bruceb news

If you’ve ever wondered what motivates the creators of malware, you should read a fascinating article by Benjamin Wallace over at Wired.com, “How Two Scammers Built An Empire Hawking Sketchy Software.” It’s the story of a couple of run-of-the-mill scam artists who leveraged scareware into an underworld empire bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Scareware is a good term for the windows you may have seen popping up from poisoned web sites, claiming that your computer has been hijacked and pretending to do a scan that identifies awful things that need to be cleaned – then offering to take care of the problem if you will just click the big OK button and enter a credit card number. […] continued

Previously:
Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, Part 1: Overview
Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, Part 2: Remote Access

Small Business Server 2011 Essentials has one overlooked feature that fills an important need in most small businesses. Every night, SBS 2011 Essentials backs up all of the workstations in their entirety.

Microsoft originally developed this backup technology for Windows Home Server. Microsoft did some of its best technical magic on the backup system to use the least possible space on the server hard drives and to make the backups quick (although they’re done in the middle of the night, so speed isn’t really an issue). […] continued

Previously:
Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, Part 1: Overview

Microsoft has done more than anyone else to promote remote access to small business networks. Almost ten years ago, Small Business Server 2003 opened up Outlook Web Access and safe remote desktop access to small businesses for the first time. SBS 2008 and the various iterations of Windows Home Server refined that first portal to make it easier and cleaner and more likely to work properly.

SBS 2011 Essentials brings something new to the table: remote access to files. Hold that thought and let’s look at some of the other features first. […] continued

Small businesses are finally in a position to set up Microsoft Small Business Server 2011 Essentials, the perfect server for many small businesses with fewer than 25 users. Today’s technology world does not offer any one-size-fits-all solutions but SBS 2011 Essentials should at least be closely evaluated by almost anyone with 2-25 users looking either for a first server or a replacement for a dusty server in the closet.

The idea is to blend an onsite server and cloud services. In broad overview:

• The server runs the network onsite, authenticating people as they log in and passing out files;
• Email is handled separately, ideally by Microsoft’s hosted Office 365 service.

[…] continued

Here are representative screen shots of what tablets present and future look like side by side.

Apple iPad 2

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

(standing in for all the Android tablets)

Amazon Kindle Fire

Microsoft Windows 8

(a preview look at Microsoft’s tablet interface)

Mary-Jo Foley makes an important point:

Obviously, buying choices aren’t entirely based on just one factor. It’s not just the user interface that is the ultimate differentiator. Price, apps, usage plans, device weight, battery life, overall look and feel and many more factors matter, too. And we don’t know enough about Windows 8 — beyond the user interface and legacy app support plans — to truly evaluate it against the existing and coming competition.

[…] continued

With its announcement of the Kindle Fire tablet on Wednesday, Amazon did something worthy of Apple: it invented a niche that it is likely to control, not directly competitive with anything currently on the market.

You will see endless discussion about how the Kindle Fire compares to the iPad, or whether the Kindle Fire is an “iPad killer.” Don’t worry about that. It misses the point.

First, make sure you have the details in mind. Here’s one of the 7 billion articles today about the Kindle Fire and Amazon’s other announcements. If you want more background, Bloomberg’s article recaps Amazon’s history and describes how the new Kindles fit into Amazon’s business plan. […] continued

If all goes well, Mad Mimi is going to take over the mailing list for subscribers to Bruceb News. Here’s the story that led me to the odd logo on the left.

If you send an email message to more than 25 people, most of them won’t receive it. The message will be filtered as spam and tossed into a junk mail folder.

Vertical Response and Constant Contact have made a nice business out of handling mailing lists for businesses that send out email blasts regularly. When I’ve used them in the past, they had all the hallmarks of tools for big companies – lots and lots of options, infinite flexibility, complicated controls for layout and design, sophisticated analytics for judging the success of email campaigns, and much more. […] continued

The request was deceptively simple:

Six very small offices want to share a single Internet connection. Each office wants to have a secure network for its own computers, not shared with the other offices. The offices want to share a single big Toshiba eStudio printer/scanner.

That shouldn’t be so hard, right?

It is remarkable how quickly networking becomes complicated. I don’t have any special instructions today, just a couple of anecdotes to help you understand why you might need help with your home or small office network.

Most people have simple needs: a single Internet connection for a single office; a router to let all the computers share the connection and connect to each other. […] continued

Facebook has a vision that every single thing you do will be channeled back into a record of your life held by Facebook and shared in real-time with your friends – every web site you visit, every photo you take, every movie you see and song you play and place you go, every interaction with your friends, streamed and viewed and recorded. It’s audacious. It seems science fictional and shocking if you’re over 35. Facebook users will have a record of their life that will be as natural to them as the dusty photo albums of older generations. If Facebook is successful, it will insinuate itself into every corner of the web, transforming the entire online world into something that is inseparable from Facebook. […] continued

Are you a Facebook user? You probably noticed the significant makeover to your Facebook page on Wednesday. Your news feed is now formatted a bit like a newspaper or online magazine, with “top stories,” a “ticker” feature on the right, “smart lists” on the left, and what appears to be some new methods of filtering the feed to show you a small portion of the flood being posted by your six hundred friends. That’s not all – there are more tweaks already in place.

Those are the minor changes.

The big changes will be announced at a Facebook developer conference on Thursday – likely to include various hooks into music services, possibly some kind of connection with Hulu, and perhaps new “Read,” “Listened,” “Watched” and “Want” buttons to sprinkle around on other sites and tie back to Facebook. […] continued