A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty”

Sir Winston Churchill

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For those with Intel-compatible machines, the OS will be available in two versions – Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro.

And for those with devices, largely tablets, powered by ARM-designed chips there will be a Windows RT version.

Microsoft wants to simplify how it markets Windows 8, which is expected to launch in autumn 2012.

The complex flavours of past Windows – from basic to home, premium to ultimate – have become something of a joke among tech experts.

Microsoft has called Windows 8 the most significant redesign of the Windows interface since its groundbreaking Windows 95 OS.

The ARM version of the OS is the newest edition and reflects Microsoft’s desire to unify the engine known for running desktop computers with that for tablets and smartphones. Windows RT will sit alongside Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems.

It announced the new flavours on its Windows blog.

Many of those reacting to the announcement were unimpressed by the name for its ARM version.

“You guys are doing a phenomenal job with Windows Phone, Windows 8, etc, which makes the naming of ‘Windows RT’ all the more maddening. You’re trying to simplify the rest of the ‘Windows Live’ properties, which I applaud, but then you go with Windows RT? Does. not. compute,” said Michael Jenke, summing up the views of many responses to the blog.

No ‘start’

In an earlier 8,600-plus word blog post Windows president Steven Sinofsky detailed the “energising and daunting” challenges in developing Windows on ARM.

A preview version of Windows 8 launched late last year and more than 100,000 changes had been made since the developer version went public.

For the first time since its inception, the trademark Windows “Start” button will no longer appear – instead being replaced by a sliding panel-based menu.

In a footnote in its blog, Microsoft said that there would be an adapted version of Windows 8 Pro for businesses.

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Privacy solutions provider Truste suggests that means a user typically encounters up to 140 cookies and other trackers while browsing a single site.

The research was published less than 40 days before strict rules come into effect governing cookie use.

The study was carried out in March and covered the UK’s 50 most visited organisations.

The firm said that 68% of the trackers analysed belonged to third-parties, usually advertisers, rather than the site’s owner.

“The high level of third-party tracking that is taking place is certainly an area of question and scrutiny,” Dave Deasy, Truste’s vice president of marketing, told the BBC.

“It’s not illegal to do the tracking – the question is whether you are giving consumers enough awareness that it is happening and what you are doing with the data.”

Deadline

On 26 May the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) imposes an EU directive designed to protect internet users’ privacy.

The law says that sites must provide “clear and comprehensive” information about the use of cookies – small files which allow a site to recognise a visitor’s device.

It says website managers must:

• Tell people that the cookies are there
• Explain what the cookies are doing
• Obtain visitors’ consent to store a cookie on their device

“The information needs to be upfront – without information people can’t give consent,” the ICO’s principal policy adviser for technology, Simon Rice, told the BBC.

The ICO says the vast majority of visitors to its site refuse to allow themselves to be tracked
The ICO says the rules cover cookies used to provide information to advertisers, count the number of unique visitors to a page and recognise when a user has returned to a site to adjust the content that is subsequently displayed.

However, it says exceptions are likely to be made if the cookie is only being used to ensure a page loads quickly by distributing the workload over several servers, or is employed to track a user as they add goods to a shopping basket.

Many sites have yet to add a feature asking for users’ consent.

95% of 55 major UK-based organisations surveyed on behalf of KPMG were still not compliant with the cookie law at the end of last month, the accountancy firm reported.

Truste acknowledges that the vast majority of those who took part in its study had published a privacy policy – but adds that only 16% had a summary section that was “easily digestible”, and 80% did not disclose how long data about visitors was retained.

Half-baked idea?

The move has proved controversial.

A survey published last month by the digital marketing firm, Econsultancy, found that 82% of 700 marketers contacted did not believe the cookie law was a positive development.

One respondent said: “Plain and simple – this will kill online sales.”

The claim reflects a belief that when presented with a choice, most users would refuse to allow cookies to track them – making it impossible, for instance, for a retailer to target adverts for a computer at a user who had previously looked at an article about upgrading IT equipment.

The ICO’s own research suggests this could be an issue. Since asking users to click a box if they agree to accept cookies from its site, the organisation says just 10% of visitors have complied.

However, BT’s experience points to a possible solution.
BT offers first-time visitors the chance to opt out of its default cookie settings
Since March a pop-up message on its home page has told first-time visitors that unless they take up an offer to change its settings, then they have consented to its “allow all cookies” default rule.

“So far, we can see that customers are generally choosing to keep the cookies that we use to provide the best experience on our webpages,” a spokeswoman told the BBC.

Early adopter

The ICO says it has not been prescriptive about the wording that firms use.

However, organisations need to be careful about relying too heavily on opt-out schemes.

“At present evidence demonstrates that general awareness of the functions and uses of cookies is simply not high enough for websites to look to rely entirely in the first instance on implied consent,” the regulator warns.

It adds that those who fail to implement its rules properly could be fined up to £500,000.

Truste says companies across the EU and beyond will closely watch how the regulator enforces the directive.

“A lot of this starts with making sure companies understand what level of third-party tracking is actually happening on their sites – in many cases they don’t,” said Mr Deasy.

“The UK is somewhat taking a leadership role in terms of actually following through and having a hard date for when compliance needs to start taking place.”

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The malware installs itself if a user visits a malicious website, exposing the computer to control by hackers.

The update’s release comes two days after Apple said it was tackling the issue, and a week after an anti-virus firm warned 600,000 Macs were infected.

Another security firm, Kaspersky, has recalled its own Trojan-removal tool after it affected some user settings.

The company said its tool was removing settings on the computers it was being installed on, and promised to offer a replacement shortly.

‘Slow reaction’

Apple, on the other hand, states on its website’s support section that its new removal tool gets rid of “the most common variants” of the malware.

The tool is integrated into the latest security update to Java on Apple computers running Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7 (“Snow Leopard” and “Lion”).

Users of infected machines running earlier versions of the operating system are told to disable Java in their web browser preferences to deal with the problem.

Earlier, Apple also said it was working with ISPs to shut down networks of servers hosted by the malware authors, which the code relies on “to perform many of its critical functions”.

However, Apple has been criticised for the time it took to react to the Trojan infection.

Stealing data

MacOS is increasingly attractive and increasingly exploited by criminals” Rik Ferguson Trend Micro

It is suspected that Flashback was designed to steal passwords and other personal data from users through their web browser.

Russian anti-virus firm Dr Web estimated on 6 April that some 600,000 Macs around the world had contracted the malware.

But security company Norton stated that the number of infected computers had since fallen to 270,000.

Several firms released their own Flashback removal tools ahead of Apple’s latest security update.

However, Kaspersky Lab issued a statement after discovering problems with its software.

“In some cases it is possible that the use of the tool could result in erroneous removal of certain user settings including auto-start configurations, user configurations in browsers, and file sharing data,” the firm’s spokesperson Greg Sabey said in an email to the press.

“The company will release an updated version of the utility with the bug corrected and will send a notification as soon as it’s available.”

Some analysts say Apple could have avoided the attack if it had tackled the problem sooner.

Java’s developer Oracle had issued a fix for other systems eight weeks before Apple’s first security update.

Rik Ferguson, director of security research and communication at Trend Micro, said: “Security updates issued by Apple are issued too slowly and not on any regular schedule.

“Apple’s sluggishness on security updates could perhaps have been defended in the past by the relative paucity of malware on that operating system. However, MacOS is increasingly attractive and increasingly exploited by criminals.”

Apple also appears to be trying to improve safety for its online store iTunes, possibly addressing the growing number of complaints about some accounts being hacked.

Users are being prompted to add back-up email addresses and answer security questions to protect their accounts and devices.

Apple has not commented on the move, which initially confused some of its users.

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For example, drinks giant Pepsi can apply for .pepsi, .gatorade or .tropicana as an alternative to existing suffixes such as .org or .com.

Parties are able to request up to 50 web address endings.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers plans to publish application details on 30 April.

Companies had to sign up to its process by March to qualify for the upcoming deadline. It says 839 users are taking part.

‘Smooth experience’

Canon and Google are among the companies to have said that they paid the $185,000 (£116,355) fees required to take part in the process.

Nominet, the organisation which manages .uk domains, confirmed it was also applying for .wales and .cymru.

Successful applicants also face $25,000 in costs per year to maintain the addresses.

“We plan to apply for Google’s trademarked gTLDs, and we’re currently exploring opportunities to apply for new ones as well,” the search giant told the BBC.

“We want to help make this a smooth experience for web users – one that promotes innovation and competition on the internet.”

Other organisations were less forthcoming – Facebook, the BBC and Coca-Cola would not comment on their plans.

“We do not disclose details of any proprietary marketing plans until they are public facing,” the drinks maker said.

This programme is the result of six years of careful study… It was neither hasty nor ill conceived”

Icann

Auctions

The process has the potential to cause problems among firms that share brand names. The US and German firms that both operate under the name Merck have already clashed over ownership of a Facebook page.

“We’re monitoring the Icann gTLD application process with interest,” Ron Rogers, a spokesman for the New Jersey-based company, told the BBC.

Anheuser-Busch InBev and Budejovicky Budvar may face similar conflict over their claims to own the Budweiser beer brand.

Icann suggested that in such cases the firms involved should try to negotiate a deal by themselves. If they fail, it said it would hold an auction for the suffix as a “last resort”.

“We don’t want to be judge and jury – we want the applicants to work it out on their own,” an Icann spokesman told the BBC.

Backlash

Efforts to launch the new naming system have been mired in controversy.

In November, 87 business associations and companies sent a petition to the US Department of Commerce complaining that the program entailed “excessive cost and harm to brand owners”.

Signatories included the tech giants Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Samsung.

The department subsequently snubbed Icann by cancelling a bidding process that was expected to extend the organisation’s right to run the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority – the contract which allows it to manage the domain name system.

Although Icann retains control for now, its mandate runs out in September.

However, the organisation rejects claims that its move to introduce new suffixes was badly thought out.

“This programme is the result of six years of careful study and deliberation which involved more than 2,400 public comments and dozens of public comment periods,” a spokesman told the BBC.

“It was neither hasty nor ill conceived.”

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Well at Cloud Tech Design we try to help you figure out how best to implement social networking without it getting too complicated.

What Social Networks Should I get involved with

Well not all social networks are going to be right for every company but the list below shows the most popular ones to join,

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. LinkedIn
4. Google +

The Rules

Use it – The first rule is that if you are going to go down this road then you need to make sure you are actually going to use all the different social engines you sign up to. Many companies want to say that they are on, Facebook and twitter but what’s the point if you’re not Tweeting to your audience.

Fresh Content – The internet is full of recycled words and ideas, be bold and create your own topics and articles, fresh content will always work better for you than just pasting what everyone else is saying.

Links – When writing your content make sure you have links within it pointing to your website. There is no point in people reading what you have to say, if you are not pointing then to your domain. Put relevant links within your content to drive traffic to your website.

If you have any questions or would like Cloud Tech Design to help you organise/mange/setup/explain then please contact us via our contact page above.

We would love to hear other people’s views on Social Networking so please feel free to comment below.

The company is working in collaboration with financial services to disable botnets powered by Zeus malware.

Microsoft described the action as its “most complex effort to disrupt botnets to date”.

However, security company Sophos Labs said it had not seen any “significant disruption” to the illegal network.

Senior attorney for Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit Richard Boscovich gave details of the operation in a blog post.

“Cybercriminals have built hundreds of botnets using variants of Zeus malware,” he wrote.

“For this action – codenamed Operation b71 – we focused on botnets using Zeus, SpyEye and Ice-IX variants of the Zeus family of malware, known to cause the most public harm and which experts believe are responsible for nearly half a billion dollars in damages.”

Sophos Labs hasn’t seen any evidence of significant disruption to Zeus’s activities” Graham Cluley

Freely available

He added that due to the “unique complexity” of the targets, the company’s goal was not to take down the botnet completely – but instead to implement “strategic disruption”.

However, security blogger Graham Cluley wrote that he was yet to see any sign of action being taken against the illegal networks.

“Sophos Labs hasn’t seen any evidence of significant disruption to Zeus’s activities through Microsoft’s action,” he wrote.

“Because Zeus and SpyEye are sold as kits any takedown against specific botnets will not affect all the other botnets which are still out there.

“Since the kits are still available (freely in source form in the case of Zeus) it is highly likely that we will continue to see botnets created using them.”

Zeus malware – and other variants of it – makes use of keylogging, a technique in which hidden software logs words and numbers typed into a person’s keyboard.

This can then be used to discover bank account details and other critical private information.

Crimeware kit

More worrying, Mr Boscovich wrote, was that the Zeus system is sold to criminals as a crimeware kit – typically selling for between $700 (£440) and $1,500 (£941) – allowing extra botnets to be created, increasing the threat.

He said that Microsoft estimates that more than 13 million computers have been infected with Zeus malware worldwide.

In court filings, Microsoft detailed 40 online aliases of people they suspect of being responsible for writing the malicious code.

Botnets like Zeus are created by the spread of malicious software, often via infected emails or web browser vulnerabilities.

Each “bot”, as they are known, is a hijacked computer which can be used by hackers for any number of illegal activities.

Users can protect themselves from such threats by regularly updating security software, and being wary of email attachments from senders they do not know or trust.

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The search giant argued it was not its job to monitor net content.

The cross-party committee said this argument was “totally unconvincing”.

The report by a committee of MPs and peers was commissioned by the government to look into privacy and free speech issues after a series of high profile super-injunctions were made public last year.

Celebrities including Ryan Giggs found that gagging orders against newspapers were routinely flouted online. In Mr Giggs’ case, the details of his super-injuction were mentioned at least 75,000 times on Twitter, the committee said.

Its report said that online firms needed to be brought in line with offline media in such cases.

“We recommend that, when granting an injunction, courts should be proactive in directing the claimant to serve notice on internet content platforms such as Twitter and Facebook,” it said.

Some of the harshest criticism was reserved for Google.

“Where an individual has obtained a clear court order that certain material infringes their privacy and so should not be published, we do not find it acceptable that he or she should have to return to court repeatedly in order to remove the same material from internet searches,” the report said.

‘Unconvincing’

Mr Mosley had testified that having successfully sued the News of the World over secret film it had taken, he had gone on to spend more than £500,000 on legal action to force others to remove the material from the internet.

He said that he had confronted Google saying: “Here are the pictures. We know which ones they are. Simply programme your search engine so they don’t appear.”

But Google had argued that while it could create algorithms to filter such results in future, it would not be desirable for it to proactively monitor the net.

The committee had greater sympathy with Mr Mosley.

“We find their [Google's] objections in principle to developing such technology totally unconvincing.

“Google and other search engines should take steps to ensure that their websites are not used as vehicles to breach the law and should actively develop and use such technology. We recommend that if legislation is necessary to require them to do so, it should be introduced,” the report concluded.

In response, Google told the BBC: “Google already removes specific pages deemed unlawful by the courts. We have a number of simple tools anyone can use to report such content, which we then remove from our index.

“Requiring search engines to screen the content of their web pages would be like asking phone companies to listen in on every call made across their networks for potentially suspicious activity.”

It has not been the best week for Google and its long-held promise not to censor content.

In Japan a court has ordered it to remove certain terms from its auto-complete search function after a man complained that his name was constantly being linked to criminal activity on Google.

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iCloud has been officially announced at this years WWDC, and looks to be very promising. For those who do not know what iCloud is, it’s a completely free service that will allow you to store your music, photos, apps, calendars, documents, and more. And wirelessly pushes them to all your devices — automatically. You no longer have to manage your content, as it will all be done for you.

It’s a nightmare moment. You are under pressure – to meet customer orders, finish a project, execute a deal – and nothing. Your computers, servers or network are down. If you are lucky, a few nail biting hours and a reboot or three later, you and your IT team have restored services.

But what if your IT infrastructure goes down and there’s nothing you can do because your computing power sits in the cloud, provided over the internet by another company? When a key part of Amazon’s EC2 cloud service collapsed, many of the firm’s customers were reduced to publishing apologies on their websites, and click “refresh” on Amazon’s service health dashboard.

Two of Sony’s online gaming services, meanwhile, were hacked, compromising confidential data of more than 100 million customers.
Continue reading the main story
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The twin worries of cloud computing, security and resilience, are back, just as the promise of huge cost savings persuaded many companies to make the jump. 2011, experts said, would be the year when companies would get their business ready for the cloud.

According to a new global study by IBM, more than 60% of organisations plan to embrace cloud computing over the next five years to boost their competitive advantage. Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce.com and one of the pioneers of cloud computing, speaks of a “fundamental shift, the move of computing resources into the cloud [that] gives small and large companies access to the same resources.”

Jay Heiser at technology consultancy Gartner lists the benefits: easily obtained and highly reliable services, delivered quickly, conveniently and at a relatively low cost.

Until something goes wrong, of course.

Time for a rethink?

“A cloud is not a cloud is not a cloud,” says John Engates, chief technology officer at cloud services provider Rackspace. Every kind of cloud service requires a different risk assessment.

There are cloud services for consumers holding masses of customer data. Sony had to take its service offline for four weeks. A nasty bump for the global consumer electronics giant, potentially lethal had it happened to a smaller business.

Then there are infrastructure and platform services for companies that provide cheap storage, raw computing power, or software as a service. When a software upgrade at Amazon’s data centre in North Virginia went wrong, many companies using the service disappeared from the face of the online world for a full four days.

“How long does it take to reboot a cloud,” asks Mr Heiser and argues that many companies focus too much on the operational process of integrating the cloud into their business, but do not pay enough “attention to architectural and build issues” of their cloud strategy.

So is it time for chief information officers and chief technology officers to rethink the cloud?

‘No computer is perfect’

Not so, cloud fans protest.

Amazon EC2 dashboard detail The moment things went wrong for Amazon

“Most companies have had major outages, that’s the nature of computing” argues Marc Benioff. The cloud just makes these problems more visible – and less frequent.

“Traditionally, companies were running both their own business and an IT business,” says Mr Benioff. Going into the cloud shifts the computing to the experts “who do this for a living”.

“No computer is perfect, but if you look at the history of cloud computing, it’s more secure and reliable than traditional on-premise computing,” insists Mr Benioff.

Rackspace’s John Engates believes that cloud outages can actually be beneficial. “(They) make us better, they force us to repair and bolster the service, they even help competitors to see the challenges that other folks faced,” he said.

Stuck with one provider?

Customers have to sharpen up, though.

Cloud computing may be cheap, but robust back-up solutions cost money. Cloud users will have to re-examine how many copies of their data they need, and where to keep them, says Mr Engates.

“If you build a robust infrastructure across geographies, you can sustain an outage,” he says and points to video-on-demand provider Netflix, one of the Amazon customers that dodged the outage without obvious problems.

Companies have to make a risk assessment: Do they need parallel infrastructures, multiple cloud service providers, even a hybrid cloud where the data is shared and synced between the cloud and the company’s own servers?

“People will want to bulk up their cloud strategy,” says Paul Maritz, chief executive of virtualisation software company VMware. “It’s unlikely that they will want to depend on a single [cloud] provider.”

While companies may be able to switch suppliers or spread the risk, consumers may find themselves stuck.

Once you have settled on a cloud-based service – whether it is Flickr, Playstation Network, Facebook, Gmail or Hotmail – it is tricky to switch, unless you are prepared to sacrifice your content and social network.

Security questions

“Yes, the cloud is a concentration of risk,” says Mr Engates, but people are attacking the customer, not the cloud. “It is easier to defend the cloud, because it has

Kurt DelBene, in charge of Microsoft’s Business division, says Amazon’s and Sony’s problems “haven’t dampened the enthusiasm of our customers for the cloud.” The advantages – both cost savings and the ease of integrating diverse systems, for example after mergers and acquisitions – are just too great, he says.

And anyway, says Mr Benioff, Sony’s massive data loss “is not a cloud computing issue, it’s a cybersecurity issue.”

Indeed, Verizon’s 2011 Data Breach Investigations Report found that cloud computing played no role in security breaches: “We are often asked whether ‘the Cloud’ factors into many of the breaches we investigate. The easy answer is ‘No – not really.’ It’s more about giving up control of our assets and data (and not controlling the associated risk) than any technology specific to the Cloud.”

Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at internet security firm F-Secure, warns both consumers and companies that when they “move into the cloud, you get lots of benefits, but at the same time you lose control of your data… you have to blindly trust the vendor.”

Consumers can help by playing it safe. When answering security questions “don’t use your mother’s real maiden name; don’t give out your real birthday; answer with a number, or a street name or deliberately misspell.”

Keeping online email accounts safe is key to cloud security, says Mr Hypponen, because it’s here that criminals will find all the registration emails for financial services, it’s here that they intercept requests for a password reset.

“Whether we like it or not, cloud is here to stay, because the benefits are clearly larger than the risks,” says Mr Hypponen. “During the first years of this major shift [to the cloud] we will see more problems, but we will also learn, and the systems will get more secure.”
Back to IT basics

When cloud services fail, the data is likely to get lost, and recovery is slow at best.

After Google’s cloud-based email service crashed, says Joe Heiser, “it took Google four days to restore [the data of] 0.02% of the users of a single service.”

“What is not in the least bit clear is the relative ability of any cloud service provider to restore your data into their services,” Mr Heiser warnings cloud customers.

“We do not believe that the cloud is ready for everything yet,” admits Rackspace’s John Engates, but believes that cloud services can be part of the solution.

Companies that had a mail server outage can take “days and weeks to recover data from back-up tapes,” he says. Putting the back-up into the cloud, with a different provider in a different locations, could speed up recovery.

It’s back to IT basics: One concept “that should never be lost in the cloud,” says Mr Heiser, “is the need for contingency planning.”

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