Computer games are not risk free. The AVAST Virus Lab has identified over 60 individual sites during the last 30 days that contained game or arcade in their URL address.
- Avast Security Software

Avast reports that they are seeing more and more reports of software infiltration and malware, coming from websites aimed at children. Specifically gaming sites such as cutearcade.com (who apparently refused to comment)

In the industry this has been noticed time and time again…

I really can’t say it often enough – Your children can kill your computers!

In my usual daily work I constantly battle with this stuff. Probably, on average, I get at least once a week I get a call from someone who starts with the immortal words “I let Johnny/Jenny play on the computer, now I cannot (delete as appropriate) get on the Internet/access my emails/access my files/do anything without adverts popping up/close this application; the list goes on…

The most often this happens is just after Christmas; less so after other major holiday periods too.

Sigh…

Have a read here: Hackers spread malware via children’s gaming websites
And here’s the Avast press release: Online game sites can be cute, pink, and infected

It’s a simple thing to correct though…

Don’t let your kids anywhere
near your business computers!

I hope that was obvious enough…

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Well, it’s been an ‘interesting’ year here at Rochester & Associates Ltd, hopefully yours was better than ours 

Here’s to 2012 being a great year for business and personal prosperity in all you undertake.

This year we’ll be providing the same exceptional levels of service you have come to expect, and undertaking to make the business side of things even better as we fully indulge in the internal business practices we have developed.

We are hopefully going to be bringing a few new products to the fore in the early part of the year as we’ve expanded our capabilities – more to come later… 

Lets all work together to help all our businesses grow throughout the next 12 months and enjoy the fruits of our labours!

Have a fabulous 2012, from all the team here Rochester & Associates Ltd 

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  Almost three-quarters of firms and public sector organisations across nine European countries may not fully recover their computer systems or data after an IT failure, a survey suggests.

A survey by IT group EMC asked 1750 bosses if they were “confident they could fully restore their networks” – 74% said “No”!

It also found that 54% had lost data or suffered downtime in the last 12 months. Personally I’m amazed that figure isn’t higher! I guess it depends on what they are classing as ‘Downtime’.

Having been in the business a long time I can tell you that the number of customers I have dealt with on a regular basis, that think about these kinds of things are very few. It is not something that clients worry about. Furthermore, it is a topic that some clients feel that you are using to try to scare them in to buying something!

On the flip side of that coin we have seen several instances where a lack of disaster recovery planning has caused the company irreparable harm, resulting in the closure of the business.

It is not an easy thing to get a solid plan and systems in place, but they may stop the loss of business critical systems data.

Heed the warning – business continuity and disaster recovery should be near the top of any IT project!

Of course you can call us free of charge, for an initial chat about this… 08456 340 599

News article here

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Here’s a radical thing – a company admitting that it got something wrong!

We recently simplified a clients email systems, by reducing the numbers of the accounts, and reducing the complexity of the configuration – technically sound, but we mishandled the clients expectations of how this would effect the business, and how the users would handle the change.

Hands up and ‘Mea Culpa’

In this case I misread the clients level of understanding of the systems that we had changed and didn’t convey what the client would need to do to facilitate the change once the technical bit was complete.

A simple error, but one which had consequences.

This led to the client not being too happy about the change that would ‘happen seamlessly’ – though the change did happen seamlessly, the management of the client responsibility didn’t. I simply hadn’t told them what they would need to do once the change happened.

Today I went to the client to make sure that what they expected, and what were doing, were on the same page – singing from the same hymn-book to coin a phrase.

As it turns out, this was exactly what the client wanted – us to hold up our hands, admit we’d dropped the proverbial ball. Once this was out of the way and I cleaned up the crumbs from the large portion of humble pie, we got down to the process of fixing the ‘issues’.

There were no technical issues – what there was was some explaining of what we’d done, and some minor training to re-program the client to use the it.

I left with an order for a little more kit, and an additional service to be installed and configured a little later on.

I suppose the moral is simple – don’t assume that because it’s ‘simple’ that your client understands what you are doing.

Lesson learned…
Here endeth the sermon – thanks be to God…

 

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Yesterday was an historic moment in the ongoing development of the Internet as ICANN ~ the people that look after all the Internet’s domain suffixes (such as the .com or .co.uk stuff) ~ decided to allow any type of domain suffix to be allowed.

In principle this allows any type of domain to exist, for example you could register a ‘.gardening’ domain, a .magic domain etc. We could register the .rna domain and have any websites we use attached to .rna (i.e. we could run www.support.rna)

Now this all sounds like a great idea, and I can almost hear you corporate types salivating with the possibilities, you must be aware however, that there are a few huge caveats:

1. ‘Cyber squatting” is a frowned upon practice, so buying the .mcdonalds domain is out of the question – there is legal precedent in place that almost ensures that, if challenged, you will lose the domain without any recompense.
2. ICANN are making applicants prove that they have a legitimate claim to that domain name.
3. The cost is a little steep and comes in at £114,000 ($185,000 in actuality) ~ yes that is a comma and not a decimal point.

Now while you are picking yourself up from the floor at the price, I’ll give you my honest opinion – this is a complete waste of time! ICANN should have introduced some more specific names to cover the requests being posted (such as .museum for museums sites (this was already approved) and .sex for adult sites etc…)

Currently we all know the .co.uk and the .com domain suffixes, you will also have heard of people using .org and .net, though less often. These are all recognised and well known.
Imagine that you now have to remember the entire address, not just the web or email address but the whole shebang. ~ There will be no more guessing of the ending, and if you get it wrong, there’ll be no website or email.

The cynical part of me says that the statement from ICANN saying that the price is high to dissuade spurious requests has quite a hollow ring to it – Can you spell ‘profiteering’?

ICANN say that the costs will go towards:

• Paying for the domain creation
• Employing people to scrutinise the applications
• Legal costs to defend the inevitable challenges

Yup – that’s exactly where it’s going to go

Lets see where this goes – I’d like to believe that the corporates willing to pay such ridiculous sums to “increase their Internet presence” hold off and don’t play this game – though I’d doubt it

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