Safe Browsing Site Status – Transparency Report – Google

So what is this all about? Is it a hoax? Is it a disclaimer? I don’t know but it just goes to prove that it isn’t 100% safe anywhere on the Web.

Safe Browsing Site Status

Google’s Safe Browsing technology examines billions of URLs per day looking for unsafe websites. Every day, we discover thousands of new unsafe sites, many of which are legitimate websites that have been compromised. When we detect unsafe sites, we show warnings on Google Search and in web browsers. You can search to see whether a website is currently dangerous to visit

Podcasts are now available through Google Play Music

This is not going to be anything that I am accessing soon, their library is something to be desired. No place to go but up, right? I’m still using my BEYONDPOD APP to access my favorites and that still seems to be working pretty well. So I won’t be leaving that anytime soon. Of course you have to pretty much program where you want to take things from (the RSS Feed) to be able to get the items that you care about. Apple still seems the king of the hill with their management of Podcast access through iTunes (GAG!).

But this is why in the Android world we have so many apps that we can use to gather our content into. A wide open world with no restrictions. I like it. Hopefully Google were work on this and make it a better experience soon.

By the way… Google Play Music Podcasts are only available in the US and Canada. I am sure that will be changing as well soon.

Microsoft's OneDrive for business is expecting a facelift in the next few months

RCP Magazine posted on their Blog an article discussing the recent announcements by Microsoft for upgrades to their Microsoft OneDrive for Business Product. While many of the enhancements revolve around better synching with pc’s and mobile devices there are a few other things that might interest you as well. Take a moment and see what they posted.

Podcasts coming to Google Play

It's about time. One of the keystones to Apple’s iTunes has been its access to the huge reservoir of independent information sources known as podcasts. For many of us ensconced in the tech industry this has been our method of gathering both technical and current newscasts of up and coming industry products and services. There is a wide range of subjects to draw upon that are both audio only and video content.

Hopefully Google’s access to this vast library of information will catch up quickly to what Apple offers. I will be watching closely to see where there goes.

It's about time. One of the keystones to Apple’s iTunes has been its access to the huge reservoir of independent information sources known as podcasts. For many of us ensconced in the tech industry this has been our method of gathering both technical and current newscasts of up and coming industry products and services. There is a wide range of subjects to draw upon that are both audio only and video content.

Hopefully Google’s access to this vast library of information will catch up quickly to what Apple offers. I will be watching closely to see where there goes.

Amazon is unbundling Prime Video for $8.99 per month`

I guess Amazon figures our New Math can't make sense of this. Let me see... $99/year for prime and $8.99 per month for Prime Video $119.88/year. That's my math and you lose all of the other services associated with the Prime Membership. Hmmm....

Compare that service to Hulu, $7.99 and NetFlix $7.99 and what are they thinking? I really don't fine Prime Video as that great of a source of video options so I think they really missed the mark on this one.

They are also going to offer the full Prime Services as a monthly option for $10.99 per month. That comes to $131.88 per year. That's $42.88 extra over paying it annually. That's a pretty big premium! But I understand budgets are tight and this may allow you to afford the service when you can't afford the annual fee. However, that is a pretty big premium.

Apple Confirms that QuickTime for Windows is at End of Life

As with all End of Life products that means that there will be no more updates to the software. The main concern is that there will not be any more security updates and this piece of software can become a big hole in the security of your system. So you will need to consider alternatives to QuickTime if you haven't already. For most of us using a Windows System this is not a big deal since we don't really care about the Apple Centric World, we like the availability of choice and that is exactly what you have. Most everything that is being produced today will run on media player or groove, and if you want to get more sophisticated there are plenty of programs to choose from. So don't worry, no big deal!

However, even the government is getting in on suggesting that you uninstall QuickTime after two bugs were found in the current version that could be exploited. See article.

Should you pay to get your data back after a Ransomware Attack?

Here is an interesting discussion about whether it is ever ok to pay of the Ransomware Hackers. The discussion revolves around whether it is just an incentive to be attacked again. With all the recent news about Medical and Financial Institutions being attacked this is something that you may want to consider or prepare for.

Badlock Revealed - by Naked Security

Beware and patch often is what Sophos has recently stated in their Naked Security Blog. There was a lot of hype out on this one but it if you just install the recent patch updates by Microsoft and SAMBA you should be fine. Here is there article.

Netherlands under attack!

Websites in the Netherlands are under attack with MalWare Advertising exploits. Naked Security article discussing how these attacks are being pulled off and what to look for.

Microsoft OneDrive storage decreases in July 2016

The free storage tier used to be one of the largest in the industry at 15GB absolutely free. In 2015 Microsoft announced that they were going to lower their free offering back to 5GB's and gave user the chance to claim the 15GB's by acknowledging that they want it. If you have not made that effort to claim the extra storage you will need to make sure you are not using more than 5GB’s because you will lose anything above that if you don’t pay their $1.99/month fee for the next step up of 50GB’s.

The smaller space will be for all new users so if you don’t have an account yet, all new users will get 5GB’s for free. Microsoft is in the middle of the pack of other options from competitive companies. Of course if you have made the move over to Office 365 the amount of storage you will have starts at 1TB for personal space. This for most people is more than adequate for most users. Let us know your thoughts about these changes.

Intel's SSD Drive Pricing bringing them into the mainstream

We have noticed great pricing on Intel's SSD hard drives making them a great alternative over the older spinning plate designs of the past years. Why do you want to jump to this technology? Speed! Once you have jumped to SSD technology you will never go back. I currently boot into my systems in less than 30 seconds and that includes my login. If you don’t need extra storage than you will probably be able to get by with a 250GB drive. This is a great size for office workers that are attached to network servers that are storing all their information up to the server and have no need for great amounts of local storage.

If you need more, than go with either a 500GB or 1TB. They too are very reasonable but are more of a premium than their spinning platter counterparts. Be sure when you are getting a quote for your new workstation that you ask for a comparable price for a SSD upgrade on your new system. Believe me when I say that it will bring a big smile to your face.

Ingram Micro Cloud Summit (Part II)

The Ingram Micro Cloud Summit used both general meeting sessions and breakout sessions to get its enormous amount of content out to us. While much of the general sessions material discussed the "Why the Cloud", I think that most of us that were there did not need to be convinced that the trend for most software manufacturers is for them to learn how they can leverage "The Cloud" advantageously with their products.

One of the major categories of software/services that I saw here was for offsite storage. From the fire sharing applications like OneDrive and SharePoint from Microsoft and DropBox to Backup and Disaster Recovery from Acronis, Veritas and Azure. There are a lot of options to enhance how you work and how you protect your office's data.

Ingram Micro Cloud MarketPlace is looking to add more and more vertical applications to its portfolio of products as well and providing bundles to make it easier to manage and supply services that these vertical markets can take advantage of. One of the first vertical markets that IMCM is working on is the legal profession. Some of these applications include: Office 365 E3 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook and more), Law Toolbox (Matter Time Management), RPOST (Encrypting), Rmail, Trend (Virus Protection), Dropbox for Business (secure file synchronization and file sharing), and Acronis (Backup and Disaster Recovery).

While many of the products in the Cloud MarketPlace are considered to be horizontal in nature, covering a wide variety of business types and needs, having a distinct set of applications that fit together well for a specific industry helps to us to bring our customers a good offering to choose from for their business processes.

Ingram Micro Cloud Summit (Part I)

This past week I was lucky enough to attend the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit that was held at the JW Marriott in Phoenix Arizona. It was a three day event that covered many new products and services that are or will be shortly available for our customers. While Microsoft's cloud offerings were a main focus, new product lines that enhance Office's capabilities were also shown. In the sales area, Dun & Bradstreet is offering a service for $25/ month that provides access to their large company databases to enhance your sales contact collection as well as gathering financial ratings about your current or prospective clients. They charge you $0.75 per returned record that is changed against the $25 retainer that is charged each month. You can purchase larger amounts is your search needs are greater but they must be purchased in $25 increments. Their app uses Excel as its reporting medium and has seven different functions to choose from.

HPE announced some interesting new server offerings on WednesdayWednesday that could be very interesting. They are bringing several network functions together in a single box, including: Server, Firewall, Switch, Antivirus and more. Their intent is to bring this product to market as a HaaS (Hardware as a Service). While we are waiting for more information on this in the next couple of months I will be sure to give you more detail then.

 The Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace (IMCM) also announced that Azure directory services were being made available and Microsoft announced 'Project Madeira' during u very interesting demo. 

Microsoft's "Project Madeira," a new, cloud-based business application that's built on the company's Dynamics NAV platform, is now available as a public preview for U.S. organizations.

Expected to become generally available in the second half of 2016, Madeira is described by Microsoft as a multitenant, Software as a Service (SaaS) offering that runs out of the Azure public cloud.

Madeira integrates tightly with Office 365. One benefit of that is users performing business functions can reduce the time it takes them to jump back and forth from Office applications. For instance, Madeira "automatically identifies business context such as invoices and quote requests within Outlook, and presents the user with the tools and data needed to take immediate action -- all without leaving Outlook," wrote Perisic.

In fact, Project Madeira features are accessed primarily through Microsoft Outlook.To try out a preview of this product you can sign up for the preview here. 

there is so much more that I can talk about thisconference that I will try to let you know about in the next few days. See you soon!

Microsoft Vista Support ending in less than a year

The extended support time frame for Windows Vista will expire one year from this week on 11 April 2017. That will mark the end of 10 years of total support for the operating system. Vista never really had a following but it did achieve 19% adoption at one time until Windows 7 came along.

There are still about 25 million computers running Vista still even though it has less than 2% adoption today. So what options do have? You can purchase a new computer or you can try to find an upgrade option to Windows 7. Looking at Amazon there are several options for around $75. However, I would suggest that you replace the hardware with a new system instead of upgrading just the operating system.

If you decide to take the software upgrade route, run Microsoft’s Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor to make sure all of your hardware and software are compatible. Based on my experience Windows 7 ran very well on Vista era hardware and should be OK on many of those systems.

You should also consider the amount RAM in you system as well. Windows 7 will run on 4GB’s of RAM but does a much better job with 8GB’s.

While holding onto older hardware and upgrading to modern versions of Windows are not upgrades that are full of performance increases – it will at least get you onto an OS that has more support left than Windows Vista itself.

In today’s security landscape it is extremely important to be actively protected from security threats.

Bottom Line: The best option to choose that will result in the best performance for the money that you are spending is to purchase a new device to upgrade from Windows Vista. You will not only get current and better performing hardware but you will also be on a more modern operating system that is ready to handle the security threats that are out there.

If you are using Office 365 you may be interested in these monthly video updates for Microsoft

Microsoft is posting on YouTube a video monthly recap of their updates from their blogs. Here is the link.

Amazon Echo vs. Amazon Tap

It is amazing how a seemingly simple device can so quickly become a part of your everyday life without you really considering its impact on the many different types of interactions you may have with it. The Amazon Echo has become one of those devices that hardly ever remains unused in the household either by myself or my wife. We use it as an speaker extension to our many handheld devices to entertain us through a davorite podcast while we play words with friends on a lazy weekend afternoon. We'll request from Alexa to play some accoustical music to give us some background music while we discuss and solve the many items that come in our daily lives. I come down in the morning and ask for my daily calendar to begin for the day's events that I must prepare to work on.

With the ability to play online radio stations, I can get information on what is happening on sports talk shows and other news stations in our local area. It has caused me to look for applications that will enhance its capabilities like finding a program to sync my outlook calendar with my google calendar so that I don't have to do double input in both areas. 

I love redirecting the playing of my Audible books to the Alexa to give my ears a rest from the earbuds I wear all night long. While the Echo might not have the rich bases that some other wireless/bluetooth speakers might have, it more then sufficient for the spoken word.

I just finished a review of the Amazon Tap that was written up on the Verge and can see many of the points that they brought with the Magic being lost with not being able to grab Alex's attention by addressing it from across the room. Having to physically touch a similar device to get its attention reduces its impact. But this drawback might not be as bad in certain types of use scenarios. I could see where the device is always at arms length, that reaching out to begin your interaction might not be so bad and the fact that it is so portable makes it nice to be able to bring it with you as your location continues change as it does so often during the long summer days.

It has a nice long battery life (9 hours), that makes it a functioning companion for a relatively full day of use. This makes it that much more intriguing to me to actually mke me consider adding it our household of friendly devices.

Welcome Brett Smith as a new contributor to this site

Many of you that have visited our storefront have met Brett out in our showroom. He is one of our newer members of our staff and like most of us here, is very excited about all sorts of technology. I am looking forward to reading about some of his interests and he has plands on producing some how-to articles and videos.

Ransomware is one of the scariest attacks that we have seen

Once an infection takes hold there are very few options that you have to recover from it.We are seeing that besides the general attacks that occur, now we are seeing specific organizations being targeted.

There have been several Medical Organizations that have fallen prey and of course financial institutions are a prime target as well. The Government is also under attack with a reported 321 separate ransomeware attempts in the second half of last year. Is the Government ready to protect them?

A recent article from GovInfoSecurity has gone into depth about the question: DHS's Response About Infections on Federal Computers Leaves Questions Unanswered.

Even the most sophisticated protection, though it can help prevent these attacks from taking hold of your system, you have to be on constant guard for its footprints. Once it makes itself known to you it is usually too late to recover unless you have a good back up system to recover from. Even so, you may have some loss. While not all versions of Cryptolocker require a full reload, the nastier versions due and lately those are ones we have been seeing. Make sure you have full backups of your data, that they are incremental in nature, and that you are vigilent when working with websites and communications from outside sources. Don't be click happy and meander onto sites that you don't recognize, and make sure that you have a good and up-to-date virus protection software package.

If you are on a network, you need a solid business class firewall that runs software to actively protect you from these kinds of attacks. We like the Sophos line of products for this. For backup of your files we like to use our Gemini 3 Backup Solution. It provides an effective and simple image backup system of your servers that provide incremental recovery. It makes it simple to look for the first attack point to recover from to provide a safe recovery of your system. Talk to our representatives to learn more about these products.

Sophos experts Chester Wisniewski and Paul Ducklin

I enjoy listening to their podcast each week and one of the topics that they talked about is what every manufacturer seems to be talking about which is the Internet of Things (IoT), Apple and the FBI and the Jury Duty Scam that is going around. You can listen to it here: Sophos Security Chet Chat

The US Court Service has warned about the a new scam that is calling people to tell them that they didn't follow through on Federal Jury Duty and are able to send you to a website that looks like it might be real, they are spoofing local phone numbers and it is absolutely not true. The Us Court System says that they don't make these calls and if you ever receive a call like this it is something that you should just ignore/hang up on. These can be scary and they can sound real. But don't be taken in. 

Update on Monday, April 4, 2016 at 5:53PM by Bob Appleby

Here is a great article that goes into more depth on this scam

Petya Ransomware

Follow this article from Arstechnica about a new Ransomware attack being found primarily in Germany, but I'm sure we will be seeing instances of it here soon. Take a look at the full article here!