead to policies to use only ASCII chars for filenames (often violated by clueless users).
However, Linux doesn't have problems with such filenames. mount command has some switches which allow to access these files although the actual unicode characters will be converted to hex numbers.
--
I tought my grandmother to use a computer. She, like other old people, has some difficulty using it but opening e-mails is not a big deal. She just clicks on a message and reads it. She even learned to send messages herself and was very proud of this.
But this time she got in trouble. I don't know how - maybe antivirus software was disabled or something else but MyDoom infected her computer. Yes, it was Windows. I actually don't have much time to install software for my family members and just bought a second hand computer with Windows and everything and gave it to her to use. Now I think I will take some time to wipe it out and install Linux instead.
It is a psychology of inept users to click on things. It cannot be changed, at least not easily. There will always be some grandma or some office clerk who will click and execute attachment regardless how many warnings will be there. That is the biggest security problem with Windows systems - the files are always executable by default. It is different in Linux. To run the script it requires to set executable attribute first. Who needs to execute attached file anyway?
The security which does not take into account user psychology is worthless. I predict that there will be more viruses like MyDoom in the future as there were in the past. The whole Windows architecture is broken with regard to user interaction and it cannot be easily fixed.
--
Did you know that only 40 people on site died in Chernobyl?
But what about many thousands who participated in cleaning up the mess and later got very sick and/or died in the result? Did you also know that there is a special disability status "Chernobil veteran" in Latvia and probably other surrounding post-USSR countries and they get free health care? They even didn't work at the very site. Health problems started to appear many years later. Thousands and thousands of children in many areas of Ukraine and Byelorussia are still dying for leukemia because they were exposed to winds flowing from the site.
Did you know that Russia did very little to clean up the waste that was expelled and as a result killed about 200 more people through inaction?
Soviets were never efficient but this is too much BS. You can imagine the difficulties. First they were throwing graphite from chopters above. There were men with lead armor sent just to throw one shovel of graphite and afterwards they were sent away from the site never to work again here because their amount of radiation received exceeded all levels. Their work was for 7 seconds and we don't know if they survived some years later.
--
Recently I did some freelance translation work for Microsoft. Actually some brochures highlighting the benefits of using licenced software versus pirated sw. The files I was sent were in rtf format and I did the job successfully using Open Office 1.1 in Linux.
If the documents from Microsoft (although I don't really know if they were from Microsoft because my direct client was not Microsoft) can be used on Open Office then why not in the Israel government, provided that the language support is there. My experience is that government clerks are not the brightest users anyway and they tend to use a limited range of features they have been tought. With some planning Open Office can be more than adequate for all real tasks in the government.
--
I have never used antivirus program for the last 4 or 5 years and my computer has never be infected with a virus. Actually it is a mistery for me why people execute apparently infected file on their computers and then blame others for their stupidity.
I remember the times when viruses spread around with floppies. It got written into boot sector and loaded into memory when floppy was inserted into drive. Then antivirus programms were necessary. Nowadays, however, it is not a technical issue to write a virus but purely human engineering. Those virus writters have better understanding of average human psychology than I have and they know that average Joe will download untrusted file, or will run the attachment, regardless how suspicious it may look.
Why care about virus writers? They will always be arrond like those who draw grafiti on walls which is a nuisance but not something that any sane man would seriously believe to. Better educate people how to use their computers and whom to trust online.
The problems with NAT in many cases are overestimated. I was working for one mom & pom ISP which provided over 100 business clients in Riga, Latvia with internet, mainly over wireless links to areas where DSL or cable were not available. I was responsible to implement all this system, and what I did was put a Linux router on the roof on one high building installed antennas and started to figure out how do the routing considering that we were connected to two different uplink ISP but they asked some fee for every block of 16 IPs.
Besides, we were too small to install BGP4 or anything, so we just bought only 16 addresses and used NAT for all clients. Plus one ip for SMTP, POP3, DNS and web servers we were hostings for the clients. We routed the "real" ip address only to a few geeky clients who asked for them. They were only 5 or 6 cases. Majority of clients saw no problem with NAT. They simply used internet for web browsing, e-mail, banking and chatting.
NAT helped to keep our network more or less secure. The clients don't know anything about security. Hey, while creating POP3 account for them I even had to tell them: "No sir, you cannot have an e-mail account without a password." They windows boxes are never patched but we never had Code Red or other worms.
Of course, NAT breaks many things and sometimes I wished we had not used it. When we started to connect residential clients it turned out that they were much more demanding regarding bandwith, realiability etc. including routable ip addresses than businesses, although they were ready to pay much less. However, from the business point of view I cannot see much profit from using IPv6 instead of IPv4 combined with NAT.
IE might be just pulling the page from its cache which is stored by url, independently of IP changes. /flushdns"
But DNS cache on Windows2000 and XP can be cleared with command "ipconfig
In Latvia there are only two competing mobile phone operators; one of them blocks IMEI that are reported as stolen and another does not. The first operator uses this fact to bad-mouth the competitor: "Look at these bastards! They allow stolen phones on their network." And the second operator counteracts, saying, "On your network there are as much stolen phones as on our. Every kid knows that IMEI can be changed. However, the equipment to block by IMEI is costly and, by not buying it, we and our customers save money as our rates are lower." This is a little bit funny to see all this tit-for-tat.
However, I don't really think that checking IMEI codes have much use. Correct me if there are any statistics, but I don't think that many stolen phones has been retrieved using this protection. Ultimately it only fosters those shady businesses (illegal or not) who perform IMEI deprogramming.
Yes, it makes harder for thieves to sell stolen phones but the question is does it curb theft considerably to pay back all the equipment? In my view it is the same protection as computer network security which relies on MAC addresses.