NMP Blog

With all of the news about the the privacy changes at Facebook, the Untangle team has create SaveFace to help you get your privacy set back to more restrictive settings, so that all your information is not available to everyone.  It will set your privacy settings so that only your friends can access your information.  It is easy to run and keeping your settings private is generally a good idea.

When setting up a office/corporate network environment, users may complain that it is frustrating to have to change their password every so often, or have to come up with difficult passwords. Despise the user’s arguments, although valid, remember the security risk that it poses. If you have simple passwords, maybe something common that all users share, it’s easy for unauthorized access into the system. If someone guesses or gets hold of one user’s password, it may be possible to guess the rest. Protect your data and files – enforce a password policy on your network, with an expiration on passwords. Use requirements such as at least one capital letter, and a number or special character to increase security. Your data is YOUR data – so make sure it’s safe from prying eyes!

This may seem like a no brainer, but it is often done wrong.

Set your parameters once and once only.  In other words, if you have ANY value that will be used more than once in your program, set a variable to that value and use the variable in the body of the program.

In other words:

variable1 = 40

width=variable1

rows=variable1

NOT

width=40

rows=40

Sure it’s one extra step now.  But if you ever change that value (and you probably will!), you’ll be able to change it in one place rather than hunting and searching for the fifty different places where you hard coded the value into your program.  It also means that you only have to worry about typos the first time through the program, not after each value change.

And of course, it goes without saying that you should keep all your parameters in one, easy-to-find place.  Your future self will thank you.

It never takes long for the spammers to find you.  Within days of opening this blog, we began receiving the first spam comments –the typical “buy this product”, “click this link” type that you also receive in your email.

But last week I encountered a new type of comment spam that almost slipped past me –it was a positive comment, no products mentioned, from a legitimate sounding name and email address, with no links to any strange websites.

After encountering enough scams, however, you develop a kind of sixth sense out of pure defensiveness.  I did a google search on the name, and found that the same person had posted nearly identical comments in thousands of blogs on the same day –suggesting it was a robot and not a real person.  But the question was why?

My best guess is this –once the original round of robot comments go out, the spammer can do a websearch on his alias to find out which forums approved his message.  He can then concentrate his next round of spam –the kind carrying the payload –on the most vulnerable sites.

I don’t want to mention the exact names and messages here for that very reason, but if you want to find out more about this, there’s a blog entry from another blogger who was hit last week here.

I have to admit –I’m a Twitter resister.  Even in this age of instant communications, the idea of staying current on the minute-to-minute details of the lives of all my friends, loved ones and acquaintances seems less like a blessing and more like a curse.  But I do have to admit that there’s a place where twitter makes perfect sense –in the business world.

When my boss first announced the concept, I was skeptical.  But for a business like ours, Twitter is fantastic.  Most of us are rarely ever in the office –we’re all either telecommuting or out on assignment.  But with Twitter, we never need to worry about the right hand knowing what the left hand is doing.  Instead, it’s simplicity itself to know where all my coworkers are and what project they are engaged in.  It’s even helped me keep track of myself on particularly busy days by giving me a record of what I did when.

However, when the work day ends, I sign out of Twitter with no regrets or urges to check up on people after hours.  For now, at least, my private life remains proudly untweetable.