Remember, extra security is required for wireless hotspots

-
Forbes reports on recent work that has identified many airport hotspots not being secure. This is a good reminder to all of us who use hotspots that we need extra security. First, if you can get on the hotspot, so can anyone else. With a little work and help from programs such as Cane and Abel, anyone can intercept everything you send and receive. Other people may just set up their laptop to look like a hotspot, so when you connect, you are actually connecting to their laptop. Again programs are readily available to make this work with relative ease.

Your job, if you're going to use hotspots, is to only communicate with VPN on. VPN will encrypt data as it is sent and received between your laptop and the VPN server. If your company does not provide you with VPN or you need it for private use, try services such as PublicVPN or HotSpotVPN. For a small fee, these services will protect you .

The same rule also applies to any public network that you physically connect to such as from a hotel room. After connecting to the network, fire up the VPN before doing anything else. It is also a good idea to make sure you are not sharing any files or folders. If you are, when you join the network, but before you access the VPN, anyone on the network can get to those shares.

How does this differ from private physical connections such as in your place of byusiness? You are trusting that the only people on your business network are safe, and not snooping the network. If your business network is also available via wireless, it should be protected with WPA using a strong security key.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Digital Signatures in PDF Do Not Print

-
Image
Trouble getting the digital signature in a PDF to print? The solution is actually simpler than you might think. With your document open in Adobe Acrobat Reader, click File >> Print. When the Print dialog box opens, look for the "Comments and Forms:" drop-down below the Properties button, located in the upper-right. Click the drop-down and select "Document and Markups." Now print. That's all there is to it.
Read more

Referencing the value of a cell, not its formula

-
Image
In Excel, I will use formulas quite frequently for my analysis. At times I want to reference the resulting value of the formula for comparison or to feed another formula. Unfortunately, if you are doing a comparison, Excel will try to compare the formula instead of the formulas results. Well, turns out there is an easy way to correct this. If you want your formula result to be a number, then use the VALUE function. If you want the formula result to be text, use the TEXT function. Here is the syntax for each: VALUE(text) TEXT(value,format_text) -- The format_text value can be any format from the Category box on the Number tab (in the Format Cells dialog box) except General. Here is an example of each: =VALUE(MID(A2,46,FIND("&",A2)-46)) -- this actually finds a number beginning with the 46th character of a string, and continues until it finds the ampersand character. By wrapping the formula with VALUE, I can now compare the number to other numbers in my looku
Read more

CorelDRAW X4 Crash on Startup

-
I had a fresh install of CorelDRAW X4, and each time I tried to start it, it would crash. After some searching through Google, I found the following fix. Open the folder C:\Program Files\Corel\CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4\Programs\UIConfig\CorelDRAW Edit DrawUI.xml Find the line <dockpage guidref="bc1e2f70-3b58-41cd-8406-aaa550482972" visible="true" selected="true"> Change visible="false" and remove selected="true" <dockpage guidref="bc1e2f70-3b58-41cd-8406-aaa550482972" visible="false"> Save and close DrawUI.xml Fold down F8 and restart CorelDRAW X4 When prompted to update settings, select OK That did the trick for me. Apparently it is caused by a conflict with MFC dlls that are installed (version 1833) with SQL2008.
Read more