I’ve recently taken an interest in a site called Dark Reading. It’s a security news site that reports on just about everything security and privacy related.

Today I found a very good article that talks about a survey being released on how enterprises don’t know where their data is or even how to classify it. This has been one of my pet peeves for some time now. It’s a good read and will hopefully kick start some people’s brains and get a move on in this area. I never understood how an organization can enforce security when it doesn’t even know what it needs to protect.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

“Most enterprises still don’t know where their sensitive data resides, and less than half of those that do know are actually enforcing its protection, according to new research to be released next month by The 451 Group.”

Cheers!
~TheNerd

Have you ever wondered why tech support people are cranky? Well it’s your fault. If you only knew how many times people call and yell at us for things that we have no control over or have nothing to do with. Do you talk to your mother that way? Probably not. I bet you’ve even heard the saying “Do onto others as you would want them to do onto you”. That definitely applies when you call tech support.

Here is a list of some simple things you should keep in mind when talking to tech support on the phone (or email):

1. Be nice and don’t yell
2. Explain your problem not what you want us to do to fix it
3. We don’t care if you’ve had a bad day
4. It’s not our fault you left things to the last minute and then your computer broke
5. We are your peers so don’t talk down to us
6. We never let “gremlins” loose after hours to mess things up. We already have enough to do.
7. Remember that your problem is not necessarily the most important thing on our agenda
8. We are not a counseling service and we don’t care about your “non-tech” problems
9. We don’t always want to help you with your home computer
10. Just because you can do it at home doesn’t mean you can do it at work

So there’s a list of 10 things that you should always keep in mind when you call tech support. A little bit of respect goes a long way towards creating a healthy relationship with your techies and will get you faster service in the end. Being disrespectful does not make anyone want to help you and will, most often, result in slower response and repair times.

Cheers!
~TheNerd

Ok so in the last post I talked about a product called Free CompuSec and talked about how good it was. This weekend I decided to try out the whole disk encryption included with the latest version of TrueCrypt.

First off I would like to say that I am very impressed with TrueCrypt. It’s open source (which is a bonus for me) and is extremely easy to use. I’ve used a TrueCrypt in the past to create encrypted volumes and files but never for whole disk encryption.

The biggest plus over Free CompuSec is that TrueCrypt can encrypt your drive while you use it. Unlike Free CompuSec you don’t have to reboot and put your computer aside while you wait for it to finish. The only drawback is that it takes TrueCrypt a long time to do the whole drive. My notebook has an 80 GB drive and it took just about 10 hours to encrypt the whole thing. When I used Free CompuSec it only took about 2 hours to encrypt a 60GB drive.

I guess, once again, it depends on where your priorities are. If you need to use your computer then you might want to use TrueCrypt as you can still use your computer while it’s running but if you don’t mind being without a system for a few hours then you might want to try Free CompuSec. As far as the rest goes they both do just about the same thing. TrueCrypt doesn’t have the secure VOIP program but it’s a great utility if you just need encryption.