Dibbler's Net

Here in the US monitoring your credit report is an important thing to do. Sometime last year I canceled whatever bad service I was using ans was planning on finding a new one.

So recently I thought about looking for a new credit monitoring service. After about 2 minutes of searching I stopped. Why ? Because then I thought about it and decided why pay for something that I will most likely get for free. Well yesterday I won the security lottery and got a letter about my free 12 months of credit monitoring. As the letter stated, an employee of a company I use, was caught selling personal data of customers. So while they promise that everyone is safe, and they can’t see how this would be bad, they are doing the PC thing and providing free service for all customers for 12 months.

In today’s world I have given up on commercial company’s that care about profit ever being able properly secure data. It’s just not their main priority so it never gets done right. Based on this I would guess that most people will win this lottery over the next few years. Keep this in mind before spending money on monitoring services.

D~

It was only a matter of time but the next evolution in the desktop is here with DesktopTwo. Sponsored by Sun this new free service gives you a virtual desktop.

* Caveat. With all cloud services you need to balance the service vs the risk of having your data on someone else’s systems.

I signed up and logged in. Besides the requirement for Flash this service works really well. The display is clean and the apps are useful and full featured. I will spend some more time to see just how ready and willing I am to move to this type of thing but this would be a nice jump in technology from where remote desktop is today and remote computing for the office workforce. Once we are able to completely move back to a dumb terminal / server option we will not have completed our full circle back to mainframe based computing as things were when I started. I am very interested in how this completion of the computing technology cycle will open a new wave of client /server and client computing in the next circle of technology advancements.

I was also very pleases to see that the parent company Sapotek have not only made this open for development of new apps but they have made the whole system open which means you can run this as your internal desktop system using any assortment of web client machines. With the requirement to be on Windows, or Mac, or Linux no longer there and only a base requirement for bandwidth and a browser we will see less dependecny on the big OS makers and more control by the corporate IT departments. Most people would say that this is bad but in my mind it isn’t. Back with dumb terminals and mainframe’s security truly was easier. When you are dealing with the app security and not every desktop it does help to simplify and reduce the burden of work. The old adage used to be that any system could pass C2 requirements, all you needed to do was remove the network card, video card, keyboard, and lock it in a room. Once that was done you had one of the most secure OS’s around. It may seem like a joke but the reality is there. The less doors and windows on a house the easier it is to secure those few entry points. The less software or desktop machines the easier it will be to not have your data breach end up on the front page of the local news. Please do not take this to say that Cloud Desktops are the answer to security. I don’t mean that at all. I just see that the cycle coming back around to dumb terminal and mainframe (server) systems has some ability to simplify one aspect of a security model.

So go to their website, sign up and give it a try.

D~

For the past few months I have started running a dedicated opensolaris desktop system on my desk at home. It has two monitors, one screen displays nagios network status while the other one does generic web browsing and some twit live watching. I had run into an issue with 2008.05 that it did not want to nicely upgrade to svn_95 due to some mbr boot changes. Now granted this is a development so I don’t expect anything to be perfect, however I am finding myself surprised by more features each day. I am used to the fact that Solaris is a great Server OS first and a desktop second (for most users) but this is starting to change for me. This evening I decided to move to svn_95 as part of the pre 2008_11 version. Wanting to avoid my mbr boot issue (which is documented I just didn’t read the readme first) I went and got the ISO for 2008_11 svn_95 and downloaded it to the solaris system. Upon download I put a blank DVD+R into the drive. First Opensolaris saw the blank disk and auto launched a burning utility, this is new and I must say a nice touch. This shows Sun’s move to more of a end user friendly desktop. Next I went to the ISO file and right clicked on it. From there it gave me a burn to disk option which I used. From there a small utility popped up and with one click the dvd was being burned. This was actually an easier process than burning an ISO on windows. Congratulations to the Opensolaris team for a job well done and an OS that is quickly becoming a viable end user option.

D~