Posts by Fay Zee

Patchy Windows patching leaves users insecure

Not the whole software industry ...

Thomas Kristensen, chief security officer at Secunia, explained: "The core of this patching issue is that the software industry has, so far, failed to come up with a unified patching solution that can help home users on a large scale; that is, encompassing all software programs."

He says "the software industry" but specifically means products that run on Microsoft. This has long been a problem and a headache for users.

On open source systems, users have been able to get all updates in one action for years, with a choice of automatic and manual. That is to say, all feature and security updates for applications and packages within the particular Linux distribution. Meaning any program the user installed from the quite considerable repository offered by the distro. This could be paid commercial/enterprise offerings such as Red Hat, Ubuntu, SuSE and the like, or Debian and other community editions. Packaging staff and volunteers collect the updates and test and package them so they are available. This of course represents a lot of work. That's not to say an open source user cannot install software not in the repository, but the likelihood is that there would be far fewer of these programs than for a comparable Microsoft user.

I would expect such a service to have to be profitable, or affect ROI, before anyone would consider offering this in the Microsoft world. One might expect that Microsoft itself, from the profits it makes, would offer such, but there are issues involved that would prevent this happening. Let's see if/how far Secunia can succeed in their offering. There is an article at http://secunia.com/company/blog_news/news/84 which states that the service will be free, offering "security updates for a broad array of applications".

Plod punishes PC-reliant businesses

Why must the whole machine be taken away?

I have never been able to understand why the whole machine must be taken away.

Surely just the hard drive(s) would be sufficient.

I regularly access data from externally attached hard drives. Why cannot the forensic labs simply have machines with removable caddy slots?

For the "victim", loss of computer equipment can be devastating for individuals and companies alike. Especially if the raid is based merely on a malicious, anonymous phone call.

For the police force / tax paying public, the storage and transportation costs would be significantly cheaper.

IT departments VAT-whacked

@Kevin Bailey

"You use a lookup function for things like this. Therefore in an admin screen the user can set the change in advance using date ranges to define when the new rate(s) apply. Think lookup tables."

+1

That's the way we do things. We don't do anything involving VAT but we provide admin-editable lookup tables queried by functions for all sorts of things as much as we can. Makes the customer independent.