Dell’s misleading graphics card buying advice

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011

Dell should be commended for going out of its way to help novice PC buyers, but its entry for choosing a graphics card — accessible by clicking the “Help me choose” link when customising various Optiplex models — contains a glaring and potentially expensive error, as spotted by Reddit users.

While the text is basic, it’s accurate enough for beginners. Instead, it’s the image that contains a dangerous chunk of misinformation.

The monitor on the left, labelled as a PC that uses a “standard graphics card”, is displaying a Windows desktop that’s washed out and blurry. The seemingly identical Dell TFT on the right, powered by a “high-end graphics card”, is showing the same desktop – but this time it’s much sharper and more vivid. They’re both outputting at the same resolution. (more…)

Mobile money: a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist

Thursday, June 2nd, 2011

Mobile money is the future, or so I’m assured by research into the use of Near Field Communications (NFC) systems, which says most of us will be using our smartphones to pay for stuff within the next four years.

First things first, mobile money is not new. And, no, I’m not talking about the fact that money itself is pretty damn mobile when you think about it — what I’m talking about provides a system whereby you don’t have to carry real cash and can instead just point an easily carried payment device at a retailer.

Most of you will immediately know what I’m talking about when I mention the name of this bit of wonder kit, this device that has revolutionised retail, that does away with the need to carry cash and that just about everyone is comfortable using: it’s called a debit card.

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The nightmare of Patch Tuesday for small businesses

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

More and more businesses are dreading that Tuesday every month when Microsoft release a bunch of security patches and updates.

Patch Tuesday should be a thing to look forward to, of course, seeing as it’s when the latest round of application and operating system vulnerabilities get a nice big sticking plaster to protect your systems and data from exploit. The trouble is that when, as with the latest Patch Tuesday, there are no fewer than 17 security bulletins (nine rated as critical) covering a whopping 64 vulnerabilities –  many of the patches requiring a full system restart – it all starts to become something of an IT management nightmare. Especially for the smaller business where there isn’t an IT manager or even an IT department to handle such things.

The vast majority of smaller businesses that I talk to are not IT savvy, they get by and rely upon the systems and software they are supplied to do their job. They don’t switch browser to Firefox or Chrome, they run Internet Explorer because that’s what everyone else uses and it came with the box. What’s more, they often run an older version of Internet Explorer as they apply the “if it ain’t broke” rule. Wrongly in the case of older versions of IE, of course, which are broken from a security perspective.

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£400 of freebies? Pull the other one, Microsoft

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

StartUp Britain is an initiative to help startup businesses in the UK. Clearly this is a good thing in principle though some have suggested – not least my Real World Computing comrade Kevin Partner -  that some of the sponsors and backers of this Government-applauded but privately backed venture are rather in it for themselves, judging by the help and offers that have been made public.

However, things hit a new low with Microsoft’s offer: it is offering “free technology resources worth up to £400 per company”, which sounds pretty good to me at first glance.

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StartUp Britain – business advice or marketing machine?

Tuesday, March 29th, 2011

One week after the Government focused on big business with a 2% cut in the main rate of corporation tax (which doesn’t apply to small businesses) it’s seeking to make up for this by supporting StartUp Britain.org. This website, which features a picture of David Cameron levitating and a very red-faced Richard Branson, purports to “make it easier for new companies to flourish” and, perhaps, is the planned replacement for BusinessLink.

The essential difference with StartUp Britain is that it’s been developed and run by private companies rather than the Government. This gets around BusinessLink’s obsessive focus on regulation rather than the development of business. However, the Government’s much vaunted idea – that private individuals and companies will philanthropically fill the gap left by their withdrawal from public services – is immediately exposed as pie in the sky by StartUp Britain.

The site is little more than a series of links to other sites (how original) along with “up to £1,500 of great offers”. Sadly what these offers amount to is a set of promotional vouchers, many offered by the founders of StartUp Britain. For example, Glasses Direct (whose founder Jamie Murray Wells is one of the backers of StartUp Britain) offers a £15 discount voucher.

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How insecure is IPv6?

Friday, March 25th, 2011

The internet has been running out of space for the best part of ten years now, address space that is. In a nutshell, the 4,294,967,296 addresses provided by IPv4 are pretty much exhausted and so we must start embracing IPv6 which can provide a few more.

How many, exactly?

How does 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 addresses sound to you?

Now I’m not going to get stuck into the whole ‘how to migrate to IPv6 thing’ here, nor even the debate about how long we really have left to make that migration (although Steve Cassidy will be examining this in issue 200 of PC Pro). Nope, I’m more interested in what the potential impact upon internet security will be when it’s a done deal and everything is connected to the internet.

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Should your small business buy an Apple iPad 2?

Friday, March 11th, 2011

Let me get one thing out of the way right now: I love the iPad and think it’s a brilliant piece of technology. For the average consumer it’s quite rightly an object of desire that many aspire to own, and I will be first in the queue for an iPad 2 come launch day. But is the iPad 2 a gimme for the average small business buyer? The evidence suggests not.

I do, of course, appreciate that neither the original iPad nor the iPad 2 are pushed primarily as a business tool, but maintain that it’s a valid question to explore nonetheless.

The trouble is, I’m hard pressed to come up with too many small business scenarios where media consumption, rather than creation, is a core computing requirement. As a complementary device to an existing netbook or laptop it comes into its own but, seriously, how many small businesses have the kind of budget which will stretch to such a fanciful and, frankly, superfluous purchase in the current economic environment?

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Cloud security: is Android the weakest link?

Monday, March 7th, 2011

Much has been written about the security of data in the cloud, and even more about the insecurity of the same. Until now, things have been somewhat quieter when it comes to how we access cloud-based data on the move. That, I suspect, is about to change.

Plenty of effort has been poured into securing online data stores, and plenty is made by the providers of those cloud services in making sure potential customers know about it. Which is why the bad guys are understandably looking for the soft targets, and at the moment that would appear to be Android apps.

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again: the smaller your business, the bigger the benefits of cloud computing. That rings especially true at the ‘free’ end of the cloud scale where the attraction of services such as those provided by Google can offer real bottom-line savings for hard pressed small business concerns. Security within the free or low-cost cloud isn’t somehow automatically weaker than that found at the expensive end of the cloud provision market either.

You can be sure that Google has invested heavily in securing the data at rest within those cloud bases, incorporating all the multi-layered protocols and synchronous replication processes you might expect. But perhaps it needs to invest more at the other end, the smartphone to be precise. What you need to ask yourself is whether Android could be the weak link in the cloud security chain?

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The plummeting price of stolen personal data

Thursday, February 17th, 2011

How much is your data worth? You may think that the customer database your business has built is priceless, and individuals probably regard their online data as being rather valuable as well. After all, that’s why we put so much effort into securing it. Unfortunately, the basic economic laws of supply and demand exist within the criminal marketplace just as they do elsewhere.

Which means that our perception of value is hugely over-inflated when compared to the reality of the online underground economy. That reality is that as malware production and exploitation has rocketed, and stolen data has flooded the marketplace, so the price has plummeted to pretty unbelievable lows.

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How to physically secure your business hardware

Friday, January 21st, 2011

There seems to be something of a misconception, at the smaller end of the business scale at least, that data security is somehow a terribly complex thing that is also expensive to achieve properly. This myth is no doubt massaged just a little bit by small business consultants with one eye on the invoice.

The truth of the matter is somewhat different, of course, and basic data security is neither difficult nor expensive to achieve. All it takes is a little bit of technical know-how and an awful lot of common sense.

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