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Craig Murphy has written an excellent synopsis of the Scottish Developers Day Conference in Perth on Friday past. It can be found HERE.
Scottish Developers’ events are superb. They are a must attend for developers.
A number of interested software developers get together every Wednesday night in Edinburgh. We meet to immerse ourselves in the Agile software development methodology known as eXtreme Programming (XP), using Java, JUnit and Eclipse or IntelliJ. The group has only been going a few months but thanks to some of the more experienced members we are all quickly getting up to speed on this exciting methodology.
Until this point we have been doing some meaningless examples to get a feel for the practices and activities which make-up XP. Last week saw Adbel, the leader of the group, making a request to move onto doing a real world project. A number of suggestions were put forward as ideas worthy of our attention and creative skills. One of the ideas put forward by John Thomson of RSL was an application for the facilitation of Mind Mapping, a technique devised by Tony Buzan in the 60’s to take advantage of the human brain’s creative thought processes.
After some debate, the concensus opinion found in favour of this proposal. However, a little bit of research subsequently revealed that it was already being done by another group on SourceForge. The project entitled FreeMind is also using Java as their development language of choice. Does this now mean this idea is shelved and we try to think of something else? Certainly not! Having FreeMind available as a reference will be great if we run into issues or don’t understand a part of the mind mapping process. The creation of the software is secondary to us becoming expert practitioners in eXtreme Programming.
This is going to be very interesting indeed over the coming months.
Feel free to contact John by email if you are interested in becoming part of this project or to join the group.
RSL do not accept any liability for your use of these links. Follow them at your own risk.
Following on from our earlier article “Who’s Spying on You?”, the following Microsoft article may be of some use:
Alan Francis has posted an interesting link to an article entitled Hiding Behind Certification.
Just like most things in life, certification has a time and a place. It should be only one of the metrics used when assessing a company or individuals ability to perform in the real world. There are many other qualities which should be considered in the decision making process: including past performance on similar tasks; ability to work in teams; honesty with the rest of the team and the customer; appropriateness of the certification to the task at hand and a wide range of interpersonal skills that should be brought to the party.
One of my associates has been running a little experiment on Google. He has made a post on his blog to fool Google’s search bots into placing him at the top of various results.
For example, a search for “scrummaster+hire” puts Craig at no 1! But Craig is in full time employment, which would make it very difficult for him to be a consultant CSM for hire! Search engines and their bots are easily fooled, but does this make them dumb?
A search on “scrummaster+fife” has my personal blog as number 1 of 2.
Now let’s conduct a little Google experiment, ala Craig’s style:
John Thomson consultant of Roundtrip Solutions Limited Fife Scotland for Agile software development including test driven design and development (TDD) certified ScrumMaster .net CSM award winning postgraduate of the University of Abertay undergraduate of the University of Strathclyde formerly Motorola Sun Microsystems Micronas providing and available for consultancy for hire and weddings (my little joke).
Some of my search engine optimisation colleagues will surely inform me of many other ways to improve the ranking, but this is a little experiment and the results will speak volumes. I’ll check back with Google later on and report the results.
I expect to be number 1 or 2 within the next day or so!
Continuing on with the theme of free and low cost tools, we will now look at a few options for detecting and removing Spyware, which is used by companies to track all kind of privacy and usage issues when browsing the Internet. The following article goes into this in more details: “Who’s Seeding the Net With Spyware?”.
Unfortunately, a minority of companies use Spyware for less than ethical practices, resulting in it being considered a serious enough security and privacy risk for governments to be looking at the introduction of legislation. See “What’s the Best Way to Stop Spyware?” to read more about this.
Spybot Search and Destroy can search for spyware and has an immunisation option to provide realtime protect of your system. Best of all it is free for all uses.
Adaware is a free for non-commercial use Spyware scanning tool. Many consider this to be the industry leader but it lacks the realtime protection in the basic version. This only appears in the Plus and Professional versions which surprise, surprise costs money!
a² Free is available to scan for Spyware, dialers and other malware. The personal edition is a low cost solutions that gives realtime protection to stop the malicious code getting onto the system in the first place.
RSL do not accept any liability for the use of these applications or the links provided. Use at your own risk.
A common practice when distributing files is to place them into an compressed archive such as a ZIP file. Rather than spending money on some of the commercial offerings, why not think about some FREEWARE offerings:
RSL do not accept any liability for the use of these applications or the links provided. Use at your own risk.
There are a number of tools available to help in the fight against spam, many of which are free or low cost. They all have strengths and weaknesses and there usage should be related to the nature of your email systems and knowledge of your users. Over the coming weeks and months we will go into each of these applications in more details.
In the meantime, why not check them out for yourself:
NOTE:
RSL do not accept liability for the usage of any links or applications. As always use at your own risk.
Java Cool Software has excellent tools available to help improve your online privacy and security.
As always use at your own risk. RSL accepts no liability for the use of the above link or anything found there at.
Ten Must-Have Tools Every Developer Should Download Now is an interesting article for .net developers from MSDN.
In our last post it was suggested to change the WEP encryption key on a frequent basis. This can be made all the easier by Wireless Key Generator, which is a useful small application to generate keys, either totally at random or based on some random dictionary words. Find it HERE.
RSL accept no liability or blame for the use of Wireless Key Generator. As always, use at your own risk!
Sharing your wireless connection with all and sundry, whether intensionally or by accident, is bad, bad news. Would you leave your front door open for anyone to come trapsing through your home? You may even be leaving your internet connection open for use by criminals, phaedophiles and other undesirables! Do you really want for the police to be bashing your door down when they track web access back to your computer network? The biggest one could be that sharing your internet connection may be against the service agreement with your ISP - you could be in breach of contract!
So why do it with your internet connection and local network by leaving the wireless open for all? Individuals using your wireless network could well be surfing with complete anonymity for them, but worse still making it appear as if the user performing the illegal activities is YOU!
There are even more reasons for securing the wireless connection, but hopefully the aforementioned ones will be enough to make people sit up and take note. Now that you’ve been scared into thinking about securing your wireless connection, try:
Although the default encryption used by nearly all wireless kit is weak, the use of WEP (Wireless Encryption Protocol) is better than no encryption at all. Changing the WEP encryption key frequently can assist in keeping out hackers by making it difficult to return and gain immediate access to a compromised network: they have to go through the long process of cracking the WEP key once it has been changed. How often is frequently? It will depend on the risk and likelyhood of someone breaking into your wireless network, it will depend on how sensitive your data is and it will also depend upon your technical abilities. It could be once per week, once per month, etc. This is up to you!
Use of the 802.1x standard gets around some of the problems of WEP, but generally requires a RADIUS server to be available. There are many quirks associated with different RADIUS products so installation and configuration can be fun! Generally this makes it prohibitive for most home and many small business users.
Future posts will be looking at some of the tools and techniques used by hackers to gain access to your network!
Microsoft have an interesting resource in their three steps to better security.
The bottom line to better security is:
Looks dead simple when stated in these three easy steps. Just a shame that some individuals and companies are failing in at least one of the above.
Closing thought:
These are basically the starter for 10! How many of you can get extra points from answering the supplementary security questions?
The BBC are reporting that domain names registrations are now dooming in Sales boom fuels new net growth.
Seems like this is the time to grab your domain name before it is gone!
Kelly Martin of SecurityFocus, a leading online security resource, has highlighted how virus writer’s anonymity could be easily maintained by the explosion in wireless networks within an article written for The Register. See “The Wi-Fi explosion: a virus writer’s dream” for the full text.
Manufacturers of wireless equipment nearly always send their kit out into the field with the least privledges or minimum security enabled. RSL have on a number of occasions visited customers using WiFi technology straight out the box, with the unsuspecting users not even knowing that they were insecure! Even the most commonly adopted WiFi standards have poor security at best. Utilities and tools are freely available on the net to compromise these networks.
Many corporates have identified wireless technologies as a major security risk to their IT infrastructure. There have been occasions when well meaning employees have fitted insecure wireless kit to a corporate network without the assistance or knowledge of their IT team. Unfortunately the employees were exposing their company’s IT system to a new hacking risk.
