August 2007

Zango’s court case against Kaspersky has been thrown out, because Kaspersky has immunity as a result of the Communications Decency Act.

The decision can be seen at Ben Edelman’s site. (PDF)

Ben has also updated his list of legal actions: Threats Against Spyware Detectors, Removers, and Critics

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Zango Drops Lawsuit Against PC Tools

Adware company Zango has voluntarily withdrawn its lawsuit against security software company PC Tools, which Zango accused of illegally removing its software from users’ PCs without their express permission. The move follows a court’s refusal to grant Zango a temporary restraining order.

Article at BetaNews.

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Websense Press Releases.

STUDY: SMBs Overconfident in Their Information Technology Security

SAN DIEGO August 27, 2007 — According to independent research released today by Websense, Inc. (NASDAQ: WBSN), small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) fail to take adequate steps to reduce the risk off data loss from Web-based security threats. The SMB State of Security (SOS) survey of 450 IT managers and employees within the United States shows that while 46 percent of SMB IT managers say they have software to protect company confidential data, 81 percent do not use software to block the use of peer-to-peer applications, block USB devices (80 percent), control the use of instant messaging (76 percent), or stop spyware from sending out information to external sources (47 percent) – all growing vectors of confidential data loss.

Despite the risk of data loss, 20 percent of SMBs do not use Internet security software other than firewall and anti-virus products, as they mistakenly feel these are sufficient. Additionally, 12 percent of IT managers admit, while they have an Internet usage policy, they have no way of enforcing it.

The study also found that business-owned computers are left vulnerable to security threats for more than 21 days, on average, despite the daily updates promoted and offered by operating system and anti-virus vendors. In fact, only 4 percent of SMB employees have daily security updates on their work PC, while 11 percent of employees say the security software on their work PC has never been updated.

On the bright side, 94 percent of SMBs claim to have an Internet use policy in place, and 67 percent say that all companies should have equal levels of protection from Internet security threats, irrespective of their size.

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Windows Genuine Advantage Blog

Validation Issue Fix

We’ve been receiving reports on our forum and through customer service starting last night that Windows Vista validations have been failing on genuine systems. It looks now as though the issue has been resolved and validations are being processed successfully.

Customers who received an incorrect validation response can fix their system by revalidating on our site (http://www.microsoft.com/genuine). We encourage anyone who received a validation failure since Friday evening to do this now. After successfully revalidating any affected system should be rebooted to ensure the genuine-only features are restored.

I held off writing an update until posts from a few users, who were still reporting problems after trying to revalidate, had abated.

Kudos to the WGA Team for resolving the issue quickly, although I am sure this incident will add fire to the already hot WGA debate.

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Today I received my copy of the latest issue, “Deploying Windows Vista, BDD 2007 Delivers Windows Vista On A Silver Platter.”

Although it’s nice to have the magazine, it’s also available to download as a standalone HTML Help file (.chm) TechNet

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Microsoft’s WGA server went down August 24th 2007, and installations were being flagged as counterfeit because they could not be validated.

Please see this topic:
ATTENTION - Vista Validation 0xC004C4A5 Errors - PLEASE READ (Or read the latest post for resolution steps) in the forums.

Until the situation is definitely resolved, I would advise against shutting down or rebooting your Vista machines.

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If you are interested in WordPress theming, plugins, reviews and tutorials, be sure to check out WPDesigner.com

One new theme I have onboard is Wrath developed by Small Potato.

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Recently I upgraded to a new router and experienced problems configuring it to work in harmony with my XP and Vista machines; resolved by installing another router by a different vendor and upgrading Intel drivers.

Then it was time to reconfigure the security settings, which is when I saw Corrine over at the Security Garden had blogged “Steve Lamb of Microsoft created this 5 part series on securing a Wireless network.”

Part 1: Enabling WPA on a wireless router
Part 2: How to change the SSID
Part 3: Reconfiguring a Vista client to connect to your WPA secured access point
Part 4: Connect using WPA for the first time on Windows Vista
Part 5: Connecting using WPA for the first time on XP

Useful series complete with videos, helpful to those who prefer a visual guide.

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One of those WOW moments.

Microsoft has launched Tafiti, a search engine built on Microsoft® Silverlight

This is not your usual search interface and has rich visualizations. You need the Silverlight runtime for Tafiti, your search may never be the same again.

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