Do businesses need antivirus on their Macs?

Posted on May 4, 2011 by admin

By Erik Eckel of Tech Republic

Long the debate has raged: do Macs need antivirus? The technical, politically correct answer is yes, business Mac users should load antivirus software. Apple officially began recommending Mac users to load antivirus as far back as 2002. Today Apple’s website publicly encourages Mac antivirus adoption, too:

Security Advice

The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box. However, since no system can be 100 percent immune from every threat, antivirus software may offer additional protection.

That said, I’ve loaded antivirus on Macs exactly twice, and both times because the client specifically requested the additional security software be loaded on their Mac OS X systems. Often, Mac antivirus might simply be overkill.

A tighter architecture

Mac OS X runs on UNIX. The underlying code base is inherently more secure. It’s more difficult to hack. That’s not to say it can’t be done; it can. But cracking UNIX security is more difficult than some other operating systems. As Apple states, “Mac OS X doesn’t get PC viruses.”

Sandboxing is built in

Macs also boast built-in sandboxing, a security-conscious environment in which applications and processes are separated. Mac OS X restricts the actions programs can execute. Mac OS X ‘s sandboxing technique also restricts file access and program execution. The result is a more secure system less vulnerable to malware infection and exploitation.

Additional guidelines

Apple lists numerous security recommendations on its website. Its online Mac OS 10.6 Help page states that users should “run an antivirus program if you find any suspicious files or applications, or if you notice any suspicious behavior on your computer.”

To help protect systems, Apple also recommends Mac users avoid downloading or installing unlicensed or pirated software, accept applications only from known and trusted sources, disable unnecessary root accounts and remove unneeded administrative permissions from commonly used everyday user accounts. With such good security habits in place, it’s unlikely a third-party antivirus application is required. But when sensitive information is in question, or when patient data is at risk, best business practices require that businesses load and maintain professional antimalware software, regardless whether the computers in use are Windows-, Linux- or UNIX-powered.

Many Mac antimalware choices

A few years ago, there weren’t that many prominent software manufacturers producing antimalware software for the Mac. Now almost every antivirus provider, including Symantec/Norton, Eset, Intego, Bit Defender and Avast, produce Mac-specific antimalware platforms.

Many choices exist. Unfortunately the debate is seemingly no longer whether Macs require antivirus, but which platform to load. That is, if Mac enthusiasts are subscribing to the technical, politically correct answer. Which, knowing Mac personalities, most are likely not buying.

 

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iPad 2 For Travel: New Travel Apps, iMovie Trip Videos, Battery Life Tips, More

Posted on April 15, 2011 by admin

By Mary Anne Potts

When the first iPad came out just over a year ago, we were sure it would transform travel: Apple’s tablet computer married work and play utilities so well, it rendered a laptop excess weight on a vacation. Thirteen months later, our computing behaviour has already evolved drastically. Everyone from VPs to restaurant sommeliers to preschoolers are using iPads everywhere. It did not take long for the tablet to find a place in our lives.

Since the second generation iPad was released a month ago, much has been said about the new lighter, smaller, faster model. And the fact that Apple has added significant new features to iPad 2—such as the front- and back-facing cameras—without raising the price. Let’s consider what the iPad 2 does to further transform travel with its smaller size, new cameras, innovative new travel apps, and iMovie travel videos.

iPad 2 For Travel

1. Packable Size, Speed

Yes, the iPad 2 is light (33 percent lighter than iPad 1) and thin (thinner than the iPhone 4). It’s so fast—two times faster thanks to the A5 chip—that the graphics seem to fly across the screen as you use it. The sleek, skinny iPad 2 disappears in your handbag, tote, or backpack. And at the airport, iPads do not have to be screened separately in the security line.

2. Ample Battery Life

The ten-hour battery life means you can literally not worry about charging your iPad for days. Battery life is simply not an issue. The iPad also has its own voltage converter, so you just need to find a power adapter for your host country and you are all set.

Here are three ways to maximize your iPad’s battery life:

• Turn down the brightness of the screen.
• Limit the apps in your multitasking. Each open app is using a bit of battery. Close out of the apps you aren’t using.
• Turn off the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth settings when you are not using them. They soak up battery power.

3. Cameras for Video Chatting, Hi-Def Video, Photos

The much anticipated front- and back-facing cameras enable FaceTime chats from wherever you have a Wi-Fi signal—airport layovers, coffee shop chats, Madrid’s Plaza de Santo Domingo. More and more cities are publishing maps of their free Wi-Fi hotspots. 

Though the cameras’ video is hi-def, the photos are less sharp than photos taken with the iPhone 4. But in reality, shooting photos and video on the iPad is a little strange. For my iMove travel video, I used my iPhone 4 to shoot photos and video, then synced to my computer, then to my iPad. You can also use the USB adapter to sync iPhone 4 photos directly to iPad.

4. Top Travel App Innovations

With the addition of the new gyroscope and cameras, and the existing GPS, the world of travel apps is about to take off. The gyroscope and GPS could enable some very cool virtual tour guides of favourite travel sites—say an iPad tour of Machu Picchu where you point your iPad at a feature and it tells you historical facts. Here are some of the more impressive new iPad travel apps out there:


• iMovie

Optimized for the iPad, this app could transform you into a filmmaker. For travel videos, it’s amazing. It makes editing videos simple—little kids could do it. See the section below to read the full review.

• National Geographic National Parks Maps HD App

This app pairs hi-res images of points-of-interest within National Geographic HD topo trail maps for 15 parks (Yosemite, Yellowstone, Zion, Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, and ten others). The iPad’s Digital Compass will locate you within the park when you are ready to start exploring.

• JetSetter

This visually stunning, content-driven travel app lets you discover travel destinations through a gorgeous layout and photography. The stories and editorial reviews will tantalize you to take a trip—and the app even allows you to book a hotel stay with a cool calendar feature. It also has “Flash Sale” limited-time travel deals.

• Word Lens

This app utilizes the camera to photograph and translate text. Right now it only works for English to Spanish and Spanish to English. Still it’s a remarkable service on the iPad. It’s not perfect. I tried it on my friend Mark Adam’s new book title, Turn Right at Machu Picchu. It came up with “Turno Correcto a Machu Picchu,” which is a little off, but the possibilities are exciting.

• TripAdvisor

Thanks to the iPad’s digital compass, TripAdvisor’s vast database of user reviews are made available on Google Street maps. Simply locate yourself via the GPS, then read reviews of nearby restaurants and hotels positioned on a Google Street View map. What’s surprising is all the local information. I always considered TripAdvisor to be best for international hotels. But with the app, I located myself in my apartment in Brooklyn and it showed me all the restaurants and businesses on my street with contact info and user reviews. 

• Fotopedia Heritage

Brilliant photos illustrate the world’s UNESCO World Heritage sites in this app. The Machu Picchu slide show alone has 59 images.

• FlightBoard

This app quite simply lets you see the Arrivals and Departures flight boards in any airport. Pretty handy if you are dealing with weather delays.

• AllSubway HD

This is the first collection of subway maps from the world’s great cities, from Moscow to Munich to Perth. You don’t need a Wi-Fi connection to use it, so subterranean navigation is possible.

5. iMovie: Geo-Referenced Travel Videos

iMovie, which we loved for the iPhone 4, is now optimized for iPad and so easy to use. The added screen real estate allows for great control and precision while editing your trip video. You can trim video clips before you add them to your edited material, and then re-edit the cuts throughout the process with multiple video editing tracks. The app is so superior, it gives you the confidence to actually cut together a video you could be proud of.

I tested the process on a morning run to see the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C., last week. In my case the early morning light on an overcast and rainy day didn’t really show off the scenery as much as I’d hoped. I used my iPhone 4, then synced the images to my computer, and then to my iPad. You can also use the USB adapter to sync directly to your iPad. Because the photos and videos are geo-referenced, I easily tagged locations in iMovie. This would be particularly handy if, post trip, you couldn’t remember where you snapped the shot.

I did all my video editing on the go, mostly on my subway commute.

If I had more time, I would have attempted to compose my own cherry blossoms run soundtrack in the new GarageBand, now optimized for iPad. In the same way that iMovie makes you feel like a capable filmmaker, GarageBand makes you feel like a diamond-in-the-rough musician. And they are both so fun to use. Apple’s creativity-developing apps encourage us to document, record, and present our lives in a personal way. The resulting videos or even music compositions may not win an Oscar or Grammy, but they contribute to focusing on some of life’s best moments—our vacations with family and friends.

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New Google CEO Larry Page: Here are your top two priorities

Posted on April 6, 2011 by admin

When you think about how deeply Google is ingrained in the everyday culture of people across the planet and how its brand has become one of the most powerful names in the history of business, it’s easy to forget that the company hasn’t even been around for 15 years yet.

Despite its relatively recent arrival, Google has a preeminent place among the most important organizations on the planet. Sure, Apple and Microsoft make a lot more money than Google, and there are plenty of older companies and even governments that employ a lot more people, and service organizations like the Red Cross and the United Way that outwardly provide greater services to humanity. But, Google’s primary mission “to organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful” is arguably the most important work of the early 21st century. A hundred years from now, when people look back at this period of time, that’s likely to be the thing they point to as the biggest turning point of this era because of its ability to empower people economically, socially, intellectually, and politically.

On Monday, Google co-founder Larry Page took the reins of the company at a time when it has reached a crossroads. After being laser-focused on information search for its early history, the company has strayed in lots of different directions in recent years with many experiments that have largely ended in failure and a lot of head-scratching (e.g. Google Wave).

As Page takes over the CEO job from Eric Schmidt, who navigated the company through its coming of age, it’s time for Google to refocus on what it wants to be now that it’s all grown up. Here are the top two priorities that should be on Page’s mind.

1. Get serious about product quality

Google became Google for two reasons: 1.) The quality of its search results were so much better than everyone else’s, and 2.) The company refused to use display ads on Google.com and consequently rewrote the rules of Internet advertising. Let’s put the second point aside for now, since Google isn’t having any problems in the revenue department.

However, the quality of Google’s search results are definitely under duress. Entire cottage industries and content farms have developed around gaming Google’s algorithm in order to get their (often worthless) pages to the top of Google’s search results. While Google fights a constant war with these “SEO spam” sites, it’s not doing a very good job of keeping up. Experian Hitwise reported that Google’s search success rate (users who visit a site after a search) dropped by 13% in 2010.

Even long-time Google and Web supporter Tim O’Reilly said, “It’s clear that Google is losing some kind of war with the spammers. I think Google has in some ways taken their eye off the ball.”

Page needs to devote more of Google’s resources to fixing this problem and rally the troops around the idea of attacking this issue since it threatens to undermine everything that Google is trying to accomplish.

However, the quality problem isn’t just an issue in search on Google.com. Google continues to release products into the market before those products are ready and let product problems languish for months or years before fixing them or simply pulling the plug on the product. For example, the first version of Android was a disaster when it was released in 2008 (a year later, the 2.0 version was finally acceptable). Google Apps had badly inconsistent features across its various office products for years after it was first released. And, products like Google Wave and Google Buzz were so badly conceived and poorly executed that they should have never been released to the public.

Page needs to rethink Google’s product development and launch strategy and demand a much higher standard of quality before going to market. That doesn’t mean Google should stop experimenting or running beta programs. Perish the thought. It just needs to get a lot more serious and discriminating about the way it launches products. And, it needs to devote more resources to search.

2. Forget Facebook

The worst thing Google can do right now is to get jealous about the media fawning over Facebook the way it used to fawn over Google. So what if magazines want to put Facebook’s twentysomething CEO on their dead-tree leaflets. Google is 10 times more important than Facebook, which is rapidly devolving into a MySpace-like waste of digital bits.

Every few months there’s a new rumor about Google launching its own social network to compete with Facebook — Google Me, Google Circles, etc. The best move Google could make in social is to not react to Facebook but simply play its own game. Continue to integrate social controls into search. Let the crowds help vote down the spam and worthless content in search. Allow people to connect to friends from their Google profile — if they choose — and allow friends’ searching preferences, votes, and favorites to add a social filter to search results (and let the social filter be toggled on and off).

Google is already doing some of those things, but the point is that is the kind of stuff Google is really good at in the social space and that’s the stuff it needs to focus on. On the other hand, building a social network does not play to Google’s strengths. If you look at what the company created with Google Wave and Google Buzz, it’s abundantly clear that this is not the kind of stuff Google engineers and product leaders should be spending their time doing.

If Google gets distracted chasing Facebook, it risks becoming like Microsoft, which has been so distracted chasing Google in the past five years that its core products have suffered considerably and are in greater danger than ever of losing their primacy.

Bottom line

Page needs to remember the mission that made Google great – organizing the world’s information. He needs to re-energize the troops around that goal, launch an all-out assault on SEO spam, and keep from getting distracted by Facebook. The task of digitizing the world’s data is far from complete — even just the public data. If Google can pull off more private-public partnerships like the one it’s doing in Kansas City, Kansas for high speed fiber broadband than it can help also bring a lot more valuable information to the Web — from libraries to public documents to historical archives to government data, for example. This is a service for the Internet community and it enhances Google’s business model by allowing people to use Google search for even more services.

As my colleague Larry Dignan noted, Google investors are going to be pressuring Page to find a big second revenue source beyond search. However, first Page will need to shore up Google’s core mission and get the company refocused on the right product strategy. If he pulls it off, Google has a shot at solidifying its reputation for doing perhaps the most important work of the early 21st century.

Article By Jason Hiner Of Tech Republic

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Google clamps down on Android

Posted on April 4, 2011 by admin

If you’ve spent enough time around the Android platform, you know how varied the interface is. From the HTC Sence, to Motorola Blur, to Samsung Fascinate — each carrier has their own take on how best to serve up the platform (There are, obviously varying opinions as to which take is the best.) Although that is very much in keeping with open source, it does cause problems for developers and support alike. Think about how many times you’ve had to be support for an Android user in your company only to realize you were trying to walk the user through setting up an Exchange connection on a device unlike the one you were using. Believe it or not, the difference between the Motorola and the HTC Android Interface is different enough to nearly seem like you’re working on an altogether different platform.

That is not good from a marketing or support standpoint.

So — here’s what’s happening — Google has finally decided to clamp down on the carriers from making “willy nilly” tweaks to the OS. In fact, Google has laid down some rules. Those rules?

  • No more unapproved tweaks.
  • No more partnerships formed outside of Google’s purview.
  • Companies will need to have their plans for the OS approved before receiving early access to Google’s software.
  • Companies must sign a “non-fragmentation” clause that grants Google veto power over changes.

Among many communities, Google is now (more than ever) starting to appear like yet another Evil Empire. When Android was first launched, companies were told they would have a sort of ultimate freedom to be able to develop and design around the platform. But now, it seems, that Google is making a mad-dash turnabout to stop companies from making Android “their own”. And although this does go against the true spirit of open source, I actually think this is a smart move on Google’s part — so long as they do one thing: Keep the source fully available to companies and individuals.

Why do I think this is a smart move? There are certain issues that have cropped up with the Android platform. First and foremost the variances in the interfaces and settings controls offered up by different carriers has caused a lot of problems for support and developers. Second, viruses have popped up here and there, thanks to the lack of vetting done on the Android Market Place. These two issues alone have caused users exiting the Android platform for the more consistent Apple iOS platform.

In order for Android (and Google) to avoid attrition, some standards are simply going to have to be put in place. Does this mean Android has to become another Apple? No. What it means, however, is that carriers need to leave Android as-is for their handset. And that is not a bad thing. The default Android interface is, generally speaking, much better than anything the carriers have put out (far and away better than the Samsung take, if you ask me.) And this doesn’t mean that end-users are going to suffer a lack of flexibility. There will still be other home screen launchers that can be installed (such as ADL Launcher, OpenHome, etc.), so the platform will still remain flexible

And, more important to the end-user, every handset (regardless of carrier) will be able to be updated to the latest-greatest far sooner than the current model allows. That alone, should make Android users proclaim Google’s clamping down a big win.

Original Article From Tech Republic

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Internet Explorer 9: The OS and Hardware Matter

Posted on March 15, 2011 by admin

By Tony Bradley, PCWorld

Internet Explorer 9 is officially here but IE9 is only compatible with Windows 7 and Windows Vista, so two-thirds of the PCs in the world can’t take advantage of it.

It may seem odd, or self-defeating that Microsoft would invest so much effort developing a next generation Web browser that isn’t compatible with Windows XP. The legacy Windows OS still enjoys greater than 50 percent market share, more than Windows 7 and Windows Vista combined but Microsoft sees the writing on the wall, and there is a key message with IE9: the operating system and hardware matter as much as the browser itself.

The difference in the IE9 experience can be dramatic depending on the underlying hardware. Microsoft could have developed a browser that was an incremental improvement over Internet Explorer 8 just for the sake of developing a new browser, and it could have maintained backward compatibility with Windows XP. However, doing so would greatly restrict what Microsoft is able to accomplish with the browser. At some point you have to cut the cord and move on to embrace the future rather than continuously coddling the past.

With Internet Explorer 9, the browser becomes a tightly integrated component of the operating system, and websites become applications that extend the desktop experience to the Web. In order to deliver adequate performance and provide the functionality Microsoft delivers with IE9, you have to have a solid operating system and hardware foundation.

Yes, Microsoft may alienate customers by not providing backwards compatibility with Windows XP but when those customers move to Windows 7, or eventually Windows 8, they will appreciate that Microsoft had the conviction to abandon backward compatibility in favour of a more immersive and integrated Web experience.

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