Author: Dave Farquhar

Get Acronis for free

Dave Farquhar Software

There isn’t much time left, and I apologize, but for the rest of the day, you can get the home version of Acronis for free. Details at the link. It’s not a bad idea to be familiar with Acronis, since it’s so widely used by businesses. Getting it and using it on your home PCs will get you some relevant experience. I’m not sure what the differences are between the home and business versions (I haven’t seen the home version yet myself), but using it will put you in position to figure it out. And you can’t beat the price, right?

The contractor who built systems via P2P

Dave Farquhar security ,

Today I was helping one of my coworkers study for the Security+ exam, and one of his study questions reminded me of a story.

I wrote a few days ago about spending some time in an unhealthy IT shop. One of my cohorts supported one of the departments that decided to outsource its IT to a contractor, rather than use the internal IT department. It was a form of shadow IT on a large scale. The hand-off didn’t exactly go as it should.

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The difference between how I eat and how Paula Deen cooks

Dave Farquhar Cooking ,

I don’t pay a lot of attention to food, and certainly not to celebrity chefs. I don’t think the name Paula Deen would have meant anything to me a week ago. Most likely I’d have heard the name, but if you’d given me a multiple choice test, I probably would have gotten it wrong.

I know who she is now. Read more

And it seems that today things worked how they’re supposed to

Dave Farquhar Copyright , , , ,

Today, the Web protested SOPA and PIPA in various ways. And though momentum seemed to start shifting as long as a week ago, the protest went on, and some Washington politicians started changing sides, suggesting that maybe, just maybe, sometimes representative government can’t be bought.

I even saw a quote somewhere–I wish I’d written down where–that attributed one side-changer as saying it’s more important to get this legislation done right than to get it done fast. Read more

I may have a cure for the slow web browser

Dave Farquhar Software , ,

John C Dvorak lamented last week about slow web browsers.

I’m working on a cure.

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The difference between piracy and linking

Dave Farquhar Copyright , ,

Rupert Murdoch doesn’t understand the difference between piracy and linking. So I’ll explain it in terms any middle-school-aged kid should be able to understand.

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Don’t reuse your Zappos.com password

Dave Farquhar security ,

Online shoestore Zappos.com got hacked. Among other things, the hackers got names, addresses, e-mail addresses, and encrypted passwords. That’s not as bad as getting unencrypted passwords, but there are some things you need to do immediately if you shop at Zappos.com.

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The upside of the brave new Windows Server GUI-less world

Dave Farquhar security, Windows , , , , , ,

So the server version of Windows 8 is losing the GUI.  And some people aren’t happy about it.

Let’s talk about upside.
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An excellent story about collectors of old signs

Dave Farquhar St. Louis , , ,

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch profiled three local sign collectors this weekend. Bill Christman, Greg Rhomberg, and Jim May go around buying old storefront signage, particularly enamel-painted metal signs with neon lights.

“Most businesses are branded franchises, so you see the same signs over and over, repeating every few miles,” said Tod Swormstedt, who operates a sign museum in Cincinnati. “But the old signs — the hand-carved shoe or the gold-leaf lettering on a window — were iconic and what made each neighborhood unique. People miss that.”

So I guess I’m not the only one who misses that, but it sure seems like we’re a minority.

UEFI on ARM illustrates why we still have to watch Microsoft

Dave Farquhar security, Software , , , , , ,

UEFI is a technology that forces a computer to only load a digitally signed operating system. This has some security benefits, as it makes parts of the operating system unbootable if they become infected, since the viruses won’t be digitally signed by a reputable vendor.

Great idea, right? From a security perspective, absolutely. The more attack vectors for viruses we can eliminate, the better off we’ll be. But Microsoft’s policy on ARM systems shows how it can be abused.

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