A disaster recovery business continuity planning consultant - and claim to know all about data storage and disk recovery- but people find me boring.. so strange..
Onion routers are in the news again these days. While onion routers really help in developing secure networks- they also are misused by hackers all around the world.
As with any technology, if onion routers are used well, it could go a long way in developing a secure internet , but onion routers could also be an invitation for hackers to use the untraceable IP feature to hack other networks.
EMC is rapidly expanding its offerings beyond data storage to include information security and data backup competencies.
Obviously, storage software, network data security and data recovery software services are growing way faster than the traditional physical data storage business of EMC and EMC, the data storage guys,want to rapidly get into this space.
One of my friends apparently works for a intention based antivirus software company (I am not mentioning the name of the company to make it clear that I am not simply promoting his intention based antivirus company)
According to him,intention based antivirus is a technology that even companies like McAfee and Symantec are researching. Intention based antivirus software will of course revolutionize the antivirus software industry. Imagine a antivirus detection and defence world with
Intention based antivirus software definitely sounds cool- I definitely dont like the prospect of downloading antivirus software updates almost every day
In addition, I am obviously worried about some antivirus program installing their own rootkit on my machine!
My only question: When are McAfee and Norton antivirus software moving to an intention based antivirus algorithm? Silence? Hmm
An easy way to speed up your Windows XP PC is to load your Windows kernel into your PC's RAM.
Windows XP boot times can be improved drastically. You just need to tweak a Windows XP registry parameter.
Windows XP has a major drawback in taking a significant amount of time to boot. One option to speed up the boot time is to tweak the prefetching options in the Windows registry.
What is prefetching in Windows XP : Prefetching is caching of system boot files for faster loading. But Hey,the quantum of caching has a significant impact fon system boot time. By selecting the appropriate components for prefetching in Windows XP, the system boot time can be significantly improved
The Windows XP registry key to modify for enabling prefetching :- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\Prefetch Parameters\EnablePrefetcher
The options you can modify for this Windows XP registry key
'I know all about antivirus software!': The infamous Sony rootkit revisited
Good article on rootkit detection. I particularly like the reviews of rootkit detection software.
Another valid question about rootkit: Why isnt the IT industry rising up in protect against rootkits - Why arent rootkits being eliminated while popups are treated like the anti-Christ.
The rootkits protection answer isnt far away - the so called protectors and industry leaders of the IT industry are themselves indulging in spreading their own rootkits. Nothing works like rootkits in intruding people privacy
Interesting virtualization categories
Data storage thin virtualization can be defined as virtualization technologies that focuses on non core capabilities in data migration or global name spaces
Thick virtualization is defined as virtualization that focuses on core virtualization technologies such as data storage data replication, data cloning and snapshots.
SAS or serial attached SCSI is the protocol with the best promise for the data storage industry.
The reasons why SAS or serial attached SCSI is likely to be successful
Virtualization has evolved to support data migration, data replication and mirroring. In fact, data replication server vendors now openly tout the benefits of virtualization products in data migration.
Why do virtualization products now offer data migration features? Imagine you run a data center with Windows boxes on a SAN- if virtualization tempts you to add a Linux box - you had better use data replication, data mirroring or some other storage technique to ensure that you can recover your data after the inevitable server crashes
EMC's Invista platform for virtualization touts data migration as a major product feature - in fact some customers may be tempted to buy the product for the data migration features.
Do you choose Vmware workstations or Windows Virtual PCs?
I have always been sceptical of data storage virtualization, considering the amount of marketing hype surrounding virtualization in the market.
However, the latest VMware and Windows Virtual PC announcements have made me revise my earlier sceptical outlook.
Microsoft is offering Virtual PC for workstations free and also promising better support for Linux.
Vmware is coming out with a new workstation version that should remove the kinks out of the earlier version.
All in all, both Vmware and Windows Virtual PC are great options- I choose Virtual PC if the emulation is needed on more Windows environments and Vmware workstation if there are more Linux environments.
Reports suggest that more than a million PCs are infected by the new Myspace adware virus- a banner advertisement that promoted a portal (name hidden for obvious reasons- we dont want to promote the creators of the adware)
The banner advertisement appeared on the 'Profiles' page of Myspace.com. The perpetrators of the adware are not known- but reports suggest they have made a lot of money since adware perpetrators usually get paid depending on the number of PCs they infect.
Invisible rootkits are assaulting computers all over the world. Earlier rootkits could be easily detected and removed by rootkit scanners like the 'BlackLight rootkit scanner'.
However, newer almost undetectable rootkit scanners are now entering the market- the rootkit hide unside kernel and other system files so that they are undetectable by any rootkit detection software.
IBM has formed the Aperi storage consortium to challenge the BIG 5 data storage company joint effort (EMC, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Hitachi Data Systems and Symantec) These BIG 5 companies are at least trying to form a common data storage API that will work across systems. However, IBM is still waving the non-cooperative pirate flag so that it can focus on proprietory standards using the so-called Aperi storage consortium
I have found the mother of all rootkit software tools reviews. These rootkit detection reviews are definitely worth reading.
On the other hand, Symantec, the leading anti virus vendor is under considerable fire for installing a rootkit along with its internet security software
Amazon has offered storage services for developers. This is quite incredible data storage news. On first glance, one is tempted to comment that Amazon probably has bought more storage than they need (a typical case of corporate snafu of the Dilbertian world)
But, hey, Amazon are the true innovators of the online world, and they probably have figured out better ways to manage storage.
Talk about dilution of focus, though..
Google Gdrive :The moment a mistaken gaffe from Google allowed some people to get a glimpse of the potential launch of Google GDrive - I began getting questions from clients and colleagues on the potential of Google GDrive
Some of the questions on Google Gdrive that I heard were :
Symantec has belied the trust of all its antivirus customers in disaster recovery data centers and homes throughout the world- Symantec recently announced that it was using a rootkit as part of its Norton antivirus suite.
Rootkits are nothing but open invitations to hack and one wonders whether Symantec protects our PC from viruses or sides with the hackers and virus writers to make our PCs more vulnerable.
And I have hardly touched upon privacy concerns!
Microsoft has announced that its new spyware remover software will start zapping the infamous Sony rootkit. This is great news for data center disaster recovery champions, as the Sony rootkit was a huge invitation for potential hackers of data centers.
Read the blog entry from one of Microsoft's security managers.
