James O’Sullivan’s Blog

 Today I received an email from iProfile.org with a really interesting subject line “How to protect yourself against CV Identity Fraud” and have posted a report on the topic. I didn’t subscribe to iProfile.org emailing list and I would normally mark such emails as spam but this time was different. The email was informative and concerned a topic of major online safety importance - Identity Theft. iProfile provides a free service where you can upload your CV and protects you from CV identity fraud. You can protect your phone number through a masking feature but apart from that I don’t see any difference between this online CV tool and any other.

CV Identity fraud is fast becoming a major online threat to both job hunters and recruiters. What better way for a fraudster to gain your personal information to setup a profile and masquerade as you. Recruitment agencies and HR departments receive many external documents on a daily basis from unknown source. Their job is reliant on opening attachments and processing the information. However without proper understanding and protection of this threatening landscape they’re at risk of various malicious code attacks. This is why I believe online CV’s will be the preferred method of choice for both the job seeker and recruiter. iProfile and linkedIn definitely make life easier and I’m all for improved processes, efficiency and semantic data but there’s an art in writing a CV and I believe the presentation of the traditional CV tells alot about the job seeker. Standardising a format for everyone to use removes this insight.

Win a Trip to space!

Symantec, makers of Norton products such as Norton 360, Norton Internet Security, and Norton AntiVirus are offering consumers the chance to win a trip to space to celebrate their 2009 product launch! Unfortunately this isn’t open to Irish consumers.

This competition ties in with the 2009 campaign “Smart Security, Engineered for Speed” which focuses on the improvements made in Norton 2009 to make the products even lighter on resources and faster than ever before.  Norton also have some pretty aggressive claims this year such as 1 minute install and free support in some countries.

I can tell you that Norton have been pretty hurt by the slow perception of their products over the last few years. Granted this was true in 2006 but the latest products have a very low impact on system resources. There’s alot of free products in the market today such as AVG, ZoneAlarm etc and you can of course patch together your own homemade solution but does this really give you confidence that you’re secured? You have install multiple solutions from multiple software companies which means more resources running in the background which deliver updates at different times! The bottom line is that i want to install a security product and get on with my work. no nags, no update issues, no worries.

The clever folks over at reCaptha have come up with the brilliant idea of using old book style text in their captcha words. CAPTCHA ( Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart) is now widely used in websites when signing up for a service, it helps stop spam and bots from gaining access to a websites service.

These characters are difficult for a machine to decipher but humans are able to identify the words which is the idea behind CAPTCHA in the first place.  By using old book style text millions of reCaptcha users can help digitize old books. Building a captcha from scratch is not an easy job and reCaptha does a great job to take this burden away from those who would just like to add it as a plugin to our blog. However I wouldn’t advise the use of reCaptcha as your CAPTCHA tool if you have a critical web application with high traffic.
The web application will have to query the reCaptcha engine each time it’s loaded, which may keep your users waiting!
Pictures are also a nice way alternative to words when generating your CAPTCHA. But of course this hogs more bandwidth so let’s stick to black and white text for now!

Norton has launched it’s 2009 product betas for both Norton AntiVirus 2009 and Norton Internet Security 2009.

Check out the Beta site here:

and forum feedback.

So far the feedback has been pretty positive and Symantec are really pushing for a super fast 2009 product. One minute to install the product and faster quite scans means that Symantec will provide a security product that won’t bugg or slow you down.

New in Norton Internet Security 2009!

• • Innovative new architecture dramatically reduces the boot time impact, the scan time, the memory usage as well as the system footprint and the install time.
  • Smart Idle Time Scheduler runs quietly in the background to let you work and play without disruption.
  • Silent-Mode ensures your games and movies are never interrupted by alerts and security updates.
  • Enhanced Browser Protection - Blocks browser exploits and protects against infected websites (now supports Firefox).
  • Expanded SONAR Protection offers real-time protection against new and unknown threats without requiring the user to make confusing security decisions.
  • Enhanced Identity Safe now includes an interactive tutorial to get users and running quickly, cloning of your cards importing your data from Internet Explorer and more!
  • Improved Home Network Security - Networked devices report their health and status through a visual map.
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