We recently received a request from a customer to expand upon the benefits of our Basic Monitoring service.

Basic Monitoring is the first level of proactive maintenance services offered at InfinIT Technology Group. It puts the infrastructure in place for our technicians to monitor computers for problems, as well as remote repair tools to help us resolve any issues that arise quickly and with less inconvenience to our customers. Basic Monitoring Agreements do not include any pre-paid labor, but customers with a monitoring agreement get a discount on all labor charges (onsite, in-house, or remote).

Cost: $5/computer/month
Basic Monitoring Agreements include the following benefits:

• 24/7 Monitoring of Key System Components
• Managed Antivirus (Protects and reports suspicious activity directly to your Technical Team)
• Patch Management (Keeps Windows and other software up-to-date, and reports when updates fail)
• Vulnerability Scanning (Looks for known security threats and reports them to your Technical Team)
  
• Asset Tracking (Tracks hardware and software installed in the system)
• Remote Repair Tools (Facilitates faster response times to computer issues)
• Discounted Labor Rates (onsite, dropoff, and remote)

Since reliable for-fee antivirus can cost between $30-$60 per year, a Basic Monitoring Agreement will virtually pay for itself even if you never need to take advantage of the discounted labor rates.

One other advantage a Basic Monitoring Agreement offers is the ability for customers to pose questions about messages, pop-ups, or suspicious behavior on a computer to their Technical Team. With our monitoring tools, we can log in to quickly see what is causing our customers concern, and let them know whether or not a particular issue actually requires a repair.

Without a monitoring agreement, customers have to pay for a service call to have those error messages looked at. This sometimes results in customers paying for a service call when none was actually required; it also sometimes results in customers ignoring issues that should be addressed because they don't want to waste money on an issue that was not a serious one.

Residential and business technology needs and configurations are becoming more complex all the time. A Basic Monitoring Agreement allows our customers to take control of their networks, and turns their IT management from reactive (where we wait for a problem to occur and then try to find a way to fix it) to proactive (where our goal is to look for potential problems and address them before they cause serious issues.)

If you would like more information about our Monitoring Services, please call our office at 225-286-4108, or add your comments to this post.

From Extremetech via the Guardian newspaper:

From Extremetech: "If you were shocked by the NSA’s Prism program, hold onto your hat: The NSA also operates another system, called XKeyscore, which gives the US intelligence community (and probably most of the US’s Western allies) full access to your email, IMs, browsing history, and social media activity. To view almost everything that you do online, an NSA analyst simply has to enter your email or IP address into XKeyscore. No formal authorization or warrant is required; the analyst just has to type in a “justification” and press Enter. To provide such functionality, the NSA collects, in its own words, “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.” Perhaps most importantly, though, it appears that HTTPS and SSL might not protect your communications from being snooped on by the NSA."

Here is a link to the NSA slideshow discussing Xkeyscore

While this system may not actively seek out the identity of an individual, according to slide 12 it does index "every email address seen in a session", "every file seen in a session", "every phone number seen in a session", and "the webmail and chat activity to include username, buddylist, machine specific cookies", etc. Anyone who believes that very specific information could not be gathered on an individual just from the metadata in such communications is deceiving themselves, and this program seems to go far beyond gathering just metadata.

Worse (or better, I suppose, if you are a security analyst and not a private citizen concerned about your own privacy), slide 17 highlights some of the uses for XKeyscore, such as: "Show me all the VPN startups in country X, and give me the data so I can decrypt and discover the users" and "show me all the exploitable machines in country x".

Now, the first of those sounds like this program can identify secure traffic on the Internet, and then help the user decrypt it, which makes me wonder just how secure our standard "best practice" Internet security is. The second is arguably more serious. It implies that the XKeyscore program can identify all computers in a target area that can be attacked by a specific bit of code (virus, malware, keylogger, etc.) and more than likely automatically take care of distributing that exploit. Perhaps not a terrible thing if good people are only using this in a very targeted way against very bad people, but if the "good guys" can do it, then other people can probably figure out how to do it too, if they haven't already.

Regardless of whether you believe Edward Snowden did the right thing or the wrong thing, and regardless of whether or not you believe the US Government (and whatever other governments have access to similar programs) will only use these kinds of "powers" responsibly and for the greater good, the very existence of such capabilities should give us all cause for concern.

At best, programs like Xkeyscore and PRISM (and who knows how many other similar but differently-named projects exist out there... we all watched or read the Jason Bourne stories, right?) could inadvertently provide governments with information that they should have no rights to. At worst... Well, I'd rather not dwell on a worst case scenario here.

This seems like the kind of issue that should have Civil Rights and Privacy Rights advocates joining forces, demanding more information and at least requiring some real and legitimate oversight in hopes of ensuring these types of information-gathering programs are used only in the way their designers claim they are intended.

Of course, that would require something to happen in Congress. Maybe the NSA has designed a program that prevents them from accomplishing any meaningful work.

Though I'm sure we were all hoping for something a little more stylish, the era of the flying car (or roadable aircraft, as it's designers prefer) may finally be upon us. MIT startup Terrafugia has been showcasing its Transition vehicle, a 2-seat aircraft that can fold its wing to become a road-ready automobile.

The transition runs on unleaded gas, has a flight range of 500 miles, an airspeed of ~110mph, and a road speed of 70mph.  With the prototype costing around $300,000, the Transition may not be for everyone. But it's a start.

Windows 8 received a lot of negative press because of its touch-screen centric design and steep learning curve when compared to previous versions of Windows, but the upcoming release of Windows 8.1 addresses many of those concerns, prompting some customers to ask us if the time is right to upgrade.

Under the hood, Windows 8 offers significant advantages over previous operating systems. Its memory management is superior, leading to faster boot times and more efficient multi-tasking. Windows 8 also improved internal security and is more resistant to many of the malware attacks that plague Windows 7 (and earlier) operating systems. Programs running in the Metro interface are segregated from the rest of the system, so problems affecting an individual app shouldn’t wreak havoc on the entire system.

However, the advantages gained by upgrading to Windows 8 from an earlier version of Windows are rarely significant enough to justify the expense.  The best prices to be found for a software upgrade license hovers around $100, that cost does not include labor charges, and the performance benefits of Windows 8 will be lessened by the aging hardware of the old computer.  Older programs are pretty much guaranteed to work in Windows 7, but may not be compatible after an upgrade to Windows 8. Additionally, machines more than three to four years old are likely designed around a 32-bit operating systems, and the greatest benefits of Windows 8 come from using a 64-bit operating system.

Should you upgrade your old computer to Windows 8? Almost certainly not, unless you purchased a state-of-the-art and touch-capable system a few years back and would like to get better use out of the touch screen. For business use, I strongly urge customers to consider a Windows 7 downgrade, and likely will continue to do so until they are no longer available. For home use, the cost of an upgrade license as well as the possible complications that go along with upgrading an operating system make it an unwise investment.

Windows 8 runs best on new hardware, particularly hardware with a touchscreen. If Microsoft’s new operating system is something you are interested in trying out, you would be far better served buying a new system than upgrading your old one.

Congratulations to AeroVelo for building a human powered helicopter that hovered for 65 seconds on nothing more than the furious pedaling of a man desperate not to crash to the ground.

And a special shout out to an old friend Trammell Hudson, one of the many who supported the Kickstarter campaign for this aircraft.

At InfinIT Technology Group, we advocate proactive maintenance of our customers' networks over the more traditional break/fix IT relationship. But many of our customers wonder what, exactly, proactive maintenance is.

Proactive maintenance is a defined as a strategy for stabilizing the reliability of machines or equipment. Basically, it is a system designed to keep computers and networks in good working order to prolong the life of the machinery and to reduce downtimes when problems occur.

InfinIT's proactive maintenance plans fall into two categories: Monitoring Agreements and Service Agreements. Monitoring Agreements are low-cost agreements (as low as $5/month) that put all of the tools in place for remote monitoring, managed antivirus, patch management, and asset tracking. Monitoring Agreement customers receive a discount on labor, but there is no time for diagnosis and repair built into the agreement.

Service Agreements differ from Monitoring Agreements in that they incorporate a set amount of pre-paid labor time per month into the monitoring package, at very steep discounts over the standard labor rate. Service Agreements are a great way to stabilize IT costs, and to know that when minor issues arise, they are going to be dealt with by your Technical Team rather than languishing until there are enough minor problems to warrant a service call.