By Erik Small -

Have you used any of Google’s popular apps? How about the personalized iGoogle or Google Docs or Google Talk? All are great services, but will they open up unwanted security risks for many organizations?

Have a read through this latest security risk article from NextGov, a technology and business for government website.

“Google’s large following, which includes federal contractors, will find it quick, easy and inexpensive to transfer company documents — and potentially unencrypted government files, said former Gartner research director L. Frank Kenney.”

By Erik Small -

Join Ipswitch in helping Haiti with an online contribution! Ipswitch File Transfer  just activated an online contribution area on their website.

http://www.ipswitchft.com/

Or contributions can be made directly here at the Ipswitch Online Donation Center:
https://cart.ipswitchft.com/477/?scope=checkout&cart=60216&k_id=haiti

 100% of donations will go directly to CARE, on the world’s largest international humanitarian organizations.

No purchase of an Ipswitch product is necessary to donate. Ipswitch will even pay all credit card processing fees, so you can be sure that your entire donation will go to those affected by this catastrophe.

By boo -

I just figured I’d share with the group some recent data and security breach news stories from the last few days…does it ever end?

• Snooping through the Power Socket (BBC)
• Elance hit by Security Breach (TechCrunch)
• Someone Call Security (Twitter)
• Questions on Cloud Security (Network World)

By pete -

It’s happened! Google has announced that it is officially working on an Operating System! It is only natural really – this writer has seen the signs for a while and has been talking it up for some time. When you look at how Google talks about many of its services as “web applications” – and then has actual applications such as Chrome and Google Talk, etc, it makes alot of sense. And then when you consider Android - a mobile OS – even more writing appears on the proverbial wall.

Google Chrome Operating System

Google Chrome has always been a little more than a browser: it’s optimized for running web applications, each tab runs as a separate process, the interface is minimalistic and there’s even a task manager. “We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build,” said Google in September 2008.

Google’s blog announces a natural extension of the Chrome project: an operating system for netbooks. “Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. (…) Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.”

As people use more and more web applications, the operating system becomes less important and it makes no sense to pay for it. The desktop mail client could be replaced by Gmail, the calendaring application could be replaced by Google Calendar, the office suite has lightweight alternatives: Google Docs and Zoho, it makes more sense to use an online feed reader like Google Reader, your scientific calculator is less powerful than Wolfram Alpha and you’ll rarely need a video player when you have YouTube, Hulu and other video sites.

This idea is not new and there are already operating systems optimized for the browser. For example, Good OS announced last year Cloud, an operating system that “integrates a web browser with a compressed Linux operating system kernel for immediate access to Internet, integration of browser and rich client applications, and full control of the computer from inside the browser”. If Google manages to create a great user interface, the new operating system could be very successful.

{ Image from Google Chrome’s comic book, licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs. }

via Google Chrome Operating System.

By admin -

The new FileTransferPlanet.com has been live for just about 2 months – woot! Now that you’ve had some time to browse and partake in some discussions, please take the poll below let us know how you feel about the site! If you have any concerns or comments, please email us or start a thread in the forums.

By admin -

Big words! Maybe even Blasphemy – no one talks about Apple like this – or do they..

ASUS might have launched the netbook era with the original Eee PC and followed up on that with wave after wave of successfully more innovative designs like the Seashell, but that’s not enough for vice chairman Jonathan Tsang, who says the company’s goal is “to provide products that are better than Apple’s.” No pulling punches here! According to Tsang, ASUS spends very little on marketing, instead preferring to spend the majority of its budget in engineering products so innovative consumers are forced to take notice…

via Engadget: ASUS: “Our goal is to provide products that better than Apple’s”.

By Erik Small -

Microsoft announced the Beta release of Bing, a new search service launching in Europe. We often see new products and services trying to slice off some of Google’s search market share. Coming from Microsoft, Bing is at least worth following as it rolls out. The Bing Press Release indicates full rollout won’t happen until June 3.

The mission of Bing is straight-forward:
“Microsoft has designed Bing to help people quickly find the information they need on daily routine searches and in order to accomplish tasks, including making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.”

Sounds interesting, eh? We shall see.

By pete -

LifeHacker gives a nice rundown of the new Google Search Options:

Google’s honchos unveiled the new “Search Options” at a Searchology event, one that coincides with the two year anniversary of the Universal Search unveiling that put brief looks at images, news, and other Google-powered search results on the main page. The new Search Options, along with richer “snippets” underneath results that can show reviews and specially-formatted information, should start showing up for most users immediately, but further down the line are more interesting experiments.

Handy Youtube vid from Google, explaining the new features:

Along with these new options comes talk of Google Squared – which will appear in Google Labs this month. Google’s VP of Search Products notes:

Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn’t find webpages about your topic – instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet. We’ll be opening it up to users later this month on Google Labs.

Google Squared sure sounds like a another blow to the coming release of WolframAlpha. Google’s first strike on that was their Public Data in Search Results.

More Search Options and other updates from our Searchology event [Official Google Blog]

By Erik Small -

Yahoo has decided to wind down Geocities. This part of the Yahoo business was big back in the early days — it’s definitely an end of an era. Tech Crunch has a quick write-up on how Yahoo is pulling the plug.

Here’s in excerpt:

“GeoCities’ traffic has been falling over the past year. According to ComScore, GeoCities unique visitors in the U.S. fell 24 percent in March to 11.5 million unique visitors from 15.1 million in March of 2008. Back in October, 2006, it had 18.9 million uniques.”

“There are plenty of other Website creation and hosting services out there, including blog platforms such as Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad, as well as Website creation and hosting services such as Ning, Webs, Jimdo, Snapages, Weebly, and countless more. GeoCities never really kept up with the times, but always remained a decent pageview generator.”

Full TechCrunch article

By Hugh Garber -

Not sure if you’re paying attention to the big RSA security conference held this week in San Francisco. I can tell you firsthand that the halls are buzzing with people looking to deploy more robust security solutions at organizations of all shapes and sizes. There’s lots of interest in trying to identify new encryption, Managed File Transfer, and identity solutions that will help enable the safe handling of company data and help businesses comply with various requirements.

All that being said, it will be interesting to see how today’s economic conditions will affect how organizations spend their scarce IT budget over the next year or so. Yes, everyone agrees that “security” is important. And yes, many companies are required to provide secure mechanism as part of corporate governance and compliance requirements. But the proof is in the pudding…. Will they spend the bucks to actually deliver improved secure solutions?

Here’s a real interesting article that talks about how technology vendors and the subset of security vendors are faring in today’s economy. The bad news is that global software spending is down 5% in 2009…. But security vendors are down much less. That’s a good indication that organizations are opting to focus and channel their scarce budget on providing secure and compliance solutions. That is encouraging news.