Last month, i.e. on October 22nd 2009, a test was conducted at Sophos Labs on Microsoft’s new operating system – Windows 7. The test was carried out to check if Windows 7 really matched its claims about the OS being more secured for virus, spyware and malware. Sophos claimed that the User Account Control (UAC) feature of Windows 7 bypassed 8 viruses out of the 10 that were tested. Further, it claimed that Windows 7 UAC’s default configuration is not effective at protecting a PC from modern malwares. You still need to run an anti-virus on Windows 7.
I was just waiting for something to happen from Microsoft end and after a long wait, yes it did happen. In a blog posting recently, Paul Cooke, Director of Windows Enterprise Client Security at Microsoft stated that the Sophos claim was deceptive and bogus. Further he adds that, “This test shows that most people don’t knowingly have and run known malware on their system. Malware typically makes it onto a system through other avenues like the browser or email program. So while I absolutely agree that anti-virus software is essential to protecting your PC, there are other defenses as well.” “I do agree that you still need to run anti-virus software on Windows 7,” Cooke noted, “but it is equally important to keep all of your software up-to-date through automatic updates, such as through Windows Update service.”
Now to the main point – I absolutely agree with what Paul Cooke has to say in terms of securing your PC. Being in the IT industry since 20 years now and moreover having given consultancy in Infrastructure Security to number of organizations, I’ve only seen that 40% to 50% of the problems faced by an organization are due to un-patched system, pirated software and out-of-date anti-virus signatures. In fact, when we install Windows Vista or Windows 7 on a PC, the operating system keeps on alerting via its Windows Security system if Automatic Updates are not configured or if the PC is missing an anti-virus solution. If that is the case, the question is – when and where did Microsoft claim that the new version of their Operating System Windows 7 does not require an anti-virus? If you know the answer to this, I would like to hear back from you.
This is the best Outlook add-in so far from a company called Xobni located in San Francisco. “Xobni” is basically “Inbox” spelled backwards. The main idea behind the development of this plug-in was to give users an organized Inbox without them spending time on searching for conversations/emails, attachments and other relevant information. It creates profiles for each person that emails you and these profiles contain information like statistics of how many emails are being sent to and fro to that contact, what times are the most emails sent and received for that contact, social connections of the contact, conversations that are done with a particular contact in a nice threaded view and the attachments shared.
Once installed, Xobni takes some time to scan and index the emails in your Outlook and starts ranking your contacts by the number of emails that are shared. It takes about a minute or two for the initial indexing. Much of the indexing is then later done by the plug-in in the background.
Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg. The way Xobni displays the conversations using a threaded style similar to Google’s Gmail is amazing. All emails upon indexing are grouped in to conversations based on the subject, people in To and CC header fields, etc.
