Windows Security

Online Privacy and MSN live Messenger

Each time we sign up for online services (e-mails, online messaging, social networks, etc) we are required to click on “agree” button to accept the terms and conditions of the service which part of it is about online privacy.

How many of us ever read these statements, I don’t think I ever read them even once. But do online service providers really protect our privacy online? What promoted me to write this article is a recent incident I had with Microsoft online messenger; I have been using this service for years to communicate with relatives and friends.

On their last update to the service to “live messenger” they have added many new features and tons of information about you that could be shared and seen by others, not only that, anyone who could see your profile online can invite you to join their network and I found myself added to the network of some “party girl who is looking for fun online” and each time I chat with a friend or relative, they can see that girl on my network under a message that displays on their messenger window.

Now, for the unsuspected users, if your profile is set to public view in live messenger, the whole world can see some of your online activities and even to see who is in your live messenger contact list, I found that very disturbing and a total privacy invasion.

There are many options under live messenger where you can chose who to share your online activities with, but for many users, there are not even aware where to go to find these options, they are not even aware that some or most of their information that they used to setup live messenger is already public on the web.

Morro from Microsoft

One more security suite in the market from a big vendor. As a consultant from small businesses, I have to deal with fire walls and security suite for small networks. Live One Care was Microsoft solution for home PCs and small network security needs.

As a PC user and professional consultant, I am against using any popular security suite that comes bundled with new PCs or are widely used by consumers. From the average user point of view, security suites such as (Norton and McAfee) are difficult to setup and configure; I was always against installing these solutions in my clients’ computers. I still remember how difficult is (for the average user) to setup wireless network access permission in Norton firewall.

I have installed Live One Care few times, but I don’t really have any experience using it. Market data indicating that only 2% of the professional are using Live care as their security solution; Microsoft remedy was to release Morro, which is supposed to be a better solution.

My advice to software vendors, just come up with something that is easy to install and configure, a firewall that doesn’t ask the user to supply too much technical data.

Currently, I am using Zone-Alarm, which as much easier to setup and configure than the other popular security suites in the market.

Will Windows Vista put an end to Microsoft dominance of Operating systems?

If we look back at the early days of windows based operating systems we can see the huge enhancement Microsoft made to the Desk top operating systems, from DOS to windows 3.1 to win95 to win2000 and finally Win XP.

For many users, win XP was (end still) the best operating system Microsoft ever written, with SP1 and SP2, Microsoft fixed major bugs in the system and the users community was content with winXP.

Only when everything seemed to be working great with winXP, Microsoft released windows Vista, I personally, and I am sure as millions of users, was not ready to let go of winXP and start the journey to learn new operating system with its all new features.

Recently, I had to replace my company’s computer systems with new systems, I wanted to get new systems with XP, but the vendor told me they only can provide us systems with windows Visa. I was not very happy to migrate to Vista yet.

The transition from windows XP to windows vista is not as smooth as it should be, for the average user windows XP is more user friendly than windows Vista. One feature of windows Vista that I particularly find hard to understand for the average user is the Network and file sharing properties in windows Vista.
In its attempt to make windows Vista more secure, Microsoft made setting up network and resource sharing in windows Vista a bit hard to configure, there are many security features the user have to configure.

From a historical point of view, I can tell that Microsoft reached its full potential with windows XP, there was no need to release a new operating system at the time when windows XP was performing real well with the users.