Technical Tips From A NYC IT Consultant

Got myself a Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 a while back, for work. I travel from office to office and I use it to remote into my main desktop at homebase. The netbook came preloaded with Windows 7 Starter, which is fine for what I needed to do. I’m not a Linux expert. Far from it. But I recently ran the Windows Update, downloaded and installed Service Pack 1, and basically blew up my netbook. Hey, s#!t happens. Sooo, after I reloaded Windows 7, I decided to also install the Ubuntu Netbook. So I figured I write about my experiences with it here.

By now, you may have heard of the security breach at mass email marketing company Epsilon, where the names and email addresses of thousands, if not millions, of people have been stolen. The current list of companies include:

• 1-800-Flowers
• AbeBooks
• Ameriprise Financial
• Barclays Bank
• Best Buy
• Brookstone
• Citibank
• Disney Destinations
• Hilton Worldwide
• JP Morgan Chase
• Kroger
• Lacoste
• Marriott International
• McKinsey Quarterly
• New York & Company
• Robert Half
• Target
• Tivo
• US Bank
• Verizon
• Walgreens

The warning emails are starting to role in. This one from Target:

When will it become Standard Operating Procedure, and an industry standard, if you are storing customer info, to store it in an encrypted database! It can’t be that difficult!! The money you are spending on the resulting PR, could probably have been used to secure the database.

I blame, not only Epsilon, but also the companies that dealt with Epsilon for not making it a requirement that the customer info be encrypted.

Problem: User has a Blackberry. Is part of the company’s BES. Syncing wirelessly is the company’s default setting when deploying Blackberries. This particular user did not have the option. When I checked her Wireless Sync settings under the Contacts–> Options — >Desktop, it said “Not Available”.

I tried the following steps:

1. From your Blackberry, go to Options>Advanced Options>Enterprise Activation.

2. In the email field, press and hold the ALT key and type CNFG. Once you enter this a hidden menu should appear.

3. Change the “Wireless Sync” option to No and Save, then exit the menu.

4. Wait 30 seconds and repeat step 2.

5. Change the “Wireless Sync” option to Yes and Save, then exit the menu.

After trying the above steps, the option was available. I set the Wireless Sync to “Yes” however after a while the Enterprise Activation kicked in. After activating to 100% I checked the Wireless Sync option again and it was back to “Not Available”.

Solution: Had to check with the BES server folks. The user’s profile on the BES server did not have the Wireless Sync option enabled (guess they missed that option for her). Thus, every time I forced it, using the steps above, it was reset to “Not Available” after the Enterprise Activation sent down her Address Book Options from the server. After they enabled the option on the server, I waited about 10 minutes, and then noticed the Enterprise Activation process started again. After it completed, the Wireless Sync option was set to “Yes”

Get used to it. Moving things to the “Cloud” is becoming more popular. So will the data breaches…

Company data belonging to customers of Microsoft’s hosted business suite BPOS has been accessed and downloaded by other users of the software.

Read more…Microsoft BPOS cloud service hit with data breach – Computerworld.

We know that Gawker Media had it’s databases hacked, releasing millions of usernames and passwords.

Now spammers/hackers are taking advantage of that story to send out spam emails like this:

Beware…