My Vertical Market Solutions Reader is now on Scribd!

It’s a pretty tough term, and more is yet to come in the finals! But this is one living proof I’ll have to cherish all my life with!

View this document on Scribd

The book was made courtesy to the great pageman Mr. Paul Pajo! Our class’ site40 can be accessed here.

The top five reasons why Windows Vista failed

Full article here

On Friday, Microsoft gave computer makers a six-month extension for offering Windows XP on newly-shipped PCs. While this doesn’t impact enterprise IT — because volume licensing agreements will allow IT to keep installing Windows XP for many years to come — the move is another symbolic nail in Vista’s coffin.

The public reputation of Windows Vista is in shambles, as Microsoft itself tacitly acknowledged in its Mojave ad campaign.

IT departments are largely ignoring Vista. In June (18 months after Vista’s launch), Forrester Research reported that just 8.8% of enterprise PCs worldwide were running Vista. Meanwhile, Microsoft appears to have put Windows 7 on an accelerated schedule that could see it released in 2010. That will provide IT departments with all the justification they need to simply skip Vista and wait to eventually standardize on Windows 7 as the next OS for business.

The article hits it right on the spot. Try to read the full article to know more.

This post is also available in our VERTSOL Class’ group site. Feel free to check it here.

Mumbai attack coverage demonstrates (good and bad) maturation point of social media

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The devastation in Mumbai has been top-of-mind and top-of-the-news over the last few days – with good reason. It’s also been the hottest trending topic on Twitter and covered widely as the latest disaster to be live broadcasted via tweet.

Sadly, the people writing about how cool it is that people are live tweeting the events in Mumbai are missing a huge point. What’s happening now — and what is happening in Mumbai — is bigger than all of us. It’s bigger than communicating via Twitter. It’s bigger than just reading blogs. This is where social media grows up.

Social media is providing the ability to report and take in unfiltered news in a more direct way than ever before possible and we’re doing it on a mass scale. It’s no longer just a toy for early adopters and Internet nerds; it’s taking its place as an influencer far beyond technology. There is, however, a downside: there’s very little way to know what is true and what is rumor. As fellow ZDNet-er Michael Krigsman said to me the night, “we’re trading off potential accuracy for immediacy.”

 

I remember when our course’ Chairperson, Ms. Carmen Luz V. Cueto, gave her honest opinion about quoting resources from Wikipedia and putting it on our final project paper, “You can’t verify the integrity of the source.” Such can still be considered as true now, and perhaps even getting worse as the minute passes. As the article states, we’re trading off potential accuracy for immediacy – and that in layman’s term would more or less mean sacrificing the truth over getting whatever information can be retrieved no matter if it’s factual or not.

What’s really mind-boggling in the article is Ms. Leggio’s statement that “He’s right. On one hand, social media shows the wisdom of crowds while at the same time demonstrates the reactionary failures of the crowd.” While there are plenty of talented people out there sharing real good stuff over the social media that we have today such as Twitter, Facebook, etc., there are also plenty of people ready to spoof you into any other topic that seems real yet where in fact are just mere fiction of sorts.

I guess it’s a pretty good time for everyone involved in the social media to grow up in one way or another – we can’t just talk about topics and state that it’s actually true because it’s unfiltered. No one can simply know if you are indeed telling the truth or just goofing off. While everyone appreciates that you write a line or two about yourself, writing about Americans stealing oil out of Iraq or terrorist actually saving Mumbai rather than destroy the capital is just plain unethical.

This post is also available in our VERTSOL Class’ group site. Feel free to check it here.

Virus hits nearly 75% of systems on Afghanistan military base

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Earlier this month we saw the military ban the use of USB drives and other removable media. Apparently the virus outbreak that lead to this measure affected 75\% of all systems at the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan.

Details are still sparse, but both the LA Times and the U.S. News and World Report are reporting that the intrusion was severe enough to raise the INFOCON status, the information security equivalent of the DEFCON alert, and also necessitate the briefing of the president. We also don’t know the source of the attack, but signs point to state rather than non-state actors, with the most popular contenders being either Russia or China.

Our military is dependent upon commodity desktops whose software shares an enormous amount of DNA with systems that sit on every workplace in the planet. These systems form the backbone of what is called network centric warfare. Hopefully the security that the military is planning for these systems is something less than… commodity.

To think it’s the US military, yet they themselves cannot minimize the virus coming from Removable drives. The bad news with this one is the fact that those who are pretty much aware of the situation may abuse it further by possibly altering the virus to access and exploit victim computers and gain important information through the virus.

This post is also available in our VERTSOL Class’ group site. Feel free to check it here.

AlertPay hit by a large scale DDoS attack

Full article here

Timing is everything. Millions of account holders at privately owned online payment gateway AlertPay.com weren’t able to do business through the service yesterday, due to the fact that AlertPay was under a large scale DDoS attack, according to a notice left by a company representative. Seven hours of downtime right in the middle of the Christmas shopping season with millions of businesses using the service affected, isn’t coincidental. This DDoS attack, just like the recent DDoS attack again a popular anti-fraud site, may have well been outsourced.

AlertPay’s statement on the situation posted yesterday :

“We are currently expericing a large scale DDOS attack that has hit our sites which started at approximately 6:00am EST Sunday.  We are working with our data center to resolve and/or mitigate this issue.  More information will be posted here as we get updates. For the time being customers can connect to AlertPay at an alternate location: https://67.205.87.226″

Several hours later, AlertPay issued an update to the situation :

“We have finally mitigated the massive DDOS attack that started at 6:00am EST.  Unfortunately it took almost all day to resolve.  The site is operational now, and hopefully we’ll continue to tweak it more tomorrow to ensure this doesn’t happen again. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and we understand that this outage affects each of you personally.  We’re sorry for that.  We will continue to put measures in place so that outages like this do not occur again.

Ferhan”

There are two possible explanations regarding who’s behind the DDoS attack. It’s either unethical competition which in times of international economic meltdown can easily restore its market position by damaging the reputation and reliability of known competitor, or cybercriminals in “revenge mode” against a particular online payment processor that has detected their fraudulent activity, thereby causing them huge monetary losses.

 

Talk about getting to “desperate times means desperate measures.” I suppose whoever’s behind this could be pretty desperate in monetary terms regardless whether he’s a competitor or a plain tough cyber crook.

This post is also available in our VERTSOL Class’ group site. Feel free to check it here.

Is there no end to the AutoRun madness?

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Let’s skip any introduction and get straight to the point: We’re currently facing a problem of epidemic proportions in malware that is spreading via removable devices.

The U.S. army’s recent ban on removable storage probably says it all, though one may wonder what took them this long.
The vast majority of these malware samples is originating from China. Their functionality varies. It started out with online games password-stealers targeting World of Warcraft, LineAge and others. But over the last months, we’re seeing malware being upgraded to also spread via removable devices. They all make use of Windows’ AutoRun functionality.

It’s boot viruses all over again. Some ten, fifteen years ago we faced a huge problem with viruses spreading via floppies. Already infected machines would infect floppies upon insertion and infected floppies could infect clean machines by being booted from. Microsoft reacted to this threat and with the introduction of Windows95/NT boot viruses started to die out.

 

Pretty true, these virus from removable medias have long been prevalent even at the time floppy disks were of the most common removable storage device. It’s quite ironic that we never got away from it, or maybe because we’re stuck with having proprietary operating systems from Microsoft? Well, we can’t really blame the OS Producer now since hey, why blame them if it’s just by chance that they are the “proprietary” ones that hackers would just love to look for vulnerabilities and exploit it? Ring-ding.

While solutions have been offered, the autorun, as compared to the virii revolving around floppy disks that time, automatically executes upon access of the drive’s root. The virii then infects your PC, and sooner than you know it, corrupts it and you’d have to eventually format it.

Hopefully, a real solution will be discovered pretty soon enough.

This post is also available in our VERTSOL Class’ group site. Feel free to check it here.

Microsoft’s Live launches malware detection service for webmasters

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Playing catch-up with Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostic, Google’s warnings for potentially hackable sites, and Yahoo’s SearchScan introduced through their partnership with McAfee, Microsoft’s Live Search has updated their Webmaster tools to offer detection for embedded malware. Moreover, as a late entrant they simply had to differentiate, and they did it in the form of providing outbound links check for whether or not the ongoing links have also been embedded with malware. What is the feature capable of anyway?

“As a site owner, having malware on your site, or even just linking to other sites whose pages contain malware, can harm your customers. At a minimum, this may prevent your customers from being able to access the content on your site from search results pages. With the updated Crawl Issues tool in Webmaster Center, you will be able to :

- Determine whether any malware has been detected on any of your webpages
- Download offline-accessible reports detailing which webpages on your website are affected by the detected malware
- Determine whether any malware has been detected on any of your outbound links
- Download offline-accessible reports detailing which webpages on your website contain links to external pages containing detected malware”

Let’s take the feature for a ride. Live Search’s Webmaster tool correctly identified that Dental Clinic – India – Gurgaon – Allahabad has been embedded with malware (sahajdental .com/dentist.htm) where once deobfuscated the javascript obfuscation attempts to load sahajdental.com/a37f88e1b18c1a96 .axa3.cn and adwords.google.com.upload.main.update .kliauj.cn, where despite that the main indexes are returning “Account suspended” notices, the malware campaigns within the sites are still active. Google’s Safe Browsing diagnostic and Yahoo’s SearchScan didn’t picked it up, which is a “good” sign in the sense that competition between these free services ultimately serves the webmaster and the average Internet user.

 

Better late than never I suppose – just glad Microsoft is finally doing something to address vulnerabilities lurking within their engines.

This post is also available in our VERTSOL Class’ group site. Feel free to check it here.

Sanity check: 10 dirty little secrets you should know about working in IT

Full article here

If you are preparing for a career in IT or are new to IT, many of the “dirty little secrets” listed below may surprise you because we don’t usually talk about them out loud. If you are an IT veteran, you’ve probably encountered most of these issues and have a few of your own to add — and please, by all means, take a moment to add them to the discussion. Most of these secrets are aimed at network administrators, IT managers, and desktop support professionals. This list is not aimed at developers and programmers — they have their own set of additional dirty little secrets — but some of these will apply to them as well.

10.) The pay in IT is good compared to many other professions, but since they pay you well, they often think they own you

Although the pay for IT professionals is not as great as it was before the dot-com flameout and the IT backlash in 2001-2002, IT workers still make very good money compared to many other professions (at least the ones that require only an associate’s or bachelor’s degree). And there is every reason to believe that IT pros will continue to be in demand in the coming decades, as technology continues to play a growing role in business and society. However, because IT professionals can be so expensive, some companies treat IT pros like they own them. If you have to answer a tech call at 9:00 PM because someone is working late, you hear, “That’s just part of the job.” If you need to work six hours on a Saturday to deploy a software update to avoid downtime during business hours, you get, “There’s no comp time for that since you’re on salary. That’s why we pay you the big bucks!”

9.) It will be your fault when users make silly errors

Some users will angrily snap at you when they are frustrated. They will yell, “What’s wrong with this thing?” or “This computer is NOT working!” or (my personal favorite), “What did you do to the computers?” In fact, the problem is that they accidentally deleted the Internet Explorer icon from the desktop, or unplugged the mouse from the back of the computer with their foot, or spilled their coffee on the keyboard.

8.) You will go from goat to hero and back again multiple times within any given day

When you miraculously fix something that had been keeping multiple employees from being able to work for the past 10 minutes — and they don’t realize how simple the fix really was — you will become the hero of the moment and everyone’s favorite employee. But they will conveniently forget about your hero anointment a few hours later when they have trouble printing because of a network slowdown — you will be enemy No. 1 at that moment. But if you show users a handy little Microsoft Outlook trick before the end of the day, you’ll soon return to hero status.

 

Pretty good read, quite factual if you ask me. Check the whole list out and see for yourself.

 

This post is also available in our VERTSOL Class’ group site. Feel free to check it here.

10 mistakes new Linux administrators make

Full article here

 

For many, migrating to Linux is a rite of passage that equates to a thing of joy. For others, it’s a nightmare waiting to happen. It’s wonderful when it’s the former; it’s a real show stopper when it’s the latter. But that nightmare doesn’t have to happen, especially when you know, first hand, the most common mistakes new Linux administrators make. This article will help you avoid those mistakes by laying out the most typical Linux missteps.

Note: This information is also available as a PDF download.

#1: Installing applications from various types

This might not seem like such a bad idea at first. You are running Ubuntu so you know the package management system uses .deb packages. But there are a number of applications that you find only in source form. No big deal right? They install, they work. Why shouldn’t you? Simple, your package management system can’t keep track of what you have installed if it’s installed from source. So what happens when package A (that you installed from source) depends upon package B (that was installed from a .deb binary) and package B is upgraded from the update manager? Package A might still work or it might not. But if both package A and B are installed from .debs, the chances of them both working are far higher. Also, updating packages is much easier when all packages are from the same binary type.

#2: Neglecting updates

Okay, this one doesn’t point out Linux as much as it does poor administration skills. But many admins get Linux up and running and think they have to do nothing more. It’s solid, it’s secure, it works. Well, new updates can patch new exploits. Keeping up with your updates can make the difference between a compromised system and a secure one. And just because you can rest on the security of Linux doesn’t mean you should. For security, for new features, for stability — the same reasons we have all grown accustomed to updating with Windows — you should always keep up with your Linux updates.

 

Pretty good read. I think posts like these are valuable especially since we’ll be implementing Linux servers in the industry pretty soon enough.

This post is also available in our VERTSOL Class’ group site. Feel free to check it here.

Rating Samsung’s first notebooks for the U.S.

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If your holiday list includes a laptop, there’s a new choice from an well-known name: Samsung. In October, Samsung announced that it was entering the U.S. market with six new notebooks, as well as a netbook. The timing wasn’t great. After several quarters of double-digit growth, the PC market cooled off in late September, but Samsung seems undeterred. So should you consider a Samsung system? Here’s what the reviews sites have to say.

Laptop Magazine has been all over Samsung’s U.S. launch, and the site just posted a review of the Samsung R610-64G, a desktop replacement with a 16-inch widescreen display. Their verdict: The R610-64G has a great design, and it is one of the lightest (6 pounds), thinnest and most inexpensive models in its class. But if you’re looking for a laptop with a 16-inch display with a 16:9 aspect ratio, you probably expect a great multimedia experience too, and with its relatively low resolution display (1,366×768), poor audio quality, weak gaming performance, and lack of either Blu-ray or dedicated media controls, the R610-64G makes too many sacrifices to get the price below $1,000. Other choices in this category include the Acer Aspire 6930G, HP HDX 16 and Sony VAIO FW series. The Aspire 6930G-6723, which Laptop Magazine also just reviewed makes for an interesting comparison because it is also priced at $999, but includes Blu-ray and better graphics.

 

One thing really can’t be avoided when you’re increasing your market in terms of branching off to different products: criticism. Although plenty of companies, especially with the economic turmoil going around, think that such is the way to go, if the research does not go as well as planned, the end-product results in something that may in fact be subtle compared to what is offered by the market.

Samsung may perhaps need a new product after this one: as for anything other than the large 16″ screen? It’s pretty much what it’s only going for.

This post is also available in our VERTSOL Class’ group site. Feel free to check it here.