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CyberArtisans Web Developers Newsletter |  |
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Welcome to the July 2008 issue of the CyberArtisans newsletter! Each month we try to present information that will be useful to you as a website owner and as a user of the web. If these newsletters are useful, please forward this to a friend. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.
Xobni?? How do people think up these names? Well, actually, Xobni is Inbox spelled backwards, so looked at that way it's a little surprising it took this long for someone to use it for an email-related product. What is it? Xobni is an add-on to MS Outlook that Microsoft should have created years ago. It indexes all your email and then provides near-instant information about the sender and your email relationship with them. When you click on an email in your Inbox, Xobni brings up the following information about the person who sent you that email:
Walt Mossberg, Personal Technology Columnist for the Wall Street Journal, reviewed this product July 31st and was quite enthusiastic about it. He points out that email was the first social network on the Internet and still has the potential to provide a tremendous amount of information, if only that information is well-organized and retrievable. Xobni is the best mechanism (so far) for organizing and retrieving all that email information. We have downloaded and installed Xobni, and for the most part we agree with Mossberg. Before you download it, however, there are some downsides and risks you should consider:
The issue of firewalls is heating up again amongst the security gurus. The reviews have finally begun to take into account the user, and some reviewers have noted that the firewalls that scored best in lab tests often required so much input from the user (input that most users were simply unable to provide because they weren't techies) that these high-scoring firewalls effectively provided less protection than some of the simpler, but lower-rated, firewalls. One point that most reviewers agreed on was that the Windows firewall and a router firewall were inadequate, in that both only protect you from external attacks and don't detect programs that somehow get installed in your system (through an email attachment, a website, or recently installed software) and are trying to phone home with information about your bank passwords. One firewall that the gurus say is a good compromise between good protection and ease of use is the Sunbelt Firewall. It's not free but it's also not expensive (about $20/year to install and get a year's updates). It is, however, only a firewall, which means that unlike the Internet Suites that others like ZoneAlarm and Norton put out, you have to purchase virus and spyware protection separately. Note that we haven't tried the Sunbelt Firewall ourselves yet, but Sunbelt is a company that has been around a while and has a reputation for putting out quality products and supporting them well. Want to know how well your system is protected from external threats? If you are willing to step a short way into the world of the geek, you can test your system at Steve Gibson's ShieldsUP! site. Steve Gibson is a well-known computer security expert, so well-respected that he finds the FBI on his doorstep regularly when their computer security experts reach the limits of their knowledge. Click on the Proceed button on his site, then scroll down to the ShieldsUp Services section. We recommend you select the File Sharing and Common Ports services. The other services are more complex and aimed at serious geeks. If either of these two tests show problems, we recommend you find a computer consultant who can help you install the proper protection. If you are in the Boston area, we have found that C2 Solutions responds quickly and gets good reviews from everybody we refer them to.
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