Epsilon Weblog

Blocking Spam & Spyware

scratbag — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 03:36:47 +0000

The book I read to research this post was Blocking Spam & Spyware for Dummies by Peter Gregory et al which is an excellent book which I bought from amazon. At one time spam was just dodgy messages but the dividing line between spam, spyware & viruses has blurred rather a lot. I think spammers think if they can get their spam onto your computer they might as well make money from you ie find your bank details, and they might as well cause some mayhem. As time goes on anti virus, anti spamware & anti spyware will merge into one program. One trick they use with spam is to send a picture, often pornographic, with no separate text so as to fool the anti spamware. For a business spam is a real concern if employees are bombarded with pornography & other nasty things via spam & the firm isn’t doing enough to protect them they can sue the company. Anti spamware will either filter spam too much or too little that is a fact of life. A concern with spyware is it can be a key logger & record all your keyboard commands including potentially your bank details & passwords. One problem with many anti spyware programs is they allow your computer to become infected before they remove it, some now scan for it & remove it straight away. If you run a business you should have these types of anti malware on your servers & separately on your workstations. Another issue is employees putting software on their workstations especially stuff off the internet which can potentially contain malware.

Hacking VOIP

scratbag — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 22:14:48 +0000

The book I read to research this post was Hacking VOIP Exposed by Mark Collier which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. VOIP stands for voice over internet protocol & is the practise of routing telephones via the internet. Especially in the last couple of years this has come a long way it used to be you used a softphone which is a phone that plugs into your computer & you used the software skype to route the phonecall which is done cheaper than by conventional means. Now there are VOIP phones that just plug into your network & the price on these is gradually coming down. As with practically everything in the computer world there are certain weaknesses that certain malicious people use. It does say in the introduction of this book that hacking VOIP is a huge subject & if it was to include everything it would be a huge book so it looks at it from a business enterprise class perspective. The most common reason people hack VOIP networks is monetary gain. This often means getting important information in the company files. An example in the book is if someone finds out a company has made more profits than expected they can buy lots of shares before it’s announced & hence make lots of money. It’s a good idea to use a piece of software like asterisk which hides your IP addresses & component information from snoopers. Usually when someone does this kind of hacking they use programs like Nmap & Wireshark they can analyze what packets of information are going in & out & work out what components make up your network. They will then go to a website that tells what weaknesses & issues that hardware has. It’s worth mentioning that there are websites that store the IP addresses for every network on a particular continent which is very useful to hackers. Incidently if you use asterisk software your hardware needs to be compatible. Also a good way to strengthen a VOIP network is to use hardware that doesn’t have many weaknesses or issues. A VOIP network is particularly susceptible to a denial of service attack as an ordinary network will often just slow down but on a VOIP network it will become impossible to communicate.

Virtualization

scratbag — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:40:40 +0000

The book I read to research this post was Virtualization for Dummies by Bernard Golden which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Moore’s Law states that in the computing world processing power doubles every 2 years which basically means if you are a computer user you have to buy a new computer every 2 years. Anything which helps you upgrade less often has to be a good thing. Virtualization does just that. The most common virtualization is server virtualization where particularly with hard drives the price per gigabyte has plummeted. What would at one time have been on separate servers can now be put on one server. You still need a spare though in case one crashes. The beauty of client servers is you can set up an account that limits what the user can do on that client pc then use that for going on the internet & if it gets infected by a virus the damage it can do is severely limited. This book was released prior to the release of windows server 2008 which was due to have virtualization features included so the information on virtualization products is a bit limited but I think VMware which is featured in the book is still one of the major players in this field. Another aspect of virtualization is cloud computing or software as a service a good example of this is google search where you enter a search term, googles many servers process your request & send you the results. Can you imagine how long your home pc would take to do the same job? Salesforce.com is probably the most well known cloud computing service although there’s many companies getting in on the act. With cloud computing only a minimal amount of processing is done on your computer because most of it’s done on the service providers server. Another aspect of cloud computing which has been pioneered by IBM is charging people & companies according to how much use they make of a cloud computing service which I think is fair & has potential.

Google Sites & Chrome

scratbag — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 17:44:13 +0000

The book I read to research this post was Google Sites & Chrome for Dummies by Ryan Teeter et al which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Google sites allows you to construct a website using an intuitive wizard & the basic site is free but you have to pay if you have a business site or if you want to register a domain name for the site. If you read my post on google apps you may remember that when you register to use googles docs you are given a website where you can save your work. This site is identical in practically every way. You can have gadgets which are mini programs ie calendar, in your website & google has made it as simple as possible. The neat thing about calendar is when it’s set up others can see your schedule at a glance. I would suggest if you are new to computing & want to have a website that you consider having a blog & maybe when you have experience of that move onto google sites which has got a similiar interface to microsoft office & many blogsites.

Google chrome is the browser I use & I particularly like the fact that if there’s a website I particularly like I can drag a shortcut button onto the taskbar. It also incorporates google search which is convenient. Also it’s worth mentioning that google has specialist search engines like this one for ebooks.

http://books.google.com

Network Security

scratbag — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 21:59:42 +0000

The book I read to research this post was Network Security for Dummies by Chey Cobb which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. An interesting point in this book is that if you hire a network security consultant you should if he finds anything suspect on your network what will he do? You might think that he’d report it to you but actually he’s under no obligation to. What if he finds a password cracker on your network that someone has installed to test the network but without your approval? I’ll mention there’s a good website at ciac.org which is an american government department which is surprising because normally government departments don’t do the best websites normally consulting firms do the best network security sites. You obviously have to update your antivirus software weekly & run it every 2 or 3 days. You should have strong passwords which means a minimum of 8 character and a combination of upper & lower case letters, numbers & special characters. Everything that possibly can should have a unique password. If you have accounts on the internet you should vary your email adresses & password. Your server should be locked away if someone goes in that room ideally things like their baggage should be searched in case they’re copying information from the server onto ie a flash drive. In fact ideally the person should be searched. A final interesting point is the W3C made a statement that the safest kind of website is a barebones mac running a barebones website. That was made prior to OSX coming out which despite being comparatively safe has got its own issues. Also if you run a database & have ecommerce on your website that obviously has vulnerabilities.

Google Apps

scratbag — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 09:24:31 +0000

The book I read to research this post was Google Apps for Dummies by Ryan Teeter et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Google is most famous for its search engine which is the most used worldwide. Google also does a lot of other programs most are free most are free & you are normally eligible to use them if you have a gmail or googlemail email account. The email account is normally free although there is a premium option available for a small amount monthly. Google docs comes in team, standard, premium & education versions. The team version doesn’t come with gmail. The premium version costs $50 per month & comes with 25GB of storage, the education has many of the same features but only 6GB of storage & the standard version has limited functions & the same amount of storage. Google docs includes documents, a word processor, spreadsheet & presentations which is similiar to powerpoint. When you register to use google docs google give you a free website to store your work, this is cloud computing, if you want to register a domain name for the site that costs $10 per annum. There are many programs in the google collection among them google talk that is similiar to skype & allows you to place IM or VOIP telephone calls. All you need is a microphone & speakers.

Welcome

scratbag — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:22:12 +0000

I notice I’ve got a new subscriber so I’d like to welcome you. If anyone else is interested in subscribing it’s free & it just means when I put up a new post you get a copy by email.

All the best

Dave.

Mom Blogging

scratbag — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:18:02 +0000

The book I read to research this post was Mom Blogging for Dummies by Wendy Piersall which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. A lot of the information in this book applies to any kind of blog. First of all if you want to run adverts on your blog you have 2 major choices you could use blogger where you have to have a blogspot domain name or you could run the wordpress software which is a free download from wordpress.org on a 3rd party server. Wendy does the latter. She advises if you hire writers for your site that you pay them a percentage of the advertising revenue that way you aren’t paying out more than you have got coming in. Some good advice if you are on twitter 10% of the time you should advertise your blogs, 20% you should retweet others & the rest should be giving people informative information. Apparently she reckons facebooks better than twitter because you can write longer messages & you’ll probably have a lot of friends already there when you join. I must admit I prefer twitter because my followers have grown without a lot of effort on my part. Also you should blog on something you enjoy & that seems effortless to write. I think even if you are mom blogging you still have to do research ie say if your child has measles you have to read a book on that subject & also maybe alternative medicine so that you can compare the potential cures & thereby keep your blog interesting. By the way if you enjoy my computing blogs have a look at my proper computing blog at scratbag.me it has over 450 posts.

Hacking Wireless Networks

scratbag — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 14:30:41 +0000

The book I read to research this post was Hacking Wireless Networks for Dummies by Kevin Beaver et al which is an excellent book which I bought from amazon. This book was written in 2005 so some of the information might be a bit dated. At one time most people who had to hack a network for whatever reason would use network stumbler often called net stumbler & kismet because they were the main ones that were available but now the options are endless. However if you are new to hacking the safest ones to stick with are net stumbler & kismet. Many wireless networks use the default passwords that came with their equipment & if you know what equipment the person has you can easily find these passwords on the internet. One interesting fact in the book which is probably only of interest if you intend wardriving is that you can import your results from net stumbler into ms map point & plot them on a map. Wardriving is when you drive around & try & hack into peoples networks via a laptop. An issue in ethical hacking in unofficial wireless access points often placed there by employees who want to get on the network easily but a weak target that potential hackers can use. It’s definitely something you want to locate.

A final warning if you are doing ethical hacking on any kind of network get permission in writing & make sure it states exactly what you will be doing ie testing passwords, & make sure there’s no discrepencies.

Advanced Blogging

scratbag — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:07:29 +0000

The book I read to research this post was Blogging by the Million, Selling by the Millions by Laura Maya which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. Some of you may remember a while back I did a post on social bookmarking which was based on an ebook which was promoting a book you could buy. This is the book & although it’s fairly short there’s a lot of information covered. The book is basically about selling digital products which are things like mp3s, ebooks, web space, domain registration & affiliate marketing where you sell something on your web site & somebody sorts out delivery etc. I’ve some affiliate sites which are.

www.ebay.co

www.amazon.com

www.yahooshopping.com

Some resources are

www.befree.com

www.linkshare.com

I think the best ebook conversion is

adobe.com

Apart from things like a computer & broadband connection there is very little outlay. Another idea in the book is you can rent so much space on a server & sell it off in 20MB web site segments. There is a company called exabytes that will do it as an affiliate marketer. www.exabytes.com

Also although I don’t think it’s such a good idea there’s selling forex & commodities etc

www.easy-forex.com

These are some ecommerce sites

zencart.com

paypal.com

A blog is a good idea as they are often free & can drive traffic to your main site. Some less well known ones are

vox.com

xanga.com

blog.com

Also often you can copy & paste from one site to another.

Apparently there’s a search engine called baidu which is very big in china which I’m definately going to submit my blogs to. Did you know if you go to a foreign language site most browsers will translate it.

If you are interested in search engine optimization there’s

seolite.com

Some blog catalogs are

www.blogcatalog.com

www.bloglisting.com

Here’s a couple of article submission sites

www.articlerich.com

goarticles.com

A rather less well known social bookmarking site is

socialize-it.com

Finally some rather less well known social networking sites are

hi5.com

xanga.com

tagged.com

xing.com

I have only used a fraction of the sites in the book & if you are serious about promoting a web site or blog I would recommend it.